What Happens to Idealism

Perhaps college is the time for idealism; perhaps that's one of college's gifts to society; perhaps it's particularly true in Christian colleges.

My roommates and I may have been above average for idealism, but I doubt it. I was idealistic about some vague idea about writing that would lead to something called "a writing life" which meant, as I had learned about Hemingway in Paris, that you got to stumble around the world and experience anything you wanted, which you then wrote about through your superior artistic sense so that others could also experience it.

Another of us was idealistic about being the most buff kindergarten teacher ever; actually, he was a football player who could have benched an entire kindergarten class, but he ended up going back home to manage his dad's ice cream shop.

Another of us was idealistic about a girlfriend he had; a youth ministry major, they were to marry and affect youth forever and forever. Didn't happen with the one he thought, though now he is married and in youth ministry.

The campus pastor's son was probably the most realistic of all of us. A poli-sci major, I think he wasn't embarrassed about wanting to make some money without losing his soul, and he joined the charitable donations section of a banking corporation.

Perhaps most idealistic of all was the pre-med student. Colombian born and adopted by a couple from St. Paul, his one vision was to be a medical missionary to his country of origins--a vision which in at least one manifestation, I'm almost positive, included martyrdom. At the time with the level of violence in Colombia, this part of the vision may not have been all that unrealistic.

Reality has been a lot different for my friend, the once pre-med student. When he didn't get into the med schools he applied to after his first two attempts, he took a somewhat roundabout path to becoming a doctor: med school at Ross Medical School on the island of Dominica in the Caribbean. This separated him from the love of his life and drove them even more together. Once they were wed, had six-figure debt, and meshed their callings--his wife had not been called to medical missions in Colombia--the vision shifted. The couple bought a house in Minneapolis--and watched the worth of it crash with the housing crisis.

Not to be daunted, he signed on as a physician at a clinic in an underserved area of St. Paul. The clinic serves a mixed community--black, Hmong, white, and Latino--and my friend is--a fact I find amazing and mystifying--the only male on staff, a testament to the fact that a certain type of doctor doesn't want to work there. That type? Most of them.

He also works with Healthcare for the Homeless, treating the poorest of the poor in the Twin Cities area. Both jobs put him in daily contact with the people whose healthcare gets bought and traded for political clout: at one point, he found himself shuffling his patients among city clinics so that they could get the care they needed, all because of politics.

Regularly, too, I hear stories about some of the difficult cases he works with: complications of diabetes patients where he is left to interpret the work of remote and expensive specialists; teen pregnancies and STDs that bespeak cultural anomie and desperation.

But of all of us, my pre-med friend hit the ideals--that the rest of us thought we had--best of all. Recently, he was named a finalist for a physician of the year award. This nomination came from the people he serves as well as the colleagues he works with. His personal statement regarding the nomination captures how he's been able to live out his vision:

"If my nomination brings attention to those usually left out of the best that medicine has to offer—the homeless, the uninsured, the poor here and elsewhere; If indeed my patients, colleagues, residents, and medical students begin to believe that greatness is not in separating ourselves from sickness, pain, and poverty, but in humbly involving ourselves in the lives of our patients, and that in doing so we heal not only them but ourselves; If even one more bright young medical student decides to give her or his great talents in service to the more vulnerable ones of our world, then I consider this nomination worth it. In the words of my friend and pastor, Greg Boyd, ‘To heal the sick you have to love the sick, which means you have to fellowship with the sick’ (Repenting of Religion, p. 197)."

If this sounds too good to be true, it's not. That is, this friend of mine is not the superman that this makes him sound like. I know his warts--and he knows mine. I know that he struggles with being human in most of the same ways I do: difficulties with family, impatience with children, road rage. Perhaps it’s in these items, the personal flaws we see in the mirror every day, that idealism dies for most of us. But this friend of mine has been able to persevere; he does what he does in spite of the slivers in all of our personal lives--what we're all called to do with our ideals. That's why I say it's not too good to be true—my friend’s not superman; he's real.

I now teach Christian college students, some of them with loftier ideals than I had, some who just want a job and a good life, and many who think they want the former but will find themselves in the world of the latter. What makes the difference among those who truly pursue their ideals from those who sacrifice them?

In my friend’s case, I guess I would say some rather simple things--simple things that aren't really that simple: determination, humility, and love--the love of a good woman, love for the people of God's world, and the love--both of and for--God himself.

In a world where there's more and more spin, where there's more and more levels of cynicism to get through before we trust something as authentic, on this day I'm thankful for people like my friend the doctor in St. Paul and the light he shines in the darkness.