The Meet Hope Podcast
The Meet Hope Podcast
105: Encounter Advent 3 - Jesus is Fully Human, With Us
In this special series for Advent called "Encounter Loves Pure Light," we're here to guide you through the season with a fresh perspective and creative reflection. Join us this week as Matt and Rachel Abad, both healthcare professionals and a part of HOPE's community, share their thoughts and experiences about what it means to be human. Our conversation revolves around how we cope with stress and the need for respite, as modeled to us by Jesus.
NOTES:
- See this week's entire Encounter email, here: https://mailchi.mp/meethope/encounter-advent-week-3-jesus-is-with-us
Thanks for being a part of the HOPE community as we continue conversations about faith and hope! You can learn more at meethope.org or find us on socials @meethopechurch. Join in for worship on Sundays at meethope.live! Have a question? Contact us at podcast@meethope.org.
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Welcome to the Meet Hope podcast, where we have conversations about faith and hope. Hope is one church made of people living out their faith through two expressions in person and online. We believe a hybrid faith experience can lead to a growing influence in our community and our world for the sake of others. Welcome to Hope our world for the sake of others.
Speaker 2:Welcome to Hope. Hello and welcome to the Meet Hope podcast. My name is Heather Mandela, I'm one of the pastors here at Hope and I'm looking forward to spending some time with you today. We are in the midst of our Advent Encounter series, where we have been talking about who Jesus is. This week we're looking at the fact that Jesus is fully human, fully God with us, jesus Emmanuel. So we thought, you know, we talk a lot about who Jesus is as God and we would look at who Jesus is as human and what it means to be physically human. And so we invited Matt and Rachel Abad to join us today, and we'll get into why in just a moment, but first I want to take a moment and just let them tell you a little bit about themselves.
Speaker 3:Hey guys, Hi, how are you? Thanks for having us.
Speaker 2:Of course, thank you. So now tell me how long have you guys been married? 11 years, so how did you meet? How long have you guys been married? 11 years, so how did you meet?
Speaker 4:Tell me a little bit about yourselves, we met in the ER where Matt was actually, I think, picking up extra shifts to remodel his kitchen, and I was a nurse, so he was a physician's assistant and I was a nurse at the time in graduate school, working on finishing up my nurse practitioner degree.
Speaker 2:Fantastic. And what tell me, Matt, was it love at first sight?
Speaker 4:or For me, not for Matt. For you, probably not for Matt, like I don't know about Matt.
Speaker 3:That's not true, that's not true at all. Busy with work and stuff and I a hundred percent noticed her immediately. So but it was hard because you had different shifts in me we. It was a couple shifts before I even really even talked to you.
Speaker 4:Yeah, no, I noticed him first, but I was working all kinds of shifts because I was in like working full time, but then I was also in like a part time graduate program.
Speaker 2:So I was just kind of like whatever. I did, yeah, gotcha Excellent. So the rest is history. You got engaged and married.
Speaker 3:Thanks to.
Speaker 4:Rocky.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:One Mm-hmm. You got engaged and married Mm-hmm. Thanks to Rocky.
Speaker 2:Yeah, one of the nurses that we worked with. Oh, I love it. She used to be a lot of-.
Speaker 1:That was that spark.
Speaker 4:A lot of the nurses in the ER were kind of like-.
Speaker 2:They facilitated this match.
Speaker 3:Yes, I never forget Rocky.
Speaker 2:I love it. I love it. That's awesome. That is awesome. And so you, of medicine, you're passionate about this. Tell me a little bit about your career paths. So how have you gotten where you are, matt, I'm going to start with you. How have you gotten where you now are?
Speaker 3:Oh, I know we're on like limited time. So after I graduated um I I did trauma and dive medicine for a U S government.
Speaker 2:So you were military for a while right.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I don't make it like the top priority of my personality, but it's like, yeah, I was US Navy you know, so I did dive medicine and combat medicine and that gave me into the world of surgery. I always wanted to go into surgery. I love surgery and I had a famous or not famous, infamous, I should say surgical, attending no-transcript, Fixing problems and being right, you know, typical surgeon. But I fell in love with the whole surgical profession, the personality, just that you know, hands-on type of you are fixing a problem.
Speaker 2:Yeah, literally.
Speaker 3:And that was the direction I went and I've done general surgery, vascular trauma surgery, emergency medicine, spine surgery. I've had a ton of great attendings that have taught me over the years and now I'm lucky enough to be a partner in my practice where we do orthopedics and physical medicine for geriatric patients and skilled nursing.
