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What is true matters, as does our chosen focus, perspective, emphasis…

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It has been a tough couple weeks.  When people are inpatients for any extended time, one’s efforts transition from work and responsibility to (emotional) care/love.  Relationships form.  We get to know the families who care for their loved one and we hurt and hope with them.  They “go home” with you, they are “with you” through the night and when you wake, they invade your conversations with your Father…  Caring for anyone is of great value, but can also be demanding, exhausting and painful… and caring for so many…  One must be vigilant about one’s focus, thoughts must be guarded, emotions corralled…  A beautiful several inpatients, who we have been battling with for weeks and months, with their beautiful, hurting, ever-hoping families, have saddened me, haunted me, and motivated me…

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I left a tragic, failed, life-saving attempt in our maternity ward.  I was spent, frustrated, even angry.  A dying baby then arrived who needed all of my focus and attention.  I was struggling with fever from malaria and I was personally tired and spent.  I could focus on my feelings and my state of fatigue… or not.  I could “rest” and “trust God” with our staff’s care of the baby…  or I could “trust God” with granting me the ability to overcome my current “state of being” and do all I could, “trusting God” that I would get needed rest in coming hours. Not “right” vs “wrong,” but a choice nonetheless…

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We all face similar choices every day.  On what will we place our focus and what perspective will most influence our decisions?  It is in this arena that we fail often.  I do.

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Yesterday a four-month-old arrived after a five day illness… couldn’t breathe, couldn’t stop coughing.  Exam revealed a clear pneumonia and his oxygen level was below that which can support life.  He couldn’t nurse because of his breathing and hadn’t for more than a day.  We threw everything at him that we had.  In the middle of the night our nurse called and said the baby hadn’t improved and the parents were taking the child to their shaman.  When I arrived in the morning, the baby was still there and breathing better, still with very low blood oxygen levels, even with supplemental oxygen.  The family had debated and argued with each other during the night and finally the baby remained in the hospital, saving his life for another day.  This little boy survived and returned home well, after a week of aggressive care, because of the family’s wise decision and the sacrificial choices many of you make to support what we do.

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Choices… we all face them, constantly.  In whom do we place our trust?  On what evidence do we base our trust?  Risk and cost vs benefit?  We are called to give our lives away… daily…

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Because Angola has historically been a largely religious, godless culture and ignorant of a living Jesus, the people within are ruled by fatalistic hopelessness and they find security in long-standing cultural traditions and lies.

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I wonder if the reason many in rural Angola are still living as they have for the last thousand years is because nothing seems to provoke fear more than change.  Change requires critical thinking, trust in outcome potential, and the courage to step into the unknown. Like the rest of us throughout the world, in our ignorance, we believe both truth and lies.  We are all swayed by marketing, harmful traditions, clever persuasion, desires, wishful thinking, fantasy and illusion.  In his recanting of the story of creation, Moses wrote that Adam and Eve largely failed because they ceased being grateful and desired, rather, to be “like God,” choosing to determine their own identity and morality, independent of their Creator and His instructions. 

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History has not changed human nature.  Our modern prosperity has dressed us with pretty bells and whistles and provided us increasing comfort, but we are all Adam and Eve.  The most important battles we each face, every day, are invisible, within, and involve truth and lies – about ourselves, about others, about the world, about history.  Who/what we choose to trust/believe determines our biases and the lens through which we view all the above. For all those in the US, Germany, China and Cavango, temptations abound to forego humble gratitude to our Creator and to make choices independently of the Lover of our souls. 

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We have been honored with the freedom to choose, by a Creator who reveals His glory plainly in His creation, who spoke to us throughout recorded history via a small, chosen group of people, and who then revealed Himself plainly in Jesus, yet He, often and humbly, stays behind the scenes and communicates His presence in ways that won’t negate the honored freedom he has granted to each of us.

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We make poor choices and better.  We resign ourselves to what is true and then rebel against the same.  We do what we want to do and don’t do what we know is better.

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In this world our Father has placed, for our benefit, seen and unseen contrasts, in both the perceived and actual – life/death, beauty/ugly, good/evil, healthy/harmful, love/hate…  Wisdom is a uniquely human calling among our Father’s created beings and can be pursued humbly in deference to its origins or foolishly independently of the same.  “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.”

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I’m reminded of when the filmmakers of “the Lord of the Rings”, through the characters and story, address the beauty and the ugly in their world when, during a painful and discouraging part of their journey, Frodo asks Sam, “What are we holding on to, Sam?”  Sam responds, “That there is some good in this world, Mr. Frodo, and it’s worth fighting for.”

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Freedom… both individually and corporately, is messy, yet honoring of human potential and its Creator.   Control is orderly, paternal, enslaving and dehumanizing, and exemplified in Angola.  Justice is never perfect but will either be the responsibility of individuals and communities or the state.  Control of the populace, by a few “chosen” elite, has been the historical norm, via “the state” or monarchies, until the US “experiment”, with its emphasis on freedom of opportunity for the individual and its recognition of the potential evil of power without accountability for those in leadership.  Freedom of people and control of those in power vs control of people and freedom to those in power…  This novel “experiment” has produced more liberation, opportunity and progress than any culture preceding, and encompasses many principles of freedom and honor, taught by the One who died and lived again.  This same country now appears to be sprinting toward being “cared for” by the state, like the hideous, enslaving and murderous cultures which fill our history books.

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The modern church today lives in a state of prosperity beyond that which ancient kings could even imagine.  A spirit of delusion dominates the ubiquitous “health and wealth” theology of the idealized fantasy that one can play with fire (living independently of our Creator and His instructions) without experiencing heat/burns/injury.  We surround ourselves with fire; we are entertained by fire; we deny that fire is destructive; we speak only of the benefits of fire and refuse to consider its potential destruction; we call “courