Busybodies

Frank Allegretti, 64, was a meticulous pilot with more than twenty years of experience—which makes it all the more shocking to hear that he crashed the plane he was piloting in a Iowa cornfield because it ran out of gas. He died in the crash. Interviewed for an article about the crash, Allegretti's wife, Cheryl, said, "Like everybody has told me, he was the most cautious, [safe] pilot they ever knew."

Sadly, Allegretti's story is fairly common among pilots. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) officials say pilots run out of gas with surprising frequency. In the past five years, fuel exhaustion was the cause or a contributing factor in 238 small plane crashes in the U.S., killing 29 people.

"It's surprising to me," said Tom Haueter, director of NTSB's Office of Aviation Safety, "that there's a group of pilots who will knowingly push it, thinking, I can make it the last couple of miles and come up short."

Christ came to bring peace and we celebrate his coming by making peace impossible for six weeks of each year …. He came to help the poor and we heap gifts upon those who do not need them. —A.W. Tozer

In Luke 10:38-42, Jesus decides to visit the home of a woman named Martha. When he arrives, he finds Martha distracted by all the tasks that come with being the host. Despite her harried efforts, it is the posture of her sister, Mary, that Jesus praises. With little concern for a successful social event, Mary chooses to sit at the feet of Jesus as he teaches those who have gathered for the meal. As the story comes to a close, Jesus says it is Mary who "has chosen what is better."

Though at first glance this doesn't appear to be a story we should look at during the Advent and Christmas seasons, writer Mayo Mathers thinks otherwise. In an article for Kyria.com, an on-line resource for Christian women, she confesses that hosting parties, cooking up delicious buffets, and shopping for gifts brings out the "Martha" in her. She had never given this much thought until she attended her church's annual Christmas pageant. She writes of her breakthrough moment:

As I sat in the candlelit sanctuary absentmindedly listening to the peaceful strains of "Silent Night," I wrestled mentally with a list of things to be done. When the congregation stood to sing carols, my lips moved unconsciously to the words while my brain mulled over various menus for our annual Christmas Eve buffet.

As in every Christmas pageant, the usual parade of bathrobe-draped children marched down the center aisle. A pseudo-weary Mary and Joseph shook their heads in dismay as the innkeeper turned them away. Having watched so many similar renditions of the Christmas story, it had become commonplace to me.

Realizing this, I felt a stab of guilt and bowed my head. Father, I prayed, let me see the story through your eyes tonight.

The young girl portraying Mary began to sing a lullaby to the child in her arms. Her voice was so pure, so full of love and awe, that I stared at her, transfixed, my distracted musings forgotten. Suddenly, it was as if the congregation had disappearedas if I had been transported back in time to the actual stable in Bethlehem.

As I listened to her song, wonder and immense gratitude settled upon me. Into my heart God whispered, If ever there was a time to worship me, it's now! This season is about me only, but each year you crowd me out with the inconsequential!

Mathers closes her article with these words: "Beautiful, delicious dinners are nice. 'Just right' gifts are delightful. But I'm learning that only one thing really matters: while I tend to be more like Martha, at Christmas, 'tis the season to be 'Mary!'"

Dr. Katrina Firlik was the first woman admitted into the neurosurgery residency at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Her recent book, Another Day in the Frontal Lobe, provides a glimpse into the training of a brain surgeon. In one chapter she shares a story from the last year of her residency—a time when she was already becoming jaded to the tragedies of neurological devastation:

I walked into yet another examining room … a brand-new consult from out of town: 18-years-old, cerebral palsy, spasticity. Okay, okay, I've seen this before, I just need to get a good history before my attending walks in. Efficiency is key. I looked at the patient for a second: very skinny, special wheelchair, arms contracted, head support in place, mouth hung open. It was clear I wasn't going to get the story from him, so I turned to the parents, my back toward the patient, and started to take down the history. …

[When my mentor walked in], I cringed. … He sat down on the examining table, the only seat left in the cramped room. After introducing himself, he surveyed the compact scene—the patient, the parents—and then focused his gaze back on the patient. After what seemed like several, almost uncomfortably quiet seconds, he looked the patient in the eye and asked, "So, when did you graduate from high school?" The young man's face lit up like I had no idea it could.

My mentor had noticed something I had missed. The patient was wearing a large high-school ring, so large that it looked a little silly on his bony finger. His body, far more than his mind, had borne the brunt of his cerebral palsy. He was a proud, beaming high-school graduate, who used a specialized computer to help him communicate. For the remainder of the visit I sat in the corner, duncelike, humbled by the enormity of this ring now staring me in the face.

We make snap judgments everyday. Many are innocuous, dealing with the routines of life. But God is always speaking, especially in our everyday routines. When we pre-judge another person and assume we know their story, choosing not to listen to their verbal and non-verbal communication, we make the saddest mistake of all. It's so easy to view people as a statistic and not as a person for whom Christ died.

