Last Sunday, I was chatting with other guests at a friend’s rooftop birthday gathering. One woman proudly told us she worked at a local hospital, adding “I am so glad it’s not a Christian hospital!”

I was floored.

People have all kinds of reasons to distrust Christianity. I get that. But a faith-based health organization, Adventist Health of Portland, together with my doctor and the electronic chart system that kept me in direct contact with my care team, was responsible for me being physically well enough to attend the event in the first place.

I was raised as a liberal Episcopalian and wrote a memoir exploring my relationship with Christianity in my early 30s. These days I am never entirely sure what I believe. One thing I can tell you is that part of following Jesus is a core belief that doing the right thing is more important than money.

The website for Adventist Health Portland includes an explicitly faith-based mission: “Living God’s love by inspiring health, wholeness and hope.”

Issues of fairness and equity in the U.S. healthcare are so widespread that it’s hard to know where to even begin to makes things better. I can’t tell you for sure whether faith-based values were part of the decision matrix that made my surgery possible, but it seems entirely consistent.

What I experienced personally can only be described as a “Room at the Inn” situation.

For several months, I had been getting weekly IV iron infusions for anemia. My iron levels were that low. The cause was fibroids with menorrhagia. Over six years, the condition progressed from minor annoyance to debilitating illness.  In the summer of 2022, I was too weak to ride my bike or go out jogging. I slept 12 hours a day. Once, I had been an avid devotee of the Portland music scene. Now having an active social life or dating was out of the question. It was all I could do to clock in to my remote job and cook and clean for myself.

I had already had one surgery (hysteroscopic myomectomy, unsuccessful) the previous fall. The six benign tumors in my uterus came right back, and the bleeding intensified. I was on a wait list through the Oregon Clinic for a second surgery, but had been told the backlog stretched six months or more. Then, right around the Labor Day holiday, things got worse.

I messaged my doctor via the Patient Portal to let her know:

I had my most severe hemorrhage since July 22 last night… There was blood all over the bathroom floor.

Sorry for the graphic detail but I hope you understand I am not exaggerating. I am taking 10 mg of Norethindrone daily. Up until now that has controlled the bleeding successfully.

I got an immediate reply, requesting that I come into her office for blood work. On that same visit, I was given a surgery date — less than two weeks away. My doctor had put in an emergency request for an operating space and Adventist Hospital had answered that call.

I scrambled to get the time off from my work and find a relative to help me through the recovery process. I got a full hysterectomy, but kept my ovaries. Remarkably, the laparoscopic procedure did not require an overnight stay. The hospital staff was caring and attentive, staying late until they were sure I was safe to leave. Within a week, the pain was mostly gone. Within three weeks, only faint scars were visible.

It took over six months for my hormonal balance to even out. But eventually, I got my life back.

The best analogy I can provide is a stained glass window in a cathedral. The procedure itself was a tangible and genuine miracle of modern science. The fact that different medical communications systems were able to connect to bring about a favorable outcome, just as much so.

SEPTEMBER 19, 2023

[Hey, I found my old spirituality blog. Looks like the entire site was archived by the Wayback Machine. I should probably write a crawler and try to make my own archive, but… too many other projects I’m procrastinating on.

I’m going to add the links here for the free PDF download of Southern Cross, the book I researched and wrote while a bored housewife seeking truth and meaning in the Bible Belt. You can also buy a copy on Amazon (Kindle or print). The free online version of the book is older and less edited — I’m sure it has a lot of typos. It also has some of the original line drawings that accompanied the project. I need to emphasize that this book was written for Christians seeking to find common ground with other Christians. If you are not Christian, please know that my intent was not to convert anyone. I left organized religion about a decade ago. I sort of know what the right faith community would look like for me and it would be a group without walls, paid staff, or dogma. Built on friendship, good intention, and mutual support.

Anyway, the post below summarizes where I’m at right now. Only downside of being a Deist is that there isn’t a built-in community. Perhaps I’ll find one or build one in time.]

DECEMBER 28, 2021

About Deism

Religion is a practice. Belief is a frame of mind.

