Is it possible to know too much? Or to be too educated?

As an avid advocate of education, I would tend to answer these questions in the negative. 

My argument would be that more harm has been done in (and to) the world by the ignorant than by the learned. I would tell you I agree wholeheartedly with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. when he spoke in 1963 and said, “Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”

I would probably also go on and chide the arrogance of the person who decided to put their education to bed, saying, “OK. That’s it. I’ve learned enough now.”

But then I met Malcolm.* And after talking to Malcolm for a couple of hours, I came to pity him for his education.

Malcolm was one of the many people who came to see me several years ago in a pastoral counseling capacity. Malcolm was a physician. Specifically, he was an oncologist… an oncologist who specialized in the treatment of melanoma. In fact, so wise and educated was Malcolm in the causes of, the treatments for, the history of, and the research into the subject of melanoma that he was now a lecturer in the subject at a prestigious medical school. Malcolm wrote articles on the subject and traveled extensively around the world, lecturing to groups of doctors about melanoma.

Malcolm came to see me one day for some pastoral guidance following his own diagnosis of… melanoma.

“The problem is,” he explained to me once we had dispensed with the formalities, “I know exactly what is going to happen now. I know exactly what treatments my doctors are going to prescribe, I know exactly their probabilities of success (in my case not very high), I know exactly how this disease process is going to progress, and I am pretty sure I can tell you – within a couple of months either way – how much longer I have to live.”

Upon hearing that grim assessment, I developed a newfound sympathy for the people who proclaim that ignorance is bliss.

But Malcolm was also a man of faith. He had long ago accepted the ephemeral nature of life on earth, harboring no illusions about his mortality. When he entered my office, he was not looking for empty encouragement or rah-rah cheerleading about fighting on and keeping his chin up. His primary concern was how he could use his remaining time to bring other members of his family along on his journey with the same kind of hope and peace he was experiencing.

I will never forget something Malcolm said to me during that conversation. It set off a sympathetic vibration that went all the way down to my shoes. At one point he looked me in the eye and in a calm, unwavering voice said, “I have no doubt at all that God will make me whole again. The only question is whether it will be on THIS side of the curtain or the other side.”

He continued, “That awareness brings me enormous peace. Pastor Russell, I am here today to ask you to help me figure out how I can help my wife and my kids arrive at that same place and know the same peace that I know.”

Rarely before or since have I met a man as simultaneously steeped in science and faith as Malcolm. 

As we concluded our conversation, we both stood up and shook hands. I closed my office door and sat down to make some notes, and as I did, I wondered. First, I wondered if our conversation had helped him at all, and how his family would respond. I also wondered what it was like to see such an exact roadmap of the end of your life. I wondered if it would all come to pass as Malcolm said it would, or if God had any kind of supernatural wrinkle in store for him.

But most of all, I wondered how I might respond, given a similar set of circumstances. 

In one sense, each of us has EXACTLY the same situation on our hands that Malcolm did. We may not be dying of a disease we are intimately familiar with, but we all have an invisible expiration date stamped on our foreheads. As the psalmist reminds us, “As for mortals, their days are like grass; they flourish like a flower of the field; for the wind passes over it, and it is gone, and its place knows it no more.” (Psalm 103:15-16, NRSVU).

And yet, despite our frailty… despite our brokenness… despite our fatal attraction toward the things that lead toward death, there is hope. Our hope is in the unshakable promise that Malcolm clung to like a drowning man clings to a life preserver; the promise that God is ready to heal us and make each one of us whole again…

… whether on this side of the curtain or the other.

Abundant blessings;

• Not his real name