Psalm 139

1 O Lord, you have searched me and known me!
² You know when I sit down and when I rise up;
    you discern my thoughts from afar.
³ You search out my path and my lying down
    and are acquainted with all my ways.
⁴ Even before a word is on my tongue,
    behold, O Lord, you know it altogether.
⁵ You hem me in, behind and before,
    and lay your hand upon me.
⁶ Such knowledge is too wonderful for me;
    it is high; I cannot attain it.

⁷ Where shall I go from your Spirit?
    Or where shall I flee from your presence?
⁸ If I ascend to heaven, you are there!
    If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there!
⁹ If I take the wings of the morning
    and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,
¹⁰ even there your hand shall lead me,
    and your right hand shall hold me.
¹¹ If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me,
    and the light about me be night,”
¹² even the darkness is not dark to you;
    the night is bright as the day,
    for darkness is as light with you.

¹³ For you formed my inward parts;
    you knitted me together in my mother's womb.
¹⁴ I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.^[a]
Wonderful are your works;
    my soul knows it very well.
¹⁵ My frame was not hidden from you,
when I was being made in secret,
    intricately woven in the depths of the earth.
¹⁶ Your eyes saw my unformed substance;
in your book were written, every one of them,
    the days that were formed for me,
    when as yet there was none of them.

I lean not on my own understanding, my life is in the hands of the maker of heaven

Man really gotta keep this in mind

TIL in 2014

I don't usually do New Year's posts and I don't do lists, but it's a new year, so I can do what I want. So here are things I learned in 2014: 

1. Taylor Swift is invincible. All I'm gonna say is...I told all ya'll haters all those years ago. You know who you are. But its okay, cause I'm just gonna shake it off~

2. I, on the other hand, am not invincible. Getting older sucks. Some genes don't work as well and the dawning realization of that feels like doing the ice bucket challenge.

3. Science is hard. I guess this one shouldn't be such a surprise, but device development or undergraduate research is very different from being responsible for original peer-reviewed research that has a chance of being impactful. I realized the reason why the degree is called a doctorate of philosophy is because hypothesizing into the unknown is more philosophical than it is scientific. Science is only the applied form of philosophy.

4. Fobs are cool. This is probably kind of terrible to say, but despite always having had a lot of Asian friends, I always identified as more American than Chinese and couldn't really relate with immigrant Chinese people (aka "fobs"). But a summer trip to China, an all-Chinese lab, and some new in-laws may be awakening my inner fob.

5. Planes are really freaking scary and sneaky and can disappear off the face of the earth. Especially Malaysian ones. Pray before ever flying through Southeast Asia. "Lost" is forreals, folks. Pray for peace for the families affected.

6. In the past week, I learned of the deaths of the two people that were among the most inspiring people I've had the privilege of meeting. I wasn't very close with either of them, but the news hit just as hard, because of their age and the lives they lived. One was David Yue, one of my favorite professors in college, who passed away from a sudden cardiac arrest. The other was a girl named Johanna, in her 20s, who lived at an orphanage I visited in China over the summer, and passed from a heart attack. Dr. Yue's extraordinary contributions to science and teaching and Johanna's incredible persistence through her physical disabilities and leadership at the orphanage were overshadowed only by their relationship with God. The gifts that God gave them could not have been more different, but they allowed God to use them to the fullest. This is all I could hope for in my life. Above all of this, however, is the continued reminder of the sovereignty of God, which requires faith in His goodness, that He may call any of his children back to Himself at any time.

7. God is good, faithful, and unlimited in power. This year I saw my parents come closer to God than I ever would have even dared to imagine. The same is true of other friends, family, and myself. I realize it sounds somewhat cliche, and it should probably stop being such a surprise, but it never does, and I hope it never will.

Happy New Years.

Cast iron pan

Got a cast iron pan recently. Being a materials science person now, I decided to look up how these are made. This is how:

It's pretty friggin cool. They literally take scraps of dirty useless iron, purify it, mold it, and out comes a pan that makes really really delicious food. Like seriously, if you don't have a cast iron pan, you should get one, because it makes H-mart premarinated bulgogi that much better. Of course, I couldn't help but think of how perfect of a visual representation this was of what God does with us.

