6 tips for surviving hospitals

Slow healing (10)

Injured Teddy Bear

Here’s the problem:

  1. Take a completely healthy person. Put them in a humiliating hospital gown. Insert a cannula in each wrist, a blood-pressure cuff to their arm and a blood-oxygen monitor on their finger,
  2. Every few hours, send someone round to hurt them, perhaps by sticking a needle in them, putting stickers on them and then ripping them off or (for maximum fun) inserting and then removing a catheter into their urinary tract.
  3. Move them to a new bed at random times, even midnight.
  4. Keep them near the nurses’ station so they don’t sleep.
  5. Make sure they are in a ward with other stressed people, some who are calling out constantly, some who fight the nurses, some who are deaf, some who don’t speak English, and some who soil their bedclothes. Arrange for one or two to die if possible.
  6. Only answer the call bell sometimes.
  7. Give them food they don’t like at times they aren’t hungry.
  8. Hold them for an indefinite time.
  9. Have a consultant visit once per day for five minutes and issue contradictory messages about when they will be allowed to go home.

I suggest that after a week of this treatment, even a healthy person would  be demoralized, perhaps really ill, and would need days to recover.

_________

At the moment I have some close relatives and friends in hospital and I am reminded of the awfulness of it. Despite the best efforts of dedicated staff and family and friends. Just like anyone who has spent some weeks in hospital, I have seen all of the above.

You have to learn to survive. Anyone who has managed some months in a hospital ward will be an expert in this. My tips — linked to Christian notions of healing — are these.

  1. See Christ beyond all of this. Trust him. Lean into him. Thank him. Believe in him and never let him go. He is good, really good, and his power and purposes will prevail in my life. Say that over and over. Work it out in your mind. Never give up on it. Never.
  2. Give him your pain, and the pain you see in your loved one’s faces. It’s too hard to hold it yourself.
  3. Make up your mind to keep your humanity in this place. Thank the people who injure you. Smile. Ask them their name. Give them yours. Be courteous and kind. They are under pressure too. You will find other patients and medical staff who, in all the inhumanity, are trying to be human like you. Spark off each other. When your loved ones visit, thank them, appreciate them, serve them: make their visit as happy as you can. Give them your best. You may fail in all of this, often, badly, but at least try.
  4. Understand this is a season of suffering and you need to endure it. Endure it rather than rage against it.
  5. Find ways of being happy: a nice meal, a good film, a kind friend.
  6. Through the night, thank God for everything you can think of and pray his blessing on everyone you can think of.

How to give to charity (3)

This can’t be right. Can it?

I once looked at a writing job with a large Christian charity.

‘It’s mostly fundraising,’ they explained, ‘and we’ve got a good system.’

Their good system was:

  • A fresh appeal every few weeks or months
  • Cheap-looking paper
  • Each mailshot made up of a few typed sheets, black and white photos, with “handwritten” additions and underlinings in red ink.
  • Sent out to a carefully refined mailing list. Single women in their 40s-70s were the favoured audience.
  • Guaranteed results.

I decided not to work for this charity.

Where does carefully monitoring the success of fundraising campaigns end? Where does cynical exploitation begin? I couldn’t figure that out, but I wouldn’t have felt right doing that job.

There has to be a better way, and that better way has to be us givers taking the initiative, giving regularly and generously to a set of good causes, and not letting ourselves be manipulated.

More than bananas – revisited

I’ve collected some blog posts specially for  all the people who enjoyed my book More than Bananas – How the Christian faith works for me and the whole Universe. This title — a free download on Kindle– has been in the Kindle theology bestseller list for the past 9 months or so.

Here they are:

Even more bananas

[amazon template=multinational&asin=0956501052]

The real problem with praying to God for healing: he has an agenda

We might not like the medicine

You probably know the old joke about a person who fell off a cliff but managed to grab hold of a branch halfway down. As he swung, he called into the mists below him, ‘Is there anybody there? Can you help me?’

A voice came from the mist. ‘Trust me, and let go the branch.’

The person thought about it and then said, ‘Noted. Is there anybody else down there?’

Involving God in our healing exposes us to the risk that God’s thoughts are not our thoughts and his ways are not our ways.

We may come to him with the hope of a quick fix to a medical problem. But in coming, we open ourselves to the fact that God may have a view on what is really wrong with us and what needs to be put right.  

We may point out the mote in God’s eye (he let me suffer toothache!), he points out the plank in ours. We bring our agenda to him; he brings his agenda to us. It is like when you have to speak to your wife about something.  It’s unpredictable. You don’t know what avalanche will be unleashed as you remove the first boulder. 

Unfortunately I know of no way round this. Once we bring our problems to God we are in the same position as the king with an army of 10,000 discovering that the opposing king has an army of 20,000.  By the end of the day there will only be one king left standing. One agenda will survive the meetup. And it won’t be ours.

Our options at this point are limited. We could take the ‘Henry V’ option (‘We few, we happy few, we band of brothers…’) Or, since it is God we are now facing, God and his agenda for us, we could take our army to one side and say, ‘Lads, it’s like this. We either face certain death in battle or we surrender and hope for the best.’ We come to him: we submit to him. We want his touch; the only thing offered is his outstretched arms, his deep embrace. It’s all or nothing, all of him or nothing.

