Stethoscope or guitar...

As a senior in high school my close friends and I, the "three musketeers" as our English teacher called us, had high hopes and aspirations of becoming great and successful men. We would be wealthy and call each other on the weekend in between patients and cases and family outings and schedule tee times at the golf course in Augusta, GA. Two of us started in Biology and Chemistry at Louisiana College and one at Louisiana Tech in Chemical Engineering. However within two years we had all changed and lent ourselves more to the things that we had said that we would never do. One changed to business, one to agriculture, and one to kinesiology. We left our dreams. Could we have achieved them? Yes. Was it the best thing and would we be where we are today? I doubt it.
I've been graduated from college for almost three years now. I've always struggled with money and power and fame. I've always wanted to be the Lex Luther, not so much the sadistic and hateful wretch that he is, but the guy that can do anything he wants at the slightest whelm. I always knew that I had it in me to be the successful doctor or the wealthy and powerful businessman; however, I've never really felt like that was God's will for my life.
Recently, my wife and I, well more so me than her, have become addicted to the TV show, House M.D. I am excited like a school boy at how he handles himself and the knowledge that he and the other doctors seem simply to carry in their pockets along with their stethoscopes and extra seringes. My friends will tell you that I have a bad tendency to let my mind and imagination adapt to whatever it is that I'm watching at the time. This could be a case of that or it could just be something that I've dealt with internally for quite sometime. Watching that show reminds me and makes me think of what I could have been, or...what I could be. I remember how I decided to get out of pre-med because I couldn't handle the responsiblity of having a person's life in my hands. Is it really in my hands and not in God's? No. However, to the world and to my guilty conscience, the life would be in my hands. I couldn't handle knowing that because of a mistake I made or simply because the person was beyond care, that they would die. That bothered me to no end and I never even had anything like that happen. I never made it to med-school although I've thought of trying several times.
The question that I've posed to myself in the past few hours is this. Is the job that I'm in now not that much different? In my heart and my knowledge I posses the "medicine" of life. I know what can cure a person's wretched soul and restore them to a true relationship with Christ. However, I let people die. And truth be told, so do you. That is disheartening. That troubles me. I've felt many times and still struggle with the idea sometimes that I could be making a larger impact in the world if I were working as a doctor and saving people's lives and making a lot of money where I could financially bless people and not have to worry any at all about my family and where I could give God the glory for saving their life and not take it for myself. I've struggled with that many times and to be honest, at times, I still do. I wonder if a guitar is just as effective as a stethoscope.
In my heart, I know that it is. God uses me and many others to teach and tell of his good news and great "medicine for the soul" that without the doctors of the gospel, they would never hear. So is one profession more impactful than the other? In some circles, one might say that being a minister is more effective and another circle would say that a doctor of medicine is more effective. However, I beleive that we both can and do make a huge impact on the world and do a great deal for our God. God gave us medicine and God gave us the Gospel. He made us and only he can fix all parts of us.
So are we as ministers as knowledgeable about lupus, cancer, anemia, and all the other crazy and long worded diseases that Dr. Greg House is? No. However, we do deal with people's lives and their eternity every day. I wonder why so many of us don't take it as seriously as the doctors of medicine do. We are "Doctors of the Gospel", so to speak. Stethoscope or guitar? I'll keep my guitar for now.