Gaining Experience

In the last 30 years--in other words, throughout my entire career as a nurse--I have noticed a disturbing trend in my first profession. I am an LPN, a Licensed Practical Nurse, and, as the title implies, my training was heavily weighted towards the practical aspects of hands-on nursing. In fact, the chief difference between the RN and LPN when I graduated was the length of time the course of studies took. To become an RN in my mother's day, you went to a nursing school which was attached to a hospital for 3 years. You spent half of each day in the classroom and half on the floor, taking care of patients. To become an LPN I went to a vocational school and spent half the day in class and half on the floor of a hospital. The result was that the newly graduated RN or LPN had a lot of hands-on experience when she started her first job.

LPNs must work under the supervision of an RN but otherwise were treated as full members of the nursing staff. I've worked Neurosurgery, Med-Surg, Psych and even in ICU. In fact, I could legally do everything an RN could do except start an IV, start a blood transfusion, and put in a central line. Today only inserting a central line is forbidden. But shortly into my career, things started to change. Initially I was welcomed everywhere because of the nursing shortage, but slowly the educational requirements increased. And the pressure increased on nurses to get a Bachelor's degree. From one perspective, this made sense. Medical science was getting very sophisticated and complicated and nursing was getting ever more specialized. But in order to get a BSN, one had to take all the other college courses as well. Which meant Nursing was not your sole course of study but your major and most of your training took place in a classroom. As you studied each specialty, some time was scheduled for you to visit a hospital or nursing home for a week or 2. Slowly nursing was becoming an academic rather than practical subject. I noticed this when I, an LPN, was often called upon to show new BSNs how to do very basic procedures. They had read all about them and watched videos and maybe had seen or even done them once. They had a lot more theory than I, especially when it came to management, but they had considerably less practice than I had coming right out of school. What was more worrisome is they were the wave of the future: well educated and woefully inexperienced.

Today, most hospitals and many home health agencies don't hire LPNs. They get better reimbursement by Medicare and insurance companies if all their nurses are RNs. Most LPNs can only find work in nursing homes and prisons. Ironically, if I had gone to a junior college for 2 years instead of a LPN program for 18 months, I could be an associate's degree RN, functionally no different from an old-fashioned 3 year nursing school RN. But at the time, I simply wanted a job to support me and my family while I went to school. Not that it matters today. The move is afoot to make a Bachelors degree the minimum requirement to be a nurse. And seeing that most nursing is becoming largely a matter of pill and paper pushing with little time left to have anything more than superficial patient contact, and seeing that nurse's aides with a few weeks training do most of the hands-on patient care, and that high tech companies are working on robots to replace nurses, the issue is academic in every sense of the word.

The book of Hebrews is a marvelous book that ties together the Old and New Testaments and shows Jesus to be the culmination and fulfillment of everything the Old Covenant prefigured. As such the New Covenant in Jesus is superior to the old one. In today's passage, the writer of Hebrews is showing how Jesus is superior as our High Priest to one who is merely human. True, a high priest who is only human could sympathize with us in our moral weaknesses because he has them as well. Unfortunately, that means he had to make a sacrifice for his own sin as well as for the sins of the people. Jesus, however, was tempted in all ways as we are and yet did not sin. At first it seems like the fallible high priest can better empathize with the fallen. But as the Baker Illustrated Bible Commentary points out "only the one who has resisted to the end knows the full weight of temptation."

Think about that. If I give in to temptation right away, I know what succumbing is like but I would be of little help to those who are trying to hold out against temptation. I could share in the misery of those who failed but not give strength to those who are trying not to fail. Not giving in would be beyond my experience. Even if I held out for days against temptation before falling prey to it, what could I say to the person who has been fighting for weeks or months or years to help them continue to resist? In 12 step programs, mentors are usually people who are more experienced in the program, who seem to be using the program successfully in everyday life. AA has a saying that goes, "Stick with the winners." Of course, the ultimate winner would be someone who never succumbed. And practically no one qualifies for that.

If you met someone who said he was a drug addict who never ever used, you'd say he was a liar. Or you'd think his temptation was not very strong. I would not be a good sponsor in, say, Gamblers Anonymous because I am not at all tempted to take unnecessary risks. But what if I said I was sorely tempted every single day but, because I had a relative who ruined their life through gambling, I never ever indulged myself? You might be intrigued as to how I fought this strong urge all these years.

If, as Hebrews says, Jesus was tempted in all ways as we are, we must imagine that every day he was tempted to drink, to gamble, to have sex with any woman he met, to slack off his duties, to boast of his superiority, to envy those who had more than he, to take what wasn't his, to rage at those who opposed him, to over-indulge his appetites, and to not preach the gospel, which alienated others while painting a target on his back. In the book and movie, The Last Temptation of Christ, the titular temptation offered to him was to be a regular guy with a quiet contented life rather than God's son and the sacrifice for the sins of the world. And, yeah, I think Jesus probably was tempted to live a normal life, rather than carry the burdens of every person on the planet, past, present and future.

