After nine years of participating in Creighton’s online ministries, today’s reflection marks my final installment to this beautiful program. After four years of undergraduate studies, four years of medical school, and three years of internal medicine residency, I will graduate for the final time from Creighton next week. I am excited about the next steps in my life, including transferring back to my home state of Wisconsin, getting married to my gorgeous fiancé, moving into our first home, and starting work at ThedaCare in Appleton, Wisconsin as a hospitalist all before October!

While this is most definitely a time of excited anticipation for the joys ahead of me, I can’t help but reflect during this time of transition back on my eleven years at Creighton. My shelves cannot hold all the notes and textbooks from all those years of education, in the same way that my simple reflection cannot adequately hold all my gratitude to each of the professors, fellow students, physicians, and patients who have taught me along the way.

I have a lot to be proud of from these years here. Which is why today’s Gospel strikes me at an appropriate time. Jesus instructs us to turn the other cheek and to humbly serve those who ask of us. The Disciples were soon going to be “graduating” and being sent forth. They also had plenty of reasons to feel good about themselves. Yet Jesus takes the opportunity to remind them of the radical humility he asks of them. When I pulled up to Creighton with my family ready to move me into my first dorm, my mother crying as her first-born moved away for college, I think I had a harder time treating humility as a valued virtue worth cultivating. I was more focused on getting good grades, proving myself in academia, and maybe even finding a girlfriend.

But now as I prepare to drive back out of Omaha, I recognize all the opportunities to grow in humility that I have had here. Surrounding myself with amazingly intelligent professors and classmates made me feel dumb every day of medical school and residency. I had to learn to sacrifice my sleep, my financial security, family events – essentially my 20s – for the greater good of either my education or my patients. While I learned some of those lessons reluctantly, I have noted that in having more to be proud of, I also have more for which to be humble. Reminiscing about the lessons that I’ve learned along the way also makes me thankful for those who patiently took the time, energy, and caring to teach me, which in turn, humbles me even further.

There are so many areas of my personality, my practice of medicine, and my faith that can still significantly improve. I do not leave Creighton as a finished product. Rather, I strive to continue to better implement the mentality of humble servitude that Jesus asks of us.

Finally, thank you for allowing me to grow closer to God and all of you through this ministry over the past nine years. I will miss you. As I bid you farewell, I promise to pray that you, the Creighton community, will continue to live out our Catholic identity in beautiful and bold ways. Please pray for me to always humbly serve God through the patients and the family that he puts before me. 

Amen.

We are extremely grateful for Sam's wonderful ministry with us these years. As an eager underclassman, San was among our first student reflection writers. He asked to continue to write, while an extremelely busy medical student and continued as a more than extremely busy resident. Thank you, Sam, for your commitment and witness of your faith. We will pray for your continued service for others, and for your happily married life.