Erwin Raphael McManus writes in The Barbarian Way:

We had an incident while Jet Skiing off the coast of Wellington [during our family vacation to New Zealand]. I had taken the Skis out by myself for a few wild and wide-open runs just to make sure everything would be okay. Then I came back and got Mariah. We were having a blast. Wind in our faces, water breaking in every direction, moving freely at breakneck speed. It was exhilarating. It was nothing less than a worship experience. Then we ended up with a dead engine, and we were drifting helplessly into [a strait].

Here is what happened. A moment before, we were moving wide open toward the strait, and then all of a sudden I felt Mariah let go. Her arms had been tightly secured around my waist, and the moment she released, I heard her yell, "Stop!"

Knowing she was in danger, I immediately shut down the Jet Ski and turned to secure her. I shouted, "What's wrong?"

Mariah's tone made it clear she thought it was obvious: "I needed to get my hair out of my eyes."

I had flooded the engine for cosmetic reasons. I guess it was about an hour later when the Wellington Rescue Squad came out and saved us. Did I mention that the water was frigid? As you can imagine, while we were drifting, we had a lot of time to talk and reflect. Just a bit irritated, I tried to understand why it was so important to get her hair out of her eyes.

It was so simple—she couldn't see. And isn't that the whole point of choosing to live an adventure, to keep your eyes wide open and to soak in the beauty of the life all around you? Mariah was not about to live through the experience with her eyes closed. Eyes wide open is exactly how God created us to live our lives. And this is exactly what Jesus has come to ensure, that we are awakened to live life wide open as we move full speed ahead.

In his book Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance, Atul Gawande recalls a patient he encountered during his final year of medical school. The older woman's complaint was simple and to the point: "I don't feel too good." She was achy, tired, and suffering from a mild cough, but she showed no signs of a fever, and her blood pressure was fine. Besides a high white blood cell count, she was fine. Gawande visited her twice each day, and she stayed the same. Thinking she was suffering from a mild case of pneumonia, he put her on antibiotics and waited for her condition to clear up in a few days. Nonetheless, the woman's condition never got better. One morning, after the woman had suffered through insomnia and night sweats, Gawande's senior resident simply said: "Keep a close eye on her." Gawande decided he would check on her each mid-day, around lunchtime. Meanwhile, the senior resident had decided to check on her himself twice that morning—which would teach Gawande a valuable lesson as a doctor and surgeon. He writes:

It is this little act that I have often thought about since. It was a small thing, a tiny act of conscientiousness. He had seen something about her that worried him. He had also taken the measure of me on morning rounds. And what he saw was a fourth-year student, with a residency spot already lined up in general surgery, on his last rotation of medical school. Did he trust me? No, he didn't. So he checked on her himself.

That was not a two-second matter, either. She was up on the fourteenth floor of the hospital. Our morning teaching conferences were…on the bottom two floors. The elevators were notoriously slow. The senior resident was supposed to run one of those teaching conferences. He could have waited for a nurse to let him know if a problem arose, as most doctors would. He could have told a junior resident to see the patient. But he didn't. He made himself go up.

The first time he did, he found she had a fever of 102 degrees and needed oxygen flow through her nasal prongs increased. The second time, he found her blood pressure had dropped and the nurses had switched her oxygen to a facemask, and he transferred her to the intensive care unit. By the time I had a clue about what was going on, he already had her under treatment—with new antibiotics, intravenous fluids, medications to support her blood pressure—for what was developing into septic shock from a resistant, fulminant pneumonia. Because he checked on her, she survived. Indeed, because he did, her course was beautiful. She never needed to be put on a ventilator. The fevers stopped in twenty-four hours. She got home in three days.

Larry McMurtry, known for his [book] Lonesome Dove, wrote another book about roads—the many roads he had driven on and the hundreds of miles he had explored across America. At last, returning in memory to the place where he grew up in east Texas, he recalls that his father had seldom gone much farther than the dusty roads near his dirt farm. Comparing his own travels to his father's localized life, McMurtry admits, "I have looked at many places quickly. My father looked at one place deeply."

We need more transparency in the church, not fear of it. It's difficult for men and women alike to be transparent in an evangelical church. You put something on the prayer chain, and you never know when your next door neighbor is going to be talking about it.

Augustine encouraged conversation at meals--but with a strictly enforced rule that the character of an absent person should never be negatively discussed. He had a warning to this effect carved on a plaque attached to his table.

It is a sign of youthful arrogance to try to build up a reputation by assailing prominent figures.

Sometimes I think the whole Christian world is made up of just two groups: those who speak their faith and accomplish significant things for God, and those who criticize and malign the first group.

We might have much peace if we would not meddle with other people's sayings and doings. ... Blessed be the true, simple, and humble people, for they shall have a great plenitude of peace.

We might have much peace, if we were of a mind not to concern ourselves with what others say and do, and which is none of our business. How can he long remain at peace who involves himself with others' concerns, who seeks opportunities outside his sphere, and who rarely draws his inner self together? Blessed are the single-hearted for they shall have much peace.