TRANSKRIPTIO 🔗
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Welcome to Truth in Motion with Dr.
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Jocelyn, where insight, clarity, and wisdom help you thrive.
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Hello everyone.
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I'm so glad you're here today.
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Yesterday we asked, how can we know what we're for?
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We met the thymus, an organ once called useless, until a young researcher discovered that it trains our immune system.
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We saw that purpose is discovered, not invented.
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And we looked at three places to find it the body's design, our own lived experience, and what God has said.
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Today we take the next step.
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If health only makes sense in light of what we're for, then we have to ask, what does well actually look like?
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In the Netherlands, a woman named Mochteld Huber trained as a medical doctor and became a general practitioner, that's a family doctor.
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Then early in her career, she became ill herself.
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For a time, she worked as a doctor in between periods of her own illness.
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And she discovered something that surprised her.
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Her experience as a patient went far beyond anything she had learned as a doctor.
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She went on to work with people who were seriously ill, and she turned her attention to one question.
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What is health really?
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Because many of us know that being well and being free of disease are not the same thing.
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People with serious conditions can be living full, meaningful lives, and people with clean test results can be struggling to get through the day.
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Her question took her straight to the most famous definition of health in the world.
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In 1946, just after the Second World War, the nations that founded the World Health Organization adopted its constitution.
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It came into force in 1948 and it contains this definition.
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Health is a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.
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There's something beautiful in that.
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It says health is more than the absence of disease.
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I agree with that completely.
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We talked about it at the end of last week.
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But notice one word, complete.
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Complete physical, mental, and social well-being.
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By that measure, who is healthy?
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A stiff knee in the morning and you're out.
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A hard week of grief and you're out.
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A lonely season and you're out.
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In 2011, Dr.
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Huber and 13 colleagues published a paper in the BMJ, one of the world's leading medical journals, titled, How Should We Define Health?
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They pointed out that the word complete would leave most of us unhealthy most of the time.
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And they offered a different idea.
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Health, they proposed, is the ability to adapt and to self-manage in the face of social, physical, and emotional challenges.
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The ability to adapt, not perfection, not the absence of every problem, the capacity to meet what life brings, respond, and recover.
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Dr.
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Huber didn't stop there.
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She and her team went out and asked people what health meant to them.
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Patients, doctors, policymakers, insurers, citizens, nearly 2,000 people answered their survey.
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They found six areas that people kept coming back to.
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How the body functions, how the mind functions, the spiritual or existential dimension, quality of life, taking part in society, and daily functioning.
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And here's what caught my attention.
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Patients rated all six about equally important.
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They wanted the broad picture.
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Doctors saw health much more narrowly, mostly in terms of the body.
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But there was one more finding.
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Doctors who had a chronic illness themselves rated the spiritual and existential dimension as significantly more important than doctors who didn't.
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That dimension includes meaning, striving towards goals and ideals, having a future to look toward, and acceptance.
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When doctors became patients, purpose suddenly mattered more.
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That's exactly what happened to Dr.
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Huber herself.
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So why does this matter for your health?
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Because the definition we carry decides what we aim for and what we notice.
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If well means perfect, we'll always feel like we're failing.
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Every ache becomes proof that something is wrong with us.
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If well means the tests came back normal, we'll miss what's really going on.
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We'll be told we're fine while we're exhausted, anxious, or not sleeping.
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Or we'll be told we're sick and feel like our life is over when there's
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still so much life to live.
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It also shapes how we treat ourself.
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When well means perfect, every symptom feels like a failure.
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And we either panic or give up.
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When well means the tests are normal, we tend to ignore what our bodies are telling us until something finally shows up on paper.
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Neither one helps us heal.
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But when we measure health against purpose, we get a truer picture.
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We can see real progress.
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Sleeping through the night again, walking to the mailbox, and then around the block, feeling like ourselves again, and we know what we're healing toward.
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So here's where I stand.
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I believe health only makes sense in light of what we're for.
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We can't judge whether anything is working well until we know what it's for.
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The same is true of a body and of a life.
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So what does well look like?
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I believe it comes down to one word: adaptability.
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A well body isn't one that never meets a challenge.
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It's one that can respond.
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When you climb the stairs, your heart speeds up, and when you rest, it settles.
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On a hot day you sweat and you cool down.
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When you cut your finger, it closes.
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When a stressful week ends, your sleep comes back and your appetite returns.
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That's adaptation.
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Meeting what life brings, then finding your balance again.
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Mostly without any help from somebody like me.
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And adaptation has purpose.
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It keeps us able to do what we were made for, to love and be loved, to work and serve, to create, to play and to laugh, to be still, to wonder and to pray, to be present to the people in front of us, and to do the things that make us strong, moving our bodies, resting deeply, eating real food, spending time outdoors, and staying close to the people who lift us up.
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Those aren't extras.
