At the end of the presentation, the learner will be able to:Discuss how to structure one’s life and practice with purpose and intention.Illustrate outside-the-box thinking in starting and building out a medical practice.Identify different ways in which success can be defined.Recognize the utility of having God as your business partner.Evaluate the results that come from living “by His Spirit.”

AMEN 2024: By His Spirit

At the end of the presentation, the learner will be able to:Discuss how to structure one’s life and practice with purpose and intention.Illustrate outside-the-box thinking in starting and building out a medical practice.Identify different ways in which success can be defined.Recognize the utility of having God as your business partner.Evaluate the results that come from living “by His Spirit.”

Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.

Adventist Medical Evangelism Network (AMEN)

Medical Track

Janie Yoo

The Purpose-Driven Practice

It's so nice to be with you this afternoon.

I kind of feel surreal to be here at AMEN almost 20 years after its inaugural West Coast Conference when I attended as a med student.

I was in my fourth year of medical school and attending the conference with my then second year dental school boyfriend.

Paul and I were dating and we were both signed up as deferred mission appointees through the general conference and we had wild and ambitious dreams of changing the world through medicine and dentistry and we had our eyes set on Africa.

But I knew it would be a while before we got into the mission field.

So it was really at this very first AMEN conference that was in San Diego.

You know, It was so inspiring then to hear motivating, inspiring stories from actual physicians who are doing God's work and spreading his gospel.

And so it's kind of hard to believe that all those years have flown by and now Paul is going to be speaking at the dental side and I have the opportunity to share some of our stories of how God is leading us to serve in our own respective fields.

So although we're far from perfect examples of how to live life or structure a practice.

I hope that you will find a few nuggets and that you will reflect on the following points of this talk.

So the first would be to think about structuring one's life in practice with purpose and intention, thinking outside the box in starting and building out a medical practice, defining success, having God as your business partner, and learning to live by his spirit.

But before we proceed, let us bow our heads for a word of prayer.

Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you so much for this Amen conference and all that it has accomplished over these last 20 years for instilling in me as a medical student these tenets that this organization upholds.

I don't like to speak, but that you will be the 1 to speak through me and that you will allow some of our experiences that you have enabled us to experience to be an example and to encourage others in their own personal journey and in their medical journey.

And we ask all these things in Jesus' name.

Chomba rushed into my office at the end of the day.

He was my maintenance man at Lusaka Eye Hospital, and we were missionaries in Africa.

I was the medical director of Lusaka Eye Hospital, and Paul was the dental director of Lusaka Adventist Dental Services, which was on the same campus of the Eye Hospital.

And confused, I was like, what's on fire?

It was about 4.30 and we were all getting ready to go home when this occurred.

She was a business manager of the dental clinic, she was like rolling around on the grass and a group of eye hospital staff had surrounded her.

Someone was spraying her down with a hose and the fire had apparently been put out, but the poor business manager had been burned.

Her arms, her legs, She was just in a lot of pain and so I got a quick history.

Something exploded and then a fire happened.

But she couldn't give me any more information.

So she was transported to the hospital, treated for second and third degree burns on her arms and legs, and we visited her at her home.

We prayed for her, and she would always clutch this Bible close to her chest each time.

Her husband was a prominent Seventh-day Adventist pastor in Zambia, and she was a godly woman, and so we were really praying for her recovery.

But 1 puzzling piece of evidence there was this can of gas and a box of matches that was in the clinic.

And Paul, my husband, the dental director, continued to investigate the cause of the fire and he started to put pieces of the puzzle together.

Paul began to discover that the receipt books, they were like triplicate forms, they had been manipulated, and it had appeared that the business manager was likely stealing from the clinic, And eventually we found out that she had tried to burn down the dental clinic intentionally to hide the evidence of her embezzling funds.

And so this was 1 of the trials by fire we experienced literally in that first year When we were managing our respective institutions, we learned quickly how to deal with HR, finances, scheduling, inventory, pharmacy management, how to deal with stealing and lying and cheating and arson, especially in a cross-cultural situation.

And all those were lessons that we had learned for the time when we would return back to the United States to manage our own practices.

And 1 other piece of evidence was that the fire was located only in the corners, in specific areas, not like a normal path of a fire would go.

So you have a W2 job, You're in person or remote.

Raise your hands high just so that I can see.

Okay, more than half of you I think are in an employed situation.

So you are in a solo or a small group private practice or you have a partner and you own your own company.

How many of you are independent contractors?

You get a 1099, anybody in that situation?

Or you don't work outside the home, you support a spouse or you're otherwise a support.

Okay, and how many of you fall in the other category?

You're retired or you're a student or in that situation.

All right, yay, our student's there, welcome.

So this talk will be applicable to all of you, hopefully, regardless of your current situation.

Currently, I do run my own private practice, but I have been in other situations as well.

And sort of the gist of this talk is about being intentional.

Intentional about our private practice, our professional life, our lives in general.

But in order to understand where I'm coming from, I'm going to share with you a little part of my story and some of the things that I've learned on the journey as we go through this.

So let me back a little bit back up to that point about 20 years ago.

I'm in medical school I'm dating this guy and you know, I'm in my fourth year So I remember thinking distinctly at that point I'm definitely not the smartest person in my class.

And I thought, how many people in my class have photographic memories?

I seriously thought maybe half of them did because they were doing very well.

And I had done well in high school, I had done well in college, but for me medical school was really hard and I passed all my classes but was definitely not that top.

And so it was definitely by God's grace that I was able to graduate and get into the field of ophthalmology.

And that honestly is a testimony in and of itself and you can always ask me afterwards during a meal about that testimony, but I want to share another story about when I was kind of finishing up residency.

So it was during residency, I was studying hard.

And it was now time to figure out what I wanted to do.

Did I want to go straight into the mission field or did I want to do a fellowship?

And I fasted and I prayed about it and I felt that God was leading me to do a fellowship in corneal and refractive surgery.

So corneal disease, corneal transplants, LASIK, etc.

But I really wondered in the back of my mind whether it would be worthwhile to do a fellowship in Africa.

Am I really going to be able to do corneal transplants?

Won't I be over trained or over qualified in the mission field?

They don't even have an eye bank in Zambia or in all of Africa.

But after feeling a very strong conviction to apply, I did so.

So I applied to maybe 20, 30 programs all across the country.

I got about 10 interviews and I was flying everywhere for these interviews, Colorado, Ohio, Texas, Oklahoma, some in California.

And, you know, based on the number of interviews, I thought, well, my chances would be pretty high that I would match into a spot.

Quickly, my mind went to questioning God.

Bob Hunsaker

The Christian Physician, LGBTQ+, and Epigenetics

My name is Robert Hunsaker, I'm a physician in Boston, and I've been a member of AMEN for 20 years.

I've been to every single 1, probably been to just 1 or 2, maybe 3 at the most over the years.

And I was there at the original planning meeting at Cahutta Springs when there was no amen, we were just talking about it.

So, it's been a blessing to see this thing grow and mature over the years.

And I spoke on this similar topic about 10 years ago without the LGBTQ component, and it's sort of been a little bit of a hobby of mine to study sort of epigenetics and genetics, and we'll go into in a few minutes why that is.

Just to tell you a couple things that we're not going to cover.

We're not going to do sort of an exegetical study on the Bible verses related to this issue because there's plenty of good materials on that.

And we're really not going to talk about the TQIA part of this.

Now, the alphabet gets confusing here sometimes, but We're just going to focus on the LGBT, I'm sorry, the LGB part of this, because the TQIA just don't have time to cover all that in 1 hour's time frame.

But the principles we'll talk about and the studies we'll look at really sort of mirror, Once you've gone through, you probably know this from your own practices, when there's some sort of topic of discussion in your own specialty, and then a dozen and 2 dozen and 3 dozen articles come out, then there starts to be some review articles and some meta-analysis, and about that time you start to get a flavor for things.

So the LGB sorts of articles are sort of mirrored in the TT articles.

I is really its own sort of category, intersex.

That's really a medical condition, not a behavior.

So that's really, I think, a separate topic.

So we're not going to touch on those this morning.

Initially, I was just asked to talk about epigenetics and LGBT types of issues.

And then I was contacted later and said, well, we want you to broaden that out beyond just the genetic part of things and sort of address the issue in a broader context.

So, we're not just going to stick to the genetic questions, but we're going to sort of broaden that out a little bit as we go through this, and you'll see what I mean by that in a minute.

Let me just say something up front here, and I think we can all agree with this.

And we need to be able to stand for truth and speak with compassion at the same time as we go through these topics.

They are made in the image of God just like we are.

They have inherent intrinsic human value just like we do.

And we need to relate that right to them with the respect and compassion that we relate to any human beings with.

So I just want to lay that as a foundation.

So whatever we talk about today, that's our foundation.

They deserve the same amount of respect that we do.

And they're made in the image of God just like any of the rest of us are.

Now Before I pray to start our meeting, I just 1 little housekeeping issue since this is a CME meeting.

And I don't think there's any overlap between any of these companies and any of the things we'll be talking about today.

I don't think any of them make cross-sex hormones or puberty blocks or anything like that.

So I don't think there's any financial disclosures that matter at this moment.

So, all right, let's bow our heads and have a word of prayer.

Dear Heavenly Father, I just want to thank you for this time we have together to understand how you created us, to understand how we've all been influenced by sin, how we've participated in that as individuals, as a race, and how there's a great story of redemption, Lord, that whatever our individual journeys have been, you've promised that the beauty of your character and your goodness can bring us to a place of healing, of freedom and redemption, and we want to understand that for ourselves as individuals, but we want to be able to share those realities with those we come into contact with, whether they have a heterosexual background or a homosexual background or whatever their background is that we want to represent you were right in our understanding and in our patterns of speech.

I pray for humility and for wisdom in Jesus' name.

Now my interest in this topic really predated anything to do with homosexuality, those kinds of issues.

I just was interested in Ellen White's statements about cultivated, I'm sorry, inherited tendencies to evil or to good.

Because we're all sort of familiar on an intuitive level that there's genetic relationships with how tall we are and our eye color and maybe even our intellect.

But it was a little non-intuitive to me when I started thinking about this and reading about this 30 35 years ago.

Behavioral realities Could be inherited because essentially that's what she's saying here Notice what she says those who put their trust in Christ are not to be enslaved by any hereditary or cultivated habit or tendency.

Now we all understand cultivated tendencies.

We've cultivated a love for chocolate chip cookies, or as my wife, oatmeal raisin cookies.

We make choices, habits form, and we act in line with those habits.

Sometimes they're good, sometimes they're not.

So those are cultivated habits or tendencies.

But what would a hereditary habit or tendency be?

I mean, that would be I do something on a behavioral level and somehow that behavior is transmitted.

Because my behaviors are occurring in my mind and then manifesting themselves in my behavior.

How would that end up in my genetic makeup, in my sperm or egg, on to the next generation?

That seemed a little counterintuitive to me, right?

Eye color, obvious, hair color, height, those are sort of intuitive, they're sort of concrete.

She goes on, whatever may be our inherited or cultivated tendencies to wrong, so there's inherited tendencies, we can overcome to the power that he's ready to impart.

So we focus a lot on the you don't have to be stuck with it, you can overcome it, but my interest was, well, what is it to start with?

What is a inherited tendency to start with?

She goes on, another place, Criets, Object Lessons, page 48.

There are very many who claim to serve God, but who have no experimental knowledge of Him.

They have not a personal relationship with a living Savior, and their characters reveal defects, both hereditary and cultivated.

So, in our characters, right, because we think of our characters what we develop over time, and that's certainly true.

That's why she talks about cultivated facets of our character.

But she also talks about inherited facets of our character.

Meaning, in some way, shape, or form, the characters that we have at birth and through life is something that was given to us in some way, shape, or form.

And again, that's not quite as intuitive as eye color, hair color, height, skin color, blah blah blah.

Those things sort of tangible, physical things that we think about a lot.

You're probably familiar with the third and fourth generation.

In both the 10 Commandments and Exodus 20, Deuteronomy 5, and a couple other places, the statement is made that God is long-suffering and abundant, but there's this visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generations.

Now There's really 2 ways you can understand that, right?

1 way is God imposes penalty, he imposes punishment on your children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren for your missteps.

Then we'd have to sort of process Ezekiel 18, right?

The son shall bear the iniquity of the father, the father bear the iniquity of his son, we'd have to process that on some level.

Or, and that's what the NIV says, the NIV says punishing the children for the sin of the parents.

That's how they interpreted this verse, the NIV translators.

But the other possibility is the Bible's describing for us as Ellen White was, a inherited tendency that gets passed on to further generations, third and fourth generations.

Now, it's interesting in Exodus 20 Deuteronomy, if you go to the next verse, notice it says, "...are visiting the iniquity of the fathers that's under the third and fourth generation." Now, generation is italicized there, Right?

All right, so but then it goes on, showing mercy unto thousands, and they didn't add generations there, I just inserted that.

The Bible's telling us, yes, iniquity is visited to the third and fourth generation, but God is showing mercy not just to thousands of individual people, but to thousands of generations.