^"But the Lord has taken you and brought you out of the iron furnace, out of Egypt, to be a people of his own inheritance, as you are this day."
- Deuteronomy 4:20

If God isn't real, then why is grace the most powerful healer of wrongs?

Luke 18:31-42

The blind beggar asks for mercy from Jesus as Jesus walks by. There may only be certain times when Jesus passes by right in fornt of us, and we must seize them when they happen.

In 41, Jesus asks, "What do you want me to do for you?" What would I say if Jesus asked me that? Its an overwhelming question, coming from the Lord of the universe. If Jesus walked by me right now, what would I ask of Jesus? I don't think it would be something Christian sounding like, make my ministry better. Nor do I think it would be something pertaining to my school work, like make me smarter or my grades better. What do I need as much as the blind man needed sight? I think I would want to be freed from the bonds of sin. That's really the one thing that I need more than anything.

Pray for what you really need, and I believe God will answer as He answered the blind man.

Through the Valley

Originally submitted as an assignment for my school's Community Health Component course:

--

“Hola. Me llamo Peter. Cómo se llama?” 

That was about the extent of my Spanish speaking ability. We were at yet another colonia, a type of rural shantytown without adequate municipal services such as water, electricity, and sewage. These are places that even the government stays away from – that is, cities exclude these places from their city limits because the tax dollars generated would not be worth the municipal services they would have to provide. There is also no legal obligation for the county or state to provide such services.  

It was my fourth week at a colonia and I had finally gotten a sense of the work flow necessary to compensate for my inability to communicate with the patients. 

“Me llamo Maria.”

“¿Cuántos años tienes?”

“Cincuenta y cinco.”

I held up the blood pressure cuff and pointed to her arm. With an approving nod, I successfully avoided the first language hurdle. One hundred thirty-five over eighty. Not bad, considering her weight and the blood pressures I had seen throughout the day. Next, I pointed at the underside of my wrist with two fingers. She got the message. As I was trying to remember the words to test her blood sugar, she helpfully preempted me. 

“Sugar.”

Relieved, I took out the glucose meter and tested her. The first week, it had struck me as odd that a diabetic who was worried about their blood sugar would not have a home meter. It probably shouldn’t have. After a few seconds, the number “255” flashed on the screen. I showed it to her, causing her brows to furrow in dismay. I pointed to the table across the room. “Alright Ms. Maria, go see Dr. Patterson, he’ll help you out.”

However, even as I said that, I knew that the options were limited. The clinic discouraged the practice of managing chronic illnesses without the ability for consistent follow-up or laboratory tests. We would counsel most patients to seek a primary health provider and obtain laboratory studies. However, the patients’ lack of insurance and questionable legal status makes obtaining such services difficult. The cheaper alternative, the prescription of diet and exercise, is almost equally difficult. The abundance of tortillas, meats, and cheese is as much ingrained in the diet as it is in the culture. Even if patients were willing to make dietary changes, salads and vegetable dishes often do not exist in their recipe repertoire.

Later, after all the patients had left, the team reviewed some of the day’s cases. One man had come complaining of a headache. He revealed that he had actually been diagnosed with a pituitary tumor in a hospital, but could not afford the cancer treatment. He had come to the free clinic in desperation to look for other options. As none of us were capable of neurosurgery, the best we could do was to refer him to places that might do such a procedure for a reduced price. It is alarming that no current option exists for these patients. In the 1970’s, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) stepped in for end stage renal disease (ESRD) patients to pay for dialysis treatment in order to prevent hundreds of thousands of patients from otherwise certain death, but ESRD remains the only disease that is federally paid for. EMTALA, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, which mandates the treatment of patients that arrive in the Emergency Department, only requires treatment for emergency medical conditions. For patients with a growing brain tumor, it would not cover the long-course care that would be necessary for complete tumor remission.

The social obligations and ethics of such policies are easily debatable in the boundaries of academia and politics, but much more disturbing when the face of the patient is sitting across from you. There is rarely an easy answer in the world of legislation, but there may be innovative alternatives.  One such hopeful effort by the director of the clinic is the implementation of mini health clinics at commercial establishments such as Wal-Mart. He believes that this would allow patients to access the continuity of care necessary to manage chronic conditions, provide preventative care, and manage costs to dramatically improve the health of local populations. Such innovation is a much needed glimmer of hope in a landscape where epidemic hopelessness risks ignorance and inaction.