Speaker 2:Excellent. So now you specifically currently what your organization, what your company does is you go in and you assess the patient's overall well-being and make recommendations.
Speaker 3:Correct, you know, and work with rehab to make sure that there is no functional reason why they can't perform therapy at the optimum, you know levels.
Speaker 2:Gotcha.
Speaker 3:And if there are issues, what can we do to fix it?
Speaker 2:Gotcha. Okay. Now your path has landed in the same place, but went a little bit differently, so tell me a little bit about how, rachel, you got to where you are now.
Speaker 4:So I think, looking back, when I decided to become a nurse, I did feel like it was just the caring and human element of it. So I actually had a couple of ideas in my brain of where I wanted to take my career. But there was just something about the profession of nursing and I think back when I went to nursing school there was a huge drive to get more nurses. So Johnson and Johnson had their campaign and I just like really fell in love with the human aspect of it, which is funny, because being a nurse and then working in the nursing profession, like that's what draws you in. And then you realize really fast how they teach you a lot of ideals in school. And then it's like how do you adapt that when you are a nurse and you don't have maybe all the resources you need and you're not working.
Speaker 2:Yes, Everything else that you thought you were going to have when you were in school and hit the reality of, yeah, we are understaffed, underpaid, under. Yeah, all those things.
Speaker 4:So I worked in labor and delivery initially and that's when I decided to go back to school and at that time the unit I was working on was closing, okay so, but they were going to be off opening up as ER in at the Borough Heart and Lung Center, okay, and they, I was offered day shift to take a job in the ER. So I kind of did like a complete three one yeah, and that's how I wound up in the emergency department.
Speaker 4:But I learned so much working there and it was definitely like one of those things where at the time I was really like high strung and just like very overwhelmed by everything that was going on there. But then once I became an NP and was working in the city and working in like skilled nursing facilities that did not have resources, I could see how it all came together, because a lot of the ways we were treating patients we didn't have hospital resources and we had to think through a lot of problems and kind of just like I had to rely on what I learned in the ER.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I would imagine more times than maybe you expect you're able to like think back on some of that combat medicine, that dive medicine, that improvisation, that ability to think with what you have in the moment right To help the patient in the best way possible. Yeah, that's really cool. So now you work with Matt.
Speaker 4:I do.
Speaker 2:You were one of his, his nurses that goes out and works in the skilled, in the skilled nursing facilities and does the evals, Excellent, Okay, which brings us back to this idea of being fully human right and and that our bodies are ridiculously complicated and that they hold onto things. So tell me a little bit about the way our body interacts both with like our surroundings, but even the way we maybe even interact with other people around us physiologically, oh man. All in less than.
Speaker 3:Gosh, I mean what it is to essentially. What you're asking is what it is almost to be human and this interaction that we have with, essentially, reality around us, on how we perceive it as an individual and translate that into an experience.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I just go no you got it?
Speaker 3:No, and it's not to you know. Pun intended, I guess when you look at the miracle of how these very small cellular interactions work and together to create this organized being that's having this interaction, like you and I are having, or Rachel and I's, have you know, you have to start to ask yourself which is the fundamental question I think in humanity is is why am I here? What am?
Speaker 3:I doing and what is my purpose and ultimately, where am I going. So yeah, I mean we could explore that a lot deeper, but I mean these are the fundamental things of both the teleological and ontological exploration. Um, you know, if you have questions from a pure physiologic standpoint, of yeah it's a big open category. Where do you want to go Right? Where do you want me?
Speaker 2:to go. I would love to talk a little bit about the way perhaps our, um, our expectations, so our, the way our thoughts can impact our physiology. So let's you know, we think about anxiety, we talk about, we think about, um, being excited or being sad, or the ways that that actually could impact our physical well-being.
Speaker 4:I mean there's definitely a mind-body connection. Let's say you're living in a constant state of anxiety, or you're constantly running on stress, or you're constantly running, your body is releasing hormones that are like elevating your heart rate, elevating your blood pressure. You're kind of staying the adrenergic response. There you go.
Speaker 3:You have your parasympathetic and your sympathetic, so yeah, like your sympathetic is obviously that fight or flight, you know, and I think society these days, we are constantly in a sympathetic overdrive, yeah, and we're anxiety in general, you know it's. We have to learn how to exercise the parasympathetic, that rest and digest as we were, you know, so intensely taught as we were so intensely taught.