I once read of a former Catholic priest, a confessed pedophile, who, realizing that he would do it again, resigned and went to live on his parents' farm for the rest of his life, isolating himself from all contact with children. That is true repentance. But imagine how much better it would have been for his victims, if he had, upon realizing his temptation, had taken this course before he ever succumbed. Would he not have been more admirable if he had simply decided right off the bat never to allow himself to be in the presence of that which tempted him?

Jesus, however, couldn't withdraw from the world. For his mission to succeed, he had to be among people of all walks of life. He had to be in constant contact with women he was tempted to grab and kiss and men he was tempted to punch in the face. Or worse. When Peter sliced off a man's ear at Christ's arrest, Jesus said to him, "…do you think I cannot call on my Father and that he would send me more than twelve legions of angels right now?" Remember when the folks of his own home town tried to throw him off a cliff? He probably was tempted to fight back. But Jesus simply walked through the crowd. How? Invisibly? I think they saw on his face the look of one who could wipe them off the face of the earth if he let himself and they parted like the Red Sea.

It is ironic that the best portrayal of the Incredible Hulk was not in the 2 movies that were solely about him but in the recent Avengers movie. For those of you unfamiliar with the Hulk from comic books or the old TV show, Dr. Bruce Banner, exposed to gamma rays, turns into an incredibly strong and nigh invulnerable huge green monster when he loses his temper. So we see him trying to avoid situations that trigger him. In the Avengers movie, as the alien armies attack earth, Captain America tells Dr. Banner that now would be a good time to get angry. "That's my secret, Cap," replies Banner. "I'm always angry." And he begins to transform. Suddenly we realize that what we took to be Banner's natural mild manner throughout the film was really him exercising extreme control over his ever-present rage.

I'm not saying that Jesus was always seething with rage or lust but we know these temptations presented themselves to him and he was always fending them off. We know that he got exasperated with the disciples when after all they'd seen and heard they were still slow to understand what kind of Messiah Jesus was and the power to be found in having faith in him. "How long must I be with you?" he would say in frustration. One example of Jesus controlling himself is the incident of the man with the withered hand. The Pharisees have planted the man right in the front row of the synagogue, evidently, as a trap. They wanted to get Jesus for breaking the Sabbath by healing him. Jesus has the man stand up and asks, "Is it lawful to do good on the Sabbath, or evil, to save a life or destroy it?" When nobody speaks up with the obvious answer, we are told that Jesus looked around at the folks in anger, grieved at their hard hearts. But rather than lash out, he has the man stretch out his withered hand to reveal it as restored. Jesus was angry but rather than hurt or harm, he helped and healed. He funneled his anger into making things better rather than worse.

The good news is that this lets us know that merely being angry or otherwise assaulted by temptation is not sin. The bad thought that flits through the mind is not sin. Prolonging it, nurturing it, brooding on it is sin. As Billy Graham once said, you can't keep a bird from flying over your head but you can keep him from building a nest in your hair. Jesus was a master of not letting temptations turn into sin. And since the purpose of Christianity is to become ever more Christlike, we should work on attaining that level. Of course, we can't do it without his help and we won't achieve 100% mastery in this life, but that should be what we are aiming for.

Another important thing about Jesus our High Priest being both fully human and fully divine is that he understands our suffering. He may not have suffered for any self-destructive ways or sins of his own but he, like us, knew what it was like to suffer the consequences of the sins of others. He had brothers who mocked him and thought he was crazy. He was betrayed by a close friend. His right hand man denied him 3 times when Jesus was in the hands of his enemies. All of his followers fled and only a few were there when he died. He was falsely accused and badly abused at his trial. He was humiliated before the crowds and hung to die naked on a public road. The writer of Hebrews seems to be referring to Gethsemane when he talks of Jesus offering up "prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to the one who was able to save him from death." Again it is comforting to know that being anguished and distressed at undergoing a painful trial is not a sin. Asking God to spare you from a awful ordeal is not a sin. But we should, as Jesus did, pray that ultimately God's will, not ours, be done.

Jesus learned obedience--not theoretically but through actual experience and under conditions that would cause most of us to do anything we could to make the pain stop. He did not live a cushy life that made obeying God easy. He endured poverty, public disapproval, mockery, rejection, isolation, torture and death and remained obedient to God through it all.

In parts of the world, Christians are still in danger of being martyred for their faith in Christ. We are not. So why are we so shy about proclaiming our faith? Torture and death are a lot worse than mocking or embarrassment. Why are we so hesitant to share the gospel with others and invite them to follow Jesus with us? We imagine that they will ridicule or hate us. That's not that likely. Studies shows that most people will visit a church if invited. In jail, as you can imagine, inmates get hassled for being too religious but that doesn't stop them from holding my hands and praying, right in the middle of the dorm, when I ask if they'd like to. I've never had one say "no."

Of course, maybe like those graduate nurses, you feel you don't have enough experience. The only way to get it is to do it. (Often 2 graduate nurses would get together to do a procedure, pooling their knowledge and encouraging each other. Jesus sent the disciples out two by two for much the same reason.) Loving God with all you are and all you have, loving your neighbor and even enemies as Jesus loves us does not come naturally. But the more you do it, the more you will learn and the more you learn, the better you will do it. Christianity is more than theory, more than doctrines. It's best learned through experience. That's how Jesus learned obedience. That's how we will. We become Christ's body, his hands, by being hands-on.