Gloria Kim

Led by the Spirit: Getting Tangible Solutions from an Intangible God

My name is Gloria Kim and I know many of you have been long attendees.

And just to give you my background, I am currently an OBGYN in private practice.

And then before that, I actually was a board certified family practice doc, so I did 2 residencies.

I did not go to Loma Linda, but today I'm gonna be talking about making decisions and how God has changed my practice.

Loving Father in heaven, I thank you so much for your love and mercy.

I thank you for this conference, where everything that we do is really by your spirit alone.

So I ask for the Holy Spirit to have full control, to be present, and that this message can truly be an encouragement to the people here and a blessing.

I pray that it's all of thee and none of me.

So, God helps those who help themselves could be the motto of many physicians.

As 1 of the most driven, self-reliant professions, we studied hard and got into med school.

We outcompeted others and got that residency slot.

In every area of our lives, we work hard and achieve our goals.

We solve problems by personal effort and money.

If our car breaks down, we pay to fix it or just buy another 1.

We, If our roof leaks, we just hire someone else to fix it.

When a family member gets cancer, we go to the most reputable cancer center, get the top doctors to come up with the most cutting-edge treatment plan.

Of course, we pray earnestly along the way, but we expect God to work with the plans that we have come up with.

So then is faith just to fill in the cracks left by irrational and evidence-based decisions?

Where does the Holy Spirit fit into our medical practice and personal lives?

So my topic today is led by the Spirit, getting tangible solutions from an intangible God.

So I'll be sharing my own journey of the changing role of faith in my personal and medical decision making.

I'll also share how praying for divine appointments transformed my job, and I'll give examples of how I believe that prayer impacted medical outcomes.

And lastly, I'll discuss some of my approaches to making decisions and dealing with uncertainty.

So after accepting Christ in college, I saw God working amazingly a few times, like getting me into med school and helping me find my husband.

But he was really a God of major decisions and emergencies.

And for the rest, I basically relied on my head and my heart.

This all changed 9 years ago when I heard Janet Page talk about prayer and about the miracles that she experienced.

And up to the point, I thought, you know, as a good Adventist, I thought the most important thing for Christians to do was to read your Bible.

And prayer was something that I just kind of sprinkled around except in times of crisis.

I also thought that God answered the prayers of a few chosen, those with really great faith and not mediocre Christians like me.

So I began a prayer journal and claiming Jeremiah 33.3, call to me and I will answer you and show you great and mighty things which you do not know.

I put that verse right on the first page of my prayer journal and began.

And I committed, 1 thing that I did differently about praying was I committed to praying until the answers came.

And then God began answering in great and mighty ways.

And I'm going to give you some examples and stories.

Miracles happen if you have faith, but prayer is how you grow faith.

Prayer is how you take the Word of God and put its promises to the test.

Prayer is how you receive the Holy Spirit, the source of all truth, guidance, and power.

For those of you who went to Loma Linda, any hands of those of you who attended Loma Linda?

So it's probably no big deal to see doctors praying with patients, but I went to a secular med school, University of Michigan, and then 2 residencies, University of Washington, Family Practice, and then Illinois Masonic for OBGYN.

And I never heard any attending praying with their patient.

I never heard any discussion about faith.

And so I never prayed when I went into private practice.

For 7 years I never prayed with any patients.

I was afraid of getting rejected or getting into trouble.

Series

Medical Track

The Purpose-Driven Practice

Transcript

Description

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Breakout Sessions C

Corp Fitness: Crossing the Chasm From Served to Servicer

1h 12m

Breakout Session C

Praying With Patients

59m

Sabbath Afternoon: Q and A

12m

Breakout Session C

Free Clinics: A Comprehensive Effect

58m

Seminars

Unity in Pastor Physician Teams: So the World May Know You Have Sent Me

1h 4m

Allied Health

Making Christ-like Connections: Win the Confidence and Trust of Your Patients

46m

A Day in the Clinic

32m

Breakout Sessions C

Christian Witness in a non-Adventist Work Environment

26m

ASI 2009 Seminar: Reaching Your Marketplace

How Business Gives Birth to Mission

1h 18m

Dave Fiedler: Thoughts on Thinking - A Brief History of Adventist Thought

Kellogg vs. the Ministry: A Century of Collateral Damage

58m

Dental Track

Evangelistic Opportunities for Associates in Non-Christian Practices

59m

In Business for the Kingdom

Turn It Over. The Plowshare of Business

1h 15m

Sound Doctrine