Jesus said
"The Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath"
Mark 2 v 27
What the Lord's Day means to a doctor?
You’re sitting in hospital, and a kid approaches your bedside and starts flicking through your charts. You have no idea who the kid is—maybe it’s an escapee from the paediatric ward. Unexpectedly, she starts probing into your medical history. You find yourself increasingly uneasy as she produces a needle and syringe and advances towards your arm to
take your blood—who is this kid? Well, it’s probably me. I’m meant to be a junior hospital doctor, but still can’t seem to pass for a fourteen year old…
My name is Esther and I work as a doctor in Swindon. I’m currently working for a haematology team of consultants, dealing with patients of all ages who have developed blood disorders, like leukemia, anaemia, etc. It is a fascinating and complicated specialty. Some of my patients have life-threatening diseases where just one tiny gene is faulty. It shows how finely tuned God has made the human body.
I trained in Birmingham University Medical School for five years, straight after A’ levels. Training involves long hours of study, so if you want an easy university life, don’t pick medicine! I spent two years in lectures about basic human sciences, and then three years somewhere between hospital wards and the lecture theatre. After five years, I graduated and I was handed a nice degree certificate with my name on it and a red ribbon wrapped around it.
Shortly thereafter, I was mercilessly thrown into the wards where I realised that the certificate meant absolutely nothing in terms of useful knowledge! All the nurses, porters and even the canteen staff seemed to know more about my job than I did in those first few weeks, but the camaraderie was excellent between other junior doctors and it was great fun getting to grips with the job, growing exponentially in learning, and eventually feeling slightly more capable at managing the wards! I’m at the end of my second year of work, and still I find the human body intriguing, and equally my patients with the experiences, stories and beliefs they bring never failing to interest me. I believe that when one works in a ‘people profession’, one becomes either more impatient and insensitive to humans with their failings, or more compassionate.
With Christ as a pattern of ultimate loving compassion, and with him as my tutor, it becomes part of my witness to become more compassionate and it’s a pleasure to have this as a daily challenge. I’ve been a born-again Christian
since age seven, when I first understood that it was a matter of life-or-death urgency to know Jesus Christ personally. Every year since I’ve known him has left me bowled over by his glories, mercies, compassions, powers—his personality is nothing short of incredible.
Dad and Mum are a pastor and pastor’s wife, and they have lovingly guided me through my Christian life to date. I’ve been incredibly privileged to have such an upbringing. My one sibling, Phil, is also a believer, so God has been exceptionally good to us. Skipping forward to last year, I married an awesome man called Duncan who is also a believer in Jesus, and is training to become a lawyer. He finds my gory medical stories equally fascinating and
repulsive, so I administer them in small doses…
Let me move on to the topic of the Lord's Day. As a hospital doctor, I have to work various weekend shifts, which mean that sometimes I miss Sunday services. While I believe the Lord approves of such ‘work of necessity’ on Sundays, I still terribly miss being in church with my Christian brothers and sisters. It’s awful to be on-call, jabbing needles into people and writing drug charts when everyone else is enjoying the services. I often prescribe myself ‘muffin therapy’ to make my day slightly less horrible (single dose triple chocolate monster muffin for one, maybe with tea).
So what does the Day mean to me? Well, attending Sunday worship makes Sundays very obviously a day where the Lord is the focus. We drop all other tasks and indulge ourselves in exalting the very crown of our lives—the Lord.
We are taught from his word, which refreshes our souls and makes us repent when he needs to gently draw us back to him. We can freely talk about Jesus to fellow believers, openly in front of visiting nonbelievers, and carry out our favourite task—to speak about his beauties and his offer of forgiveness to sinners! It seems to set me up for the week of work too, when I delve back into a world of working around non-Christians who sometimes blaspheme or deny his name, belittle my Christian principles, or indulge in the conversations and jokes that the natural human heart enjoys.
It came as a massive surprise to me at university when I discovered that some believers in evangelicalchurches that I attended no longer hold that the Sabbath day is to be kept holy. Various arguments have been offered to me—e.g., that Jesus doesn’t reiterate the necessity of the Lord’s Day in the Sermon on the Mount (although he clearly mentions it elsewhere in the Gospels!), or that the Ten Commandments are part of the old law, and therefore do not apply in the age of grace (as if we discard God’s desired blueprint for our lives because of grace!), or that the Sabbath was technically a Saturday and therefore, the current Sunday Lord’s Day is a misunderstanding of Scripture anyway (but if it was good enough for the Lord to rise on the Sunday, and for early church believers to uphold the Sunday for meeting
together, then it’s good enough for me!). Coming across these opinions made me delve back into the Word to support what my heart knew to be true (following a discouraged telephone call to my awesome dad who reassured me I wasn’t going mad and wasn’t the only one who held to the Lord’s Day!) and I can tell you I found no reason to discard the Lord’s day, but instead I found plenty of texts in both New and Old Testaments to reaffirm the need and command that the church has for Sunday worship.
Look into the Old Testament and see that God’s people were never blessed when they didn’t honour the Sabbath, but richly blessed when they respected it! Think also about what the Bible says about the way souls are saved through hearing the gospel preached—if Christians are not at church, how can they invite to and attend church with the people they are trying to witness to? Sundays have become more precious to me since working shifts in hospital, and I refuse to take them for granted any more. I also refuse to follow the trend of society which tells us to use Sunday as a normal weekday—how disrespectful to the Lord! I am working hard on my medical career so that I may have a job in the future which allows me to keep my Sundays as the Lord’s special day.
In the meantime, you’ll find me at every service I can possibly attend—dead or alive, rain or shine—sitting on the edge of my seat (and not armed with needles or syringes, you may be reassured to know…)!