trusting the process?

12/23/10 (the thoughts started then, but I am finishing the actual writing much later)

I am completing my second rotation on obstetrics, and the idea of trusting the process keeps coming up.  It comes up related to residency most of all, as I anticipate completing my intern-year coverage of OB and have to trust that I will learn all that I need to know as an upper-year by the end of these four short weeks.  Will I make wise decisions without someone farther ahead off of whom to bounce ideas for evaluation and management of our patients' different complaints?  Will my fingers learn the tasks of the examinations needed, the suturing, the positioning of a baby's head?  Trust that those who have gone before you and learned what they need to know through this training process know what they're doing when they tell you that you, too, will learn what you need to know, I hear again and again in different words related to different topics.

I think about trusting the process for labor itself.  Most patients don't know the different stages of labor (latent, active) let alone the cardinal movements a baby's head makes just before it's born.  They can't read the fetal monitoring strips we look over every time we enter the room, and they don't know how many contractions in ten minutes constitutes "adequate" labor.  They are forced to trust that their bodies know what they're doing, that the pain they endure will be worth it in the end, that their baby is slowly moving towards entering the world long before they can see or feel anything but the tightening of contractions.  It takes a marvelous amount of trust in something we in medicine still don't even entirely understand.  We don't know what hormone or protein makes labor start or where that stimulus comes from.  We don't know why labor starts when it does, sometimes weeks before and other times days or a week after the due date.  But this is how little human beings have been entering the world for thousands of years, and somehow it does work much of the time without any help from medicines or monitors.

The season, too, reminds me to trust the process as we move into and through Advent.  We who believe trust that the One who came as a helpless baby will one day come again as One to reign and set things right.  We can't see that day approaching.  The Old Testament prophets and New Testament writers thought it would be much more immediate than it has been over the hundreds of years since that first Coming.  But we remember that fact that He came and trust this process of labor and birth as well, trust that sight unseen He is making His way towards Coming Again.

In my own individual life, too, I must trust the process.  Am I becoming someone I want to be?  Am I in fact growing as a human being - in character, in strength, in faith?  Moving in a direction towards God?  Or am I becoming stagnant?  Is the Spirit still invested enough in my life to be spurring preparation for new branches and buds?  I am called to trust as I surrender myself, seeking God's way for me to live my life, at peace with the work He is doing at His pace.  I am called to trust in the One "who began a good work" in me and "will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus," as Paul wrote to the Philippians (1:6b).  That's a process where it is worth seeing the end, and it gives me hope for these other places where I trust that God is also at work, bringing new life, helping me grow as a doctor, preparing for his Return.