Gregory Bledsoe MD MPH MBA

My wife has taught high school in Tokyo for twenty years. Every year, a few of her students spend a year living with a family in America. When they come home, she asks each of them one question. "What do you miss?" She expects hamburgers. She almost never gets hamburgers. And these aren't old stories. Most of these kids came home in the last two years. "Every time I left the house, my host mom said, 'Text me when you get there.' In Japan, nobody needs to know where I am. In Ohio, somebody always did." (Mina, 17, Ohio) "If you walk toward a door, an American will hold it open. Even if you are very far away. So you have to run. I ran to so many doors." (Itsuki, 16, Georgia) "My host brother screamed on the floor of a grocery store. A stranger walked by and said to my host mom, 'You're doing great, Mama.' She almost cried. I didn't know strangers were allowed to say that." (Aoi, 17, Texas) "We went away for the weekend and left our trash can at the curb. When we got back, it was by the garage. Nobody said who. My host dad said if it had been there one more day, the neighbor would have knocked." (Haruto, 16, Minnesota) "A car got stuck in the snow in front of our house. Four men came out of four houses. Nobody called them. They pushed, the car drove away, and they went back inside without saying their names." (Ren, 17, Michigan) "Every American has jumper cables. Maybe half of them know which clip goes where. The other half help anyway." (Shin, 16, Montana) "In July, my host family put a cooler on the porch. Cold water, snacks, and a sign: 'For our delivery drivers. Thank you!' I asked if they knew the drivers. They said no." (Nanami, 16, Arizona) "Downtown, there are banners on the lampposts. Photos of soldiers from the town. Some old, some very young. My host grandpa walked me down the street and told me every name." (Yuna, 16, Iowa) "I got a C-plus on my first test. My host dad said, 'I'm proud of you,' and put it on the fridge. In Japan, nobody is proud of a C-plus." (Takeru, 17, Pennsylvania) Then the quietest girl in the class raised her hand. Sora. Seventeen. Missouri. "Nobody asks me 'home safe?' anymore," she said. She was wrong. In September, there was a typhoon warning for Tokyo. At 2 a.m., Sora's phone lit up. It was her host mom. In Missouri. Watching the weather in a country she had never been to. "Saw the storm. You home safe?" Sora told my wife she cried for a long time. Then she typed the answer she had typed a hundred times, from football games and friends' driveways. "Home safe." Her host mom wrote back one line. "Good. That's all I needed." My wife has asked that question for twenty years. Not one kid has ever said they missed how big America is. They miss how America says goodbye. And how it checks that you got home. So, America. You think you've lost something. You haven't. It's on a porch in Arizona. It's pushing a car in Michigan. It's awake at 2 a.m. in Missouri, watching our weather. You don't remember doing any of it. A kid in Tokyo will never forget.

Your purpose can be smaller than you think, and that's good news. After my son Mitch died, "What's my purpose?" was too heavy to lift. So I asked a smaller one: What does faithfulness look like today? Some days it was getting out of bed. Some days it was one surgery, done well. Small faithful days add up to a life. "There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens." Ecclesiastes 3:1

We are deeply saddened by the passing of Dr. James Y. Suen, a renowned head and neck surgeon and beloved UAMS physician. Thank you, Dr. Suen, for the countless lives you touched. You will be dearly missed. Read more about his remarkable life and legacy: bit.ly/4eftgyN

Tolkien lost his father at at 4 or so years old and was completely orphaned by 12, when he lost his mother. He was born into the second part of the Industrial Revolution, and during his lifetime watched much of the world change in ways he hated, destroying and permanently altering the beautiful things he loved. He lived through 2 world wars, fighting at the Somme and losing many of his friends, and having his sons fight in the second. This was not a good time for man in many regards. The world was changing rapidly, many men who fought in WW1 became very lost and cynical about the world, they were left damaged by trauma that no one knew how to deal with and often didn’t care enough to help them with. Young men were shamed by women giving out white feathers if they were not seen in uniform during The Great War, marking them as cowards or shirking their duty. There was not much to be optimistic about during this time period for young men. The ones who didn’t die in the First World War would have to watch their sons die or risk death in the Second. Tolkien wrote an optimistic book not because he lived through an optimistic time, but because he had faith in something beyond the dire circumstances of the time. He saw great evils, not just from the enemies, but from men on all sides during this time. And the Lord of the Rings, as hopeful as it may feel, is set in a bleak time in a waning world, where once great civilisations have been reduced to crumbling cities and ruins covered in foliage. But instead of going the route of many of the authors of the time, he did not fill his world with cynicism, but filled it with something to aspire to, something to encourage you towards doing what is right in the bleakest of times. People who say “yeah but Aragorn had this and I don’t” are missing the point. You aren’t supposed to compare yourself to these characters as stand-ins for your exact situation in life, you are supposed to be inspired by the ways they handle adversity they face and the ways they decide to do what is right. Your life isn’t going to be as epic and your circumstances aren’t going to seem as high and noble, but that’s not the point of fiction. Fiction takes concepts and turns them into something tango. LotR encourages us to do what we can to press forward with the circumstances given to us, that is the point. Not that you are in line to be king and have a beautiful love interest. Not that you get a big inheritance from your uncle, but that whether you are an insignificant gardener or the heir to the throne, you are still responsible for playing your part to the best of your ability and that it is worth it even if it seems futile in the moment.

My wife's brother spent six years at a Japanese car plant in Kentucky. He was sent to teach the Americans our way of working. He came home with a notebook. On the cover, in Japanese: "Things I Learned Instead." Some pages: "The first day of deer season, half the line takes vacation. HR plans for it every year. Nobody pretends to be sick. They just say 'deer season.'" "They name the machines. The welding robot on Line 2 is Darlene. Darlene gets a birthday cake." "When someone's wife has a baby, the whole line signs a card. The card is bigger than the baby." "A man with thirty years on the line showed me a better way to do my own job. Then he said, 'Don't tell your boss I told you that, boss.'" "Every Friday, someone brings doughnuts. Nobody is assigned. Somebody always does." "They thank the janitor by name. Every day. His name is Curtis." The last page is from his final day. In our system, anyone can stop the line, but only for a problem. Stopping it is serious. "On my last day, the line stopped for one minute. There was no problem. They stopped it to shake my hand." He says it's the only time in six years he was happy to see the line stop.

Your brain builds whatever you rehearse. 
Rehearse worry and you get better at worry. 
Rehearse gratitude and you get better at gratitude. 
Choose your reps on purpose. Here's a good brain building verse: "...whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right... think about such things." Philippians 4:8 (NIV)

A few warm fatherly tears shed today by an empty fort in the woods, so lovingly built, and so lately left, by a growing child with (quite rightly) more grown up things to do. I wish I could find her in there peeking out again, just a little smaller. Too fast; it is all too fast.

Trevon Brazile was HUGE is the Nuggets 23-point comeback versus the Pelicans! 17 PTS, 9 REB, 2 BLK, 6/11 FG, 3/7 3FG, 67 TS% 35th pick in the draft! WHAT A STEAL xitter.gq/NBAPerformances/status…