Understanding

The wound care doctor was happy about the progress of the wound, although it is obvious even to me that a minor surgery will be necessary to remove some of the unviable tissue.  It will be carried out whenever I have gathered enough mental strength to step into pain once again.  The pain has been manageable, though not gone by any means. Nausea and bloating have lessened somewhat.  What is new is the gradually worsening persistent dry cough.  Hopefully, there is a simple explanation behind it. Energy level is still OK, although there is little time left for writing down thoughts after treatments, teaching, and research.  I wish I could bring a laptop into the hyperbaric chamber or that I could write like C. S. Lewis.

Understanding brings peace?

It was well said by Helen Keller, “I do not want the peace which passeth understanding (Philippians 4:7), I want the understanding which bringeth peace”. We desire to know so badly that our ancestors ate the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge.

For example, one of the most nagging and unsolvable questions is that of human suffering.  Honestly, I have been disappointed that I have not been able to find many answers to human suffering in the Bible even before I entered the school of suffering; a class, it seems, where few students sign up voluntarily and where the Professor does little more than leave overwhelmingly difficult homework problems without posting the exact solutions. Since my teenage years, I have been horrified and confused, e.g., by the fact that six million Jews and eighteen million Chinese and countless others perished in  WWII (which, of course, illustrates how crooked we are).  The sheer number alone is both mind boggling and terrifying, without even considering the cruel ways in which they died.  For reasons only known to God himself, God seemed to miss a perfect opportunity by not directly answering Job’s question about suffering, only reminding Job how all-mighty He is.  When some of us try to fill in the blanks, I have found that most words and writings about the issue, including mine, sound hollow and all but definitive.

Obviously, the fruit of the tree of knowledge did not work as well as our ancestors have hoped.  We still do not know much about anything.  However, let’s say that we do get to know anything we would like to know.

 1. Do we have the wisdom and integrity worthy of the knowledge? For example, if I know which way a stock will go tomorrow, how long can I resist the persistent urge to profit from that knowledge?  If given the power to hear everything women are thinking like actor Mel Gibson in the movie “What Women Want?”, how many men can refrain from abusing that knowledge?  If I knew how to build a new weapon that is a million times more powerful than the hydrogen bomb, it probably wouldn’t be long before I could find a justification for building one and subsequently using its power for a “good” cause such as demanding all nations to come to a peace talk.

2. Do we really want to know the persistent inner thoughts of spite, jealousy, greed, lust, pride and self-satisfaction within ourselves and others?  How could we sleep if we knew all of that?  (It is definitely not easy to be God.)  For example, do we really want to know every time our spouse lusts over somebody else, or even just an image on a TV or a computer monitor?

3. Do we really care enough or have the strength to find out the reality?  We don’t want to think of and be reminded of such things as cancer wards, bald young children who drag a chemo pump along side them, amputees, double amputees, the fact that a specie goes extinct every few minutes because of human activities, a child dies of mal-nutrition every few seconds because of our poor food distribution, a billion plus people have to go by with less than a dollar a day, etc.  

4. How many of us feel secure enough to find out how God and others really think about our work and us?  More often than not, we are seeking affirmation rather than truth when we ask a question like “What do you think?”, “How did I do?”, or “Do you think I am a good person?”

May this find you and your loved ones in good spirit and health.

Thank you for your support, particularly those who took the time to encourage, help and pray for me after last week’s update.  I apologize for not being able to respond to you inividually yet because I have been trying to catch up after having been slowed down by pain. In fact, my last update only told half of the story because I wasn’t well enough to report the whole thing.  I was struck by some bug last Sunday.  I began feeling unwell during Sunday worship, and it just went quickly downhill from that point.  By dinnertime, I didn’t even have the strength to get out of the bed.  While I clearly wasn’t dying  yet, it certainly felt like it at times. I began to feel better after 9pm and was able to eat a little bit before going to bed.  I prayed earnestly and went to bed without knowing what to expect that night.  Thankfully, I recovered more than enough by the next morning to teach and  to receive my treatment afterward. The pain has also reduced somewhat this past week.  The wound, though, does not seem to be healing as fast as the week before. If it does not show progress quickly, I may need another surgery.  I don’t even want to think about that possibility now.

