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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

John Shin

An Audience of One

Thank you so much for that music Good morning Advent Hope It is so good to be here with you all this Sabbath morning really, this is where my story began my medical journey began here and And now here I am our family we're no longer visiting for the last couple of years.

Every time we came here, we're like, we're visiting, and now we're Lomal Indians.

So it is such a blessed Sabbath to be able to spend this Sabbath with you all.

But before I begin, can I start with a word of prayer?

Heavenly Father, we are so thankful it is your Sabbath day.

We are so thankful for the privilege you've given us where we can gather as a body in Christ to worship you on this day and to praise your name Lord I just pray for your Holy Spirit to fill this place I pray that you'll fill my mouth with your words and I pray Heavenly Father that you will give to us the message you want us to hear today all these things we pray in Jesus name amen.

So my family and I we moved here in June actually and it's been a flurry of different moves we moved from Minnesota to Maryland a year before that and then we have to move from Maryland to here So frequent moves keep your property light.

But it's a lot of hassle and for those of you who know what it's like to live out of boxes for a while, you know it can have a very disorienting feel.

And our house looks like a tornado had ripped through it.

We want to invite people over, but there's no place to sit.

We said, OK, we have to, by the end of such and such a week, we have to have all of these boxes unpacked.

But have you ever had a time when you started a day with so much on your to-do list that you actually get nothing done.

Because you look at the size of your list and you're like, you know what, I think I'm just going to go for the path of least resistance and sit on my couch and look at Facebook for a while.

Or, you know, you just don't get to anything because it's so big, that big hairy list.

My wife and I looked at each other and we're like, we haven't done anything today.

And so we tried to squeeze a day's worth of productivity into the last 4 hours of the day, and it doesn't go too well.

We just have to be resigned to the fact that we will finish maybe around 2025.

And then eventually all things will be unpacked.

It wouldn't be the worst thing in the world.

Well, as we're here, we had some good friends reach out to us.

And they invited us to join them in this family Bible study.

So what happens is in this group, the men and the women take turns having Bible studies.

And when it's the women's turn to have Bible study, the men go to a local park and look after all the kids.

And so this way, young families, the parents can actually have a Bible study in focus.

And it happened to be the women's turn that week.

And so they reached out to us, invited Alyssa to join the Bible study, invited me to come out to the park.

And these friends have been so good to us.

They've reached out to us multiple times.

And we said, yeah, we'd love to join you.

Before we go to the park and the Bible study, why don't you guys come to our place and have dinner with us?

So we hung up the phone, and then Alyssa and I looked at each other, and we said, our house.

In that 1 hour, I kid you not, we accomplished more in unpacking and cleaning our home than in the previous week leading up to that hour.

And at the end of it, we were like high-fiving each other, and we're like, do you realize what we just accomplished in 1 hour.

And we were so impressed with ourselves that when our friends came and said, wow, your house is so nice, we actually told them, like, you should have been here an hour ago.

And we described to them in gory detail just what it is, the transformation that had taken place.

And we laugh at this, but the question I want to ask you all this morning is, why do we care so much about what people think of us?

The fact that we wanted to have a moved-in ready home wasn't motivation enough for my wife and I to unpack all of our things over the course of a week.

But the threat of having people we know come to our house and see the mess supercharged us into a realm of motivation we did not know was possible.

You know, whether you're aware of it or not, we actually spend much of our lives performing for other people.

So take a minute and take stock of how other people's opinions influence your life.

From the moment you're born, What your family thinks of you, your family's expectations of you, it deeply shapes the fabric of who we are, right?

You may have grown up with a certain label, whether your parents thought of you as the smart 1, or the athletic 1, or the problem child, or the artistic 1.

Chances are you tried to live up to this label whether you liked it or not, whether you were conscious of it or not.

You try to live up to their expectations of you.

I know some people whose decisions to go to medical school or dental school was solely based on the expectations of their parents.

In their minds, they said, from a young age, I know my parents want me to be a doctor, so that's why I went to med school.

I never asked myself anything beyond that.

I know some people who actually chose their spouse based on what their parents were expecting of them.

As we become older, we get into school, and then our identity is shaped not by just our family but also by our peers.

So when young children go to school, they care deeply what their peers think of them.

And the desire to be accepted by their peers forms the basis of peer pressure.

And the most traumatic thing that can happen to a young person like this is to feel rejection from their peers, and it's actually the basis of a lot of teen suicides that happen.

As we become older students, we enter into college, grad school, professional schools, and beyond.

We become more sophisticated, I think, in our social interactions.

But this basic desire to win the admiration and acceptance of others doesn't change.

And in medical training, which I can speak to, this is especially true.

Trainees in medicine deeply care about what other people expect of them and think of them.

And a student's identity tends to get wrapped up with their performance, because when they meet certain metrics that society imposes on them, the whole world celebrates them.

Now, The funny thing is that these aren't metrics of success that students come up with for themselves.

They enter their training programs and they see what the expectations are.

They see what gets the applause and the praise and the recognition.

And then they internalize those metrics as being their own.

And they suddenly desire these things that they never thought about before.

Before I got into medical school, I remember my number 1 desire was getting in.

And I would look at these med students and I would think, some of them didn't look very happy, and I was thinking, how could you not be happy as a med student?

Even if you're in the bottom of your class, you're still in medical school.

Do you realize how many people want to be where you are?

And whereas my only goal up to that point was to get into medical school, the moment I became a medical student, that wasn't enough.

I looked to the left, I looked to the right, and then suddenly, it wasn't enough that I was a part of this class.

I needed to know, how am I doing with respect to my peers in my class?

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An Audience of One

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