Our only way out of this dilemma is to take our medicine as soon as possible. We want healing if possible please; if so, we first need to surrender ourselves, body, mind and schedule, heart and soul and hopes, to the Healer.

 

A business leader ponders commitment to Christ 

Is 51% control enough for God?

‘… It was if my life had shares and God wanted 100 percent control of it. A divine tug-of-war ensued. Why would God want all of me? Could there be a joint venture? Could I carve out a special deal to suit me? What about a partnership? Was 50/50 not a good arrangement. It became clear that true freedom was to be found in full surrender to the love of God. It did not come to me easily, nor at once. I got there in stages. I recall praying that God would take 51 percent of my life–control but not whole ownership. I remember the churning an d the heated deliberation within myself as this plan did not seem to achieve the desired objective. I saw then, and recognize now more fully, the arrogance of negotiating with God and the foolishness in believing I had anything to offer God. I recall praying: “Lord have all of me. Only don’t abandon me.” In that moment, I realized that the God who loved the entire world also loved mean and would stay faithful to me, even when I was not faithful to him, as has sadly often been the case.

‘What struck me at once was the immediate change in every area of my life…’

Ken Costa, banker, in his helpful book God at Work.

Wonderful immigration (with working link this time -sorry)

Crowd
The Church around the country is leading the fight against mean and small-minded immigration policy.

I am relying on anecdote here. It’s just that so many of my Christian friends, when they aren’t staffing the food bank rota, are helping Iranians and Syrians and Afghans fill out forms, make appeals and try to start a new life in the UK. They also inviting them to their homes, teaching them English and being their friends.

Where are the politicians? Crowding into the cellar. Where are the newspapers? Foaming at the mouth for the most part. I don’t see too many opinion-formers  telling us that the inward flow of young, keen, hardworking people is a great gift to us, a resource better than discovering a reservoir of shale oil under the entire North of England.

These good people are going to pay my pension and keep the health service running for me.  Of course we have to observe the lifeboat principle – if you try too much, too fast, you sink.

But that can’t be that hard given the fact we are entirely surrounded by an impassable watery border, we have coped even with 300,000 new people a year, and our population would be shrinking and ageing if we didn’t open our doors. We have a big lifeboat and it isn’t full. In the year 2000 the foreign-born population of the UK was 4%. By 2010 it was 8%.Well done us.

China rising

A prophecy comes true

China
Around 1985, when I was a young missions researcher, an old missions researcher named Leslie Brierley, born 1911, was helping me write a book.

I had described how the opportunities for Christian missions in China had closed down around 1949 with the communist takeover.

1985 was less than ten years after the death of Mao, and less than 20 years after the peak of the cultural revolution in 1969 when not a single Christian church met publicly in the whole country. Few glimmers of news had emerged since.

My 23-year-old apprentice self ventured some pessimism about the gospel in China. My 74-year-old  mentor begged to differ:

“I feel that we are in for some surprises with regard to the Church in China, for in the 21st century (I shan’t live to see it but you can tell me when you arrive in Glory) the Chinese will be one of the greatest waves of missionary outreach in the world.”

Estimates of 100m Christians in China are contested but mainstream today.

I look forward to telling Leslie.

How to shorten your life

Slow healing (part 9)

If you really want to cut short your time with the rest of us here on earth, here’s how — borrowing from two sources, just as we did for the blog on how to live longer.

The statistician

David Speigenhalter has some research-led findings on what to do if you really want to lop some years off your span. Here’s how different behaviours can get you into the world of the below-average.

  • Smoke 14-24 ciggies per day: take off seven years from your expected lifespan.1
  • Be obese: take off 2.5 years
  • Eat one portion of red meat per day: take off one year
  • Every alcoholic drink after the first each day: take off 0.7 years.
  • Watch TV for two hours per day: take off 0.7 years.2
Jewish wisdom

The Bible too has a some surprising views on unhealthy lifestyle–though not all of them are things you can do much about:

  • Having a wife of dubious character (Proverbs 12:4) (fortunately I’m OK on that score)
  • Hope deferred (Proverbs 13:12)
  • Envy (Proverbs 14:30)
  • A crushed spirit (17:22 and 18:14)

The beautiful joy of criticism

It separates wheat from dross, and cuts rough diamonds

Ufology sign
By ‘criticism’, I don’t mean saying bad things about people, of which I think we do way too much.

I mean holding something up, looking at it in a fresh light, considering an alternative view, listening to the opposite argument, assessing and weighing the evidence. 

Sceptical skills do not come naturally to us and I think we should practice them. Argue with yourself against some deeply-held opinions for a few minutes each day, perhaps. 1

I think we should cultivate the friendship of the smart, good people who despite being smart and good, believe all the wrong things.

We should celebrate when we change our mind or arrive at a fresh perspective. These are moments that don’t come round so often. It’s much more common, apparently, only to really latch on to the fresh information that digs us deeper into the rut we have already chosen.

And finally we should train our sceptical gunsights on those who who are on our side, who are bravely fighting our corner. It isn’t wrong. It’s breathing clean air.