May this find you and your loved ones in good spirit and health.

It was a week of pain. The wound was extra sensitive for some unknown reason.  The debridement had to be stopped the other day, and the dressing change made me sweat like it was 100 degree and I could hardly walk afterward on Thursday.  The pain has begun to subside since Sat.

On the positive side, I only lost 2 lbs in the last month and that has been the smallest monthly loss so far.  Hopefully, the trend is about to reverse soon.  Additionally, the wound has become shallower and its undermining has become smaller too.

May this find you and your loved ones in good spirit and health.

I talked to the wound care doctor about the least intrusive option that I could think of : the Wound VAC.  He agreed that, with the currently much improved blood supply to the wound site, it was a very reasonable thing to try before the skin graft that would open a second wound.  (I can avoid the skin graft if the VAC heals the wound completely. Even if it only reduces the size of the wound, the donor site would be smaller and therefore easier to heal.) With some paper work and phone calls, I am again attached to one.  It does increase the pain level and it really hurts when the dressing is changed.  Hopefully, the pain will lessen in a few days.  

The results of the blood work ordered to assess my nutrition status have come back.  Everybody was surprised because everything was virtually normal in spite of my continuous slow weight loss.  This means that my intake is pretty balanced, and all I have to do is to increase the intake and slow the passage of food through my digestive track.  I want to thank my wife for her persistent efforts in trying to feed somebody who is constantly nauseating, bloated and has frequent diarrhea.

Integrity (3) – underpaying

Self-interest or greed has been the biggest driving force in modern commerce and politics.  Furthermore, it is theorized that acting in accordance with one’s self-interest will produce socially beneficial results. For example, Adam Smith claims that, in a free market where each consumer is allowed to choose freely what to buy, and each producer is allowed to choose freely what to sell and how to produce it, an individual pursuing his own self-interest tends to also promote the good of his community as a whole through a principle that Smith called “the invisible hand”.   Efficient methods of production will be adopted in order to maximize profits. Low prices will be charged in order to undercut competitors. Investors will invest in those industries that are most urgently needed to maximize returns, and they will withdraw capital from those that are less efficient in creating value. Students will be guided to prepare for the most needed (and therefore most remunerative) careers. All these effects will take place dynamically and automatically, and the market will settle on a product distribution and a price that is beneficial to the individual members of a community, and hence to the community as a whole. In summary, self-interest or personal greed will drive actors to behavior that is beneficial to collective good.

Recently, economic super powers have risen in Western Europe, followed by North America and now Asia based on the basic idea of free markets that give freedom to most, if not all the players.  The prosperity of these economic super powers has inspired many other groups of people to follow their footsteps.  However, the limitations of greed driven free-markets have also become obvious in this still evolving social economical experiment.

The thinking that the sum of individual greed will become a collective good is flawed due to our ignorance and lack of integrity.  Take an automobile as an example.  A car has many parts made of metal, plastics, etc. In order to maximize profit and minimize the cost, we manufacture them by avoiding, shifting and deferring a significant part of its real cost such as the cost of polluting (e.g., buying plastic pellets and steel from developing countries to dump the pollution in their backyard), the cost of disposal (look at the junkyard and mounts of used tires), the cost of depleting natural resources, the environmental impact of its manufacturing processes, etc.  Simply speaking, an automobile, like almost everything else, is way under-priced.  The lack of integrity in pricing has caused us to deceive ourselves and to overconsume, which has led to even bigger problems.  The over-usage of automobiles has lead to sprawling (hence loss of land and plants that remove carbon dioxides), increased greenhouse gas emission and pollution, social economical segregation, reliance on foreign oils and hence handicapped foreign policy, etc.  

Again, lacking integrity (e.g. avoiding paying for the real cost of things we consume) creates an illusion of temporary affordability and chronic problems (e.g., pollution). These chronic problems eventually become acute problems (e.g., environment related illness and extreme weathers) that require immediate attention.

May this find you and your loved ones in good spirit and health.