Speaker 3:But going back to anxiety and stuff and just socially, it's just endemic on how we're bombarded with stimulus. It's constantly news, just the negatives of everything. And then there's the stress of home, the stress of work, and I don't think we've adapted from an evolutionary standpoint to be able to have that constant barrage of stimuli, to be able to catch up to it. Before you know, thousands of years ago it was like all right, well, we're running around, we have to hunt, we have to gather, we have to formulate these bonds with our people, have our village and stuff and that's how we'll cope and stuff. But you had breaks. Now it's just a 24 hour a day bombardment and there is no respite for it.
Speaker 2:Gosh, I think that's so profound and, as you're talking about, this I'm thinking like we went from when I won't lump you all in with my demographic, but when I was little, right like we went from having one telephone with a cord on a wall, a TV with what? Three channels you know, 10, probably for most of my childhood maxed. When you close that door at night you were in. There was no more real stimuli coming at you from the world, it was just your immediacy. And we went from that to 24-7 in less than 20 years. And I don't know that as humans we adapt that quickly. We did not, Right Like it takes a lot longer for a society, a culture, a physical body to adapt to that kind of constant bombardment.
Speaker 3:No, and we're not able to have that, you know, break where we can deal with the stresses that are present before more stressors are just thrown on you, you know, and anxiety in general I also feel, just from a core of it is is again that that question of what am I, who am I, what am I doing, where am I going, and we're not given that time to be able to ponder those things.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 3:You know there are no safe. Well, there are safe spaces I'm sitting in one but a lot of people don't recognize that or they don't have those places to go. They don't even have it in their own homes these days, some places you know. So it just builds up and again. When you're in a constant state of stress and you're hyper you know, hyper cortisol and adrenic you just have nothing. It's just you're on 100, you're burnt out.
Speaker 4:Yeah, the candles burn, because then you'll eventually crash, your body will eventually it will tell you yes not be able to keep up with the production and that you will feel that physically.
Speaker 2:And I think about as much as that bombardment is like. That is now, and I tie that back into you know, the rhythms, of course, when Jesus was on earth were very different, and there were those built in periods of rest, but he also he knew what his end result was right, and so he is. He's taking, particularly once his ministry starts, this long walk towards death, and the human side of him had to be carrying the weight of that with him as well. He had to be feeling all those same physiological things that we feel when you get scared, when you get anxious, when you're in pain, and so it's always interesting for me to remember the humanity while he had that God piece where he understood the long picture right Like that's still that living in the moment, that humanity of it is so raw and different for us.
Speaker 3:Well, no, and he and at least I'm going to speak just for myself, sir, I'm no expert, but you know he carried the burden of what we've known as existential dread. Yeah, you know, uh, sarin kierkegaard has the famous saying existence is pain, life, you know, life hurts. And to not only have that, the burden, you know, just as the human aspect of jesus, but civilization, you know, us as a species, you know.
Speaker 3:And to carry that on a daily basis, knowing what the end result was and for us now to walk in the same path that eventually we are going to meet, you know, as a species you know, and to carry that on a daily basis, knowing what the end result was, and for us now to walk in the same path that eventually we are going to meet, you know we are going to die.
Speaker 2:It is the inevitable right and and and. How we live between now and then, you know, is the is the way we walk out our, our faith, our life, our relationships. And I think about that as well when I think about the people that you love in your life, our relationships, and I think about that as well when I think about the people that you love in your life, right, because we carry that kind of existential dread for them as well. Yeah, so you know, we worry about our kids, we worry about our friends, our parents or whatever, and we carry that much like, I am sure, because, of course, we learn what empathy really looks like through watching him interact with people who are broken around him. And and that must be difficult for you guys in the nursing profession too, to some degree, because you are, you are exposed to continual pain from others suffering.
Speaker 4:Yes, yes. It's hard. I think I don't know about Matt. I don't know about Matt For me. It took me years and I saw a work in progress to learn how to be empathetic but not overly compassionate, like not to own it.
Speaker 3:You deal with it way better than I do and we're definitely like it's very interesting. We're very much like a yin and a yang, definitely more of the optimist on that side of that and that's where you go to existential dread, whereas I would say you're more of more of a kirkagarden type of thought process, whereas I'm definitely sometimes more of a niche. I can be a nihilist and I'm just like, well, we're gonna die anyway.
Speaker 2:So what's the point does it matter right?
Speaker 3:and then rachel will chime in as well. You know there's this thing. You know that it's how we deal with those stresses.
Speaker 4:Yes, like birth, death, death, life it's all a process and that's what makes us human. Yeah, so that we're all in this experience together and I think that you just see people and actually I'm going to just say I think people in emergency services in general right, so it's not just like nursing, but it's military police first responders. They're seeing people at their worst.