I believe that there is a conscious and compassionate force beyond the scope of human rational inquiry at work in our daily lives. This belief is based mostly on personal experience, and on the firsthand accounts of others. I choose not to further define this Higher Power because whatever attributes I assign would almost certainly be wrong. My definition of deism is less passive than that of the 18th Century Enlightenment. It seems most likely to me that God is a meta layer of reality, both nervous system and DNA, a manifestation of conscious information. Not a watchmaker, but rather the gears, the numbers, the hands, the wearer, the manufacturer, and the construct of 4D spacetime itself.

Photo taken 12.28.2021.

Of course, our reality could also be a simulation. In theory, the odds that we are inhabiting a simulation are fifty-fifty.

But this isn’t a “just so” story. I’m not claiming any authority or special revelation.

And no, I don’t know what happens after we die.

In 2015 I did have something happen to me that cannot be explained by science. It wasn’t a coincidence. It wasn’t an answered prayer. It’s not the face of Jesus on a pancake, or anything like that. It was just something that happened outside of continuity. Something we had no rational explanation for. It had both symbolic and personal relevance. There was another witness. We took a picture with my camera phone.

The picture wouldn’t convince you if I showed you, though. You could just say that we made the whole thing up. Anyway, I’m not trying to convert anyone.

I don’t have any particular agenda, not at this point in my life.

Be a good person. Live according to your conscience. Know that fear is largely imaginary, a pernicious delusion. Love is real but not easy to find. Distrust simple answers and the wisdom of crowds.

That is my practice. That is how I try to live my life.

“God is the only being capable of loving everything.”

That is my definition, anyway. Even if it is only a personal theory, I find it comforting. It is so hard to love other people (friends, neighbors, family) sometimes. We often fall short.

If you are new to this blog, I will share a little bit about myself:

I am 45 years old, divorced and a contract employee at a large and well-known corporation. I was an English major in college and a journalist in my 20s. I wish I could write full-time, but content myself with amateur blogging and the occasional self-published work. Got to make a living, ya know?

Actually I love what I do (coding and design) nearly as much as writing. I am lucky that way, although perhaps not in every way. I recently survived a multi-year ordeal of severe fibroids with anemia. You can read more about that experience here. I am blessed that surgery was able to resolve the problem. It has been amazing to have enough energy to hike and exercise again. The unfortunate consequence of the surgery is that I am now unable to have children. It’s ok, in the long run. I could have had kids in my twenties, but instead I prioritized writing this book. My husband later left me for another woman. I blamed his betrayal, in part, upon my long absences and travel while researching the subject matter.

<HINT>The book is about Christianity.</HINT> So I guess you could say I have some issues with God as a result.

God and I are working through those, I hope. Kind of hard to love God when you know that God is only a construct in your head — a limited way to express a living force beyond our knowledge or comprehension.

That’s all for today, folks. Thanks for reading.

I know some people who use GitHub’s Gist feature like a blog. I myself have only written one public Gist in my life. Here it is, first published on May 2, 2017:

https://gist.github.com/tessgadwa/47fedfaa053cb1d8f0b9d0aef82b565f

Project Eva was for a worthy cause — evangelizing open source.

I quote,

“The chief Gnostic error is to believe that the rest of the world can remain in Hell.”

“The world cannot survive half slave and half free.”

If the tone seems a little bombastic, bear in mind that I had recently left Christianity behind. Or to be more accurate, taken a several years hiatus. Considering that I once wrote a book on the topic, that was kind of a big step. It’s not surprising I looked to something else to fill the void.

Five years later, I believe that while FOSS is powerful both as a practice and an ideology, it is not the be-all and end-all of solutions, for three reasons:

1. Security vulnerabilities.
2. Decentralized systems tend to propagate and amplify bias.
3. Difficult to make economically sustainable.

I have written at length about numbers two and three, and number one is problematic for fairly obvious reasons. That is not my point today. I am not sure that every system needs to be free software, or that the model translates across disciplines to areas such as engineering or the arts. I am not sure that it doesn’t.

I am also in a different place theologically than I was a few years ago. What strikes me now are the similarities between the communitarian principles and values of FOSS, and those of early Christians. I would love to start a coding organization for people of faith — but it’s going to have to wait until my body recovers. Right now it’s all I can do to work and cook myself meals.