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They're what makes a life good, and they're part of what we were made for.
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Well is a body that can adapt so a life can keep moving towards its purpose.
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None of that requires perfection.
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A person with a chronic condition can be growing more well every month.
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A person with perfect lab numbers can be quietly unwell.
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Picture two people.
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One is a man in his 60s with diabetes.
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He's learned what his body needs, he sleeps well, walks every morning, keeps his blood sugar steady, and spends his afternoons building furniture for his grandchildren.
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The other is a woman in her 30s, whose every test comes back normal, but she wakes up exhausted, gets sick every few weeks, and feels like she's barely holding her life together.
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On paper, he's the sick one.
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But which of them is more well?
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Which of them is better able to adapt, recover, and do what they were made for?
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That's the question a purpose-centered picture of health lets us ask.
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Now, the ability to adapt and recover might sound soft.
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It isn't.
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It can be measured.
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When you exercise hard, your heart speeds up.
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When you stop, a healthy heart slows back down quickly.
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That drop in the first minute after you stop is called heart rate recovery.
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In 1999, the New England Journal of Medicine published a study of 2,428 adults who took an exercise stress test.
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Researchers checked how much each person's heart rate dropped in the first minute after they stopped.
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Then they followed everyone for six years.
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About one in four had a slow recovery.
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Their heart rate dropped 12 beats per minute or less in the first minute.
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Over the six years, about 19% of the slow recoverers died, compared with about 5% of those whose hearts recovered normally.
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Even after the researchers accounted for age, sex, medications, heart disease, standard risk factors, and how hard each person could exercise, a slow recovery still meant about twice the risk of dying.
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Think about what that means.
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It wasn't how fast the heart could go, it was how well it could come back.
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The ability to recover is health, and the body shows it.
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You can watch this in your own body.
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Climb a flight of stairs at a good pace, feel your heartbeat, then rest and notice how long it takes to settle.
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Watch that over the coming months as you care for yourself.
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It's a small, honest window into how well your body adapts.
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This is how Chinese medicine or East Asian medicine has always looked at health.
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It doesn't wait for a disease to show up on a test, it watches how the whole person is functioning.
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So when I'm working with someone, I'm paying attention to the everyday signs of how well the body is adapting and regulating.
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How are you sleeping?
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How's your digestion?
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How's your energy throughout the day?
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How do you handle stress and how quickly do you come back from it?
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What's your emotional weather been like?
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Those everyday functions are the body's report card, and they often change long before a lab test ever would.
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When they improve, that's health returning, even if a diagnosis is still on the chart.
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And when they slip, that's the body telling us something early, even if every test is normal.
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There's an old word that holds all of this together.
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It's the Hebrew word shalom.
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We usually translate it as peace, but it's much bigger than that.
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Its root means to be complete, and the word carries the sense of soundness, safety, welfare, and health.
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Shalom is a life in right order.
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Body, soul, relationships, and our walk with God all in their proper place.
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And the beautiful thing is shalom isn't the absence of trouble.
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It's being in right order in the middle of it.
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The Apostle John wrote a short letter to a friend and he opened it this way.
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Beloved, I pray that all may go well with you and that you may be in good health as it goes well with your soul.
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Body and soul in the same breath.
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And Jesus said, I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.
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Abundant life.
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That's what I believe we were made for.
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Not a life with nothing wrong, but a life that is full.
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Whatever your faith, I invite you to consider whether your picture of health has been too small.
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So here's one question to carry with you today.
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If I were well, what would I be doing?
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Not what would be gone, but what would you be doing?
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Who would you be with?
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What would you have the energy for?
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Let your answer be specific and let it be yours.
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Well for a 20-year-old athlete looks different from well for a new mother, and different again for a 90-year-old who wants to keep living in her own home.
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There's no one standard picture.
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There's your picture, shaped by what you're here to do.
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Let your answer be specific.
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It might be getting down on the floor with your grandchildren, finishing a project you set aside, singing again, or simply waking up glad to start the day.
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That picture is your target, and every step toward it counts as health returning, whether or not a test ever shows it.
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Today we asked what being well really looks like.
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We met Dr.
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Machheld Huber, a family doctor whose own illness taught her more than her medical training ever had.
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We saw that the famous definition of health asks for complete well-being, a standard that would leave most of us out.
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We heard a better idea.
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Health as the ability to adapt and to self-manage.
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We saw that patients want the whole picture, and that when doctors became patients, purpose mattered more.
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We saw that the ability to recover can be measured one heartbeat at a time.
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And we saw that health is measured against what we're for: a body that can adapt so a life can keep moving toward its purpose.
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Not perfection, abundant life.
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Tomorrow we look at what happens when we live with the grain of how we were made and what happens when we push against it.
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Meet you there every step of the way.
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Keep the conversation going.
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Find your next steps in notes from a fellow traveler, my blog.