Speaker 4:Yep, it's really takes a toll and absolutely, and I think like initially when I became a nurse, I felt like I could never show emotion, like I had to be that professional nurse and I remember like when I worked in the ER there was a code for a kid that was around my age and this is when my kids were little. So it was like, but I did not let myself like cry or even look upset, but like all of those things that I held on, like we're not healthy and we're not good and I had to learn like that it's okay to like step out and cry or it's okay to tell somebody.
Speaker 2:I can't take this case.
Speaker 4:Like this is not for me and it took me years to get to that point years. And like Matt talking to me, it's like cause it was just like you see so much and you just hold it all in.
Speaker 2:Well, and that's one of the things I think God does so beautifully, is bring people together who are the yin and the yang right, because they balance each other. So, you know, the differences that you guys have are actually complementary, and so they kind of build each other up and you're both better because of the other and I tease my husband about that all the time, you know, because we are, you know, very different in so many ways, but that's on purpose. I think God, you know, knew what we each needed, and I think that that's something similar for you guys, and I think that we see it too in the personalities that even that Jesus surrounded himself with you know, the 12 disciples were very different.
Speaker 3:Men.
Speaker 2:You know, they were very different. Men All walks of life.
Speaker 4:Even Jesus knew when he needed to walk away, take a nap, pray, have some respite.
Speaker 2:Yes, absolutely yeah, and so it's really important, as we go through our day-to-day lives, to recognize that we are fully human. We are fully human and that God created us uniquely, but that means that there are things that we need to be aware of and thinking of, and I think that finding that space you were talking about is huge.
Speaker 3:Sanctuary.
Speaker 2:Yeah, finding sanctuary, yeah, yeah. And so tell me, how do you guys find sanctuary? Where do you find that moment of peace in your chaos? Didn't know, I was going to ask you that, did you? I gotcha.
Speaker 3:I don't know, it's everywhere for me. I live in the Kafka absurdity of just waking up in the morning and it's just you have to embrace that absurdity and kind of shrug your shoulders and just kind of, you know, roll with it. Obviously, home is a sanctuary. That's, you know, the, the, you know home is where the heart is.
Speaker 3:But you know, anytime I can just be quiet, whether it be in a room alone, you know, just away from everything, all that extra noise, so I can be alone with those thoughts and be able to process them, whether it be the work day, family stuff, house stuff or social things that are occurring in the world, to be able to kind of digest and give my chance, my body, that parasympathetic opportunity to digest it and to be able to process it and do something productive with it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I know exercise can be great. Some people really find that's a burn off they need. For me, it's usually a walk in the woods, like that's my forest bathing Yep, yep, that's my spot. I got to go somewhere where I am alone and quiet and in nature in some way, shape or form. How about you, rachel? What's?
Speaker 4:so for me it's all about like compartmentalization of my day so I can leave work at work and then start the new day fresh. So I will try, I will have. I have a little like upbeat music, like list that I'll listen to on the way home from work. Um, I, I have to get better at this, but I have been just exercising when I get home for like just 20 minutes, like so it takes. I feel like it just helps your, but like it helps me sleep better at night.
Speaker 4:It gives me more energy through the day, like it helps me get through that two.
Speaker 1:30 run where you just want to fall asleep.
Speaker 4:It's awful and, like Matt, I just like to find quiet now. I think Even at night sometimes we'll sit, and we'll just sit and like be sit, just sit.
Speaker 3:Music is on quietly in the background and that's it.
Speaker 2:It's so funny. Kevin and I have found the same thing recently. I'll be like do you want to watch something? He's like me either, like we're okay, it's okay, it's okay.
Speaker 2:It's okay to just be quiet and chill, and I love that so well. Thank you so much, guys, for joining us, for sharing a little bit about yourselves and what you do, and I want to encourage everybody out there. You know Jesus was fully human and he, like Rachel said, knew when he needed breaks. He knew when he needed to fall asleep, even in the midst of a storm in a boat, and that we can hold on to that, because we can't. It is not healthy to live in a constant state of fight or flight, and so I want to encourage you out there to find your sanctuary, find your quiet, find time to reflect on what it means to be made in the image of God and what that means for our lives. If you have any questions, if you want to walk beside someone, you know where to find us meethopeorg. Have a great week.
Speaker 1:Thanks for being a part of the Hope Community as we continue our conversations about faith and hope. If you don't already, please join us for worship on Sundays or on demand than hope. If you don't already, please join us for worship on Sundays or on demand. You can learn more at meethopeorg or find us on socials at Meet Hope Church.