On the Possible Benefit of Resentment?
April has been a busy month.
For starters, I traveled to San Juan de laguna, Guatemala as a part of a medical team and after a quick turnaround in Durango, my wife Terry and I spent this last week in Grand Rapids, Michigan attending the Calvin College Festival of Faith and Writing and visiting old medical school friends.
In the space of thirty days I had a remarkable convergence of my medical, writing, and personal life. And while I suspect I will be unpacking this experience for some time, I have made some interesting and disturbing discoveries about myself.
First, and probably not an unusual discovery for any American physician going to the third world, practicing medicine for folks with desperate treatable needs, without governmental paperwork, insurance considerations, or malpractice lawyers reminded me of why it is I love medicine and why I am reluctant to stop. The ability to immediately relieve pain and suffering for fellow human beings is a rare privilege indeed and one I too often forget. While many of my friends good-heartedly offered up accolades for “going abroad” or “giving back” or my “generous spirit,” I must confess that I received far more than I gave.
Second, I am pretty soft and entitled. Beyond my nearly erotic enjoyment of a hot shower after a week with cold or the sensuous luxury provided by good books read and discussed or the blessings of kindred spirits with whom to share or the gift of friendships proven true over forty years or even the precious physical and emotional space necessary to consider the presence enfolding my words, I have much to be thankful for.
Yet, while decelerating this week in Durango, sorting Guatemala slides and reading the many post Festival blog posts and essays (after all, it was a conference of writers) a nagging irritation intruded like frigid air under the door jam. In the midst of warm memories, new friends, and a plethora of ideas I was resentful.
To be clear, this was not the more common resentment genus provoked by “bad ambition,” a fame virus discussed at the conference by poet Luci Shaw. Nor was my pique the result of pernicious vainglory, a validation-need common among writers, performers, and physicians. To be sure, these more common vices are well known to me, companions to the avarice and arrogance that I’m forced to confess far more often than I care to admit. But, not this time. Rather, for the first time, I resented my age.
I would suppose I possess similar trivial disgruntlements as do most folks who pass sixty: I am stunned to see my aged father in the mirror every morning, I no longer trust my achilles to play basketball, and remain surprised just how much slower I am scrambling off the floor than my grandson. But while I dislike and disapprove of the many changes my body has undergone these last years, the resentment I have is less like the loss of something I once possessed and more like an impatience for what is to come—a future I suspect I will not live long enough to share.
Seeing immense but solvable medical challenges, hearing incredibly bright young Christ followers craft insightful words and form new communities, sensing the gathering of a critical artistic mass within the church, discovering a rabbit warren of intellectual and artistic paths I want to explore all make me excited and sad and resentful. I know there is not enough time for it all. I know—well, not exactly—that I have fewer days ahead than behind.
Please, these are not, or I hope they are not, the sentimental musings of an old man. I am one of the luckiest guys I know, accomplished some things, and have relatively few regrets. I am also not naive about the dangers facing this world, the multiple ways we are and can continue to go, “off the rails.”
But these last days have been an eye-opener. Everywhere I look I see God’s grace budding like a pear tree’s white blossoms. I used to stand in my church and wonder if there were any other Christian artists and now in ways I would have thought impossible five years ago Christians are wondering how the beautiful informs the true. I am disgruntled because I want to see and be in the middle of how all this plays out, how it will be for my grandchildren and their children, I want to engage in making Guatemala’s water cleaner and their kids healthier, I want to be used by and in these new faith communities I see coming, and I want to craft beautiful words that describe and honor this coming and widening world, this “increasing stock of creation’s reality.”
Perhaps a little resentment isn’t all bad.
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