{"id":1921,"date":"2017-06-08T16:43:23","date_gmt":"2017-06-08T16:43:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hamlinechurch.org\/?p=1921"},"modified":"2021-02-10T21:15:40","modified_gmt":"2021-02-10T21:15:40","slug":"craig-bowron-2017","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hamlinechurch.org\/wordpress\/craig-bowron-2017\/","title":{"rendered":"The Spirit Moves – by Craig Bowron"},"content":{"rendered":"

During Pentecost, Hamline Church is inviting members to write about who they are, what makes them tick, and how the spirit moves in their lives. This is a way for us to understand more about what our ministries are Monday through Saturday, and why we seek out God in this church. This week, longtime member Craig Bowron writes about how he became involved in medicine and writing, and how these two inform each other.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"I\u2019m not exactly sure why I became a physician. There wasn\u2019t a doctor in my family, and we\u2019d been fortunate enough to avoid ever really needing one. My father got his higher education in the boiler room of a Navy destroyer, and my mother dropped out of college after her freshman year because she felt motherhood was a stronger calling than academics. <\/span><\/p>\n

By high school I was certain that what I really enjoyed was being outdoors, and the biology of things. So I entered college with the idea of becoming a small-town doctor. Except life has other plans, and for the last 20 years I\u2019ve worked at Abbott Northwestern Hospital near downtown Minneapolis\u2014definitely not small, definitely not rural.<\/span><\/p>\n

Being a physician is a fascinating mix of science and art. <\/span><\/h5>\n

The science is complex and always expanding. It demands a certain humility, because the more we know, the more realize how much we don\u2019t know. It\u2019s a miracle that life works out, even for an instant. <\/span><\/p>\n

The science of medicine takes place inside a human being, not a beaker or a lab, and that is the art of medicine. Every day I am immersed in the great pageant of humanity. Being sick is a very stressful event\u2014it goes to our core, literally to our very existence, and that can bring out the best and the worst in any of us. We are all our own brand of crazy. Some days the pageant seems like a Cormac McCarthy novel\u2014dark and serious\u2014and other days it\u2019s more like a Monty Python skit\u2014ridiculously silly. Some days it\u2019s invigorating, other days exhausting.<\/span><\/p>\n

There are plenty of mundane, routine, and even trivial aspects to my job, but to sit down at the bedside of a patient and hear their story, to participate in some small way in their suffering and to struggle with them in regaining their health\u2026that is sacred ground. It is always a deep honor\u2014and sometimes a weight\u2014to stand on it. <\/span><\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t plan on becoming a big city hospital doctor, and I didn\u2019t plan on being a writer, but I am both. <\/span><\/h5>\n

I was an English major in college, and started writing in earnest after finishing my training. What medicine and writing have in common is the power of story and the importance of small things. Some days, if I\u2019m lucky, I get the story and the details just right. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

During Pentecost, Hamline Church is inviting members to write about who they are, what makes them tick, and how the spirit moves in their lives. This is a way for us to understand more about what our ministries are Monday through Saturday, and why we seek out God in this church. This week, longtime member Craig Bowron writes about how he became involved in medicine and writing, and how these two inform each other. I\u2019m not exactly sure why I became a physician. There wasn\u2019t a doctor in my family, and we\u2019d been fortunate enough to avoid ever really needing… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1921","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hamlinechurch.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1921","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hamlinechurch.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hamlinechurch.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hamlinechurch.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hamlinechurch.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1921"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.hamlinechurch.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1921\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1922,"href":"https:\/\/www.hamlinechurch.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1921\/revisions\/1922"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hamlinechurch.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1921"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hamlinechurch.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1921"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hamlinechurch.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1921"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}