During Pentecost, Hamline Church is inviting members to write about who they are, what makes them tick, and how the spirit moves in their lives. This is a way for us to understand more about what our ministries are Monday through Saturday, and why we seek out God in this church. This week, longtime member Craig Bowron writes about how he became involved in medicine and writing, and how these two inform each other.

I’m not exactly sure why I became a physician. There wasn’t a doctor in my family, and we’d been fortunate enough to avoid ever really needing one. My father got his higher education in the boiler room of a Navy destroyer, and my mother dropped out of college after her freshman year because she felt motherhood was a stronger calling than academics.

By high school I was certain that what I really enjoyed was being outdoors, and the biology of things. So I entered college with the idea of becoming a small-town doctor. Except life has other plans, and for the last 20 years I’ve worked at Abbott Northwestern Hospital near downtown Minneapolis—definitely not small, definitely not rural.

Being a physician is a fascinating mix of science and art.

The science is complex and always expanding. It demands a certain humility, because the more we know, the more realize how much we don’t know. It’s a miracle that life works out, even for an instant.

The science of medicine takes place inside a human being, not a beaker or a lab, and that is the art of medicine. Every day I am immersed in the great pageant of humanity. Being sick is a very stressful event—it goes to our core, literally to our very existence, and that can bring out the best and the worst in any of us. We are all our own brand of crazy. Some days the pageant seems like a Cormac McCarthy novel—dark and serious—and other days it’s more like a Monty Python skit—ridiculously silly. Some days it’s invigorating, other days exhausting.

There are plenty of mundane, routine, and even trivial aspects to my job, but to sit down at the bedside of a patient and hear their story, to participate in some small way in their suffering and to struggle with them in regaining their health…that is sacred ground. It is always a deep honor—and sometimes a weight—to stand on it.

I didn’t plan on becoming a big city hospital doctor, and I didn’t plan on being a writer, but I am both.

I was an English major in college, and started writing in earnest after finishing my training. What medicine and writing have in common is the power of story and the importance of small things. Some days, if I’m lucky, I get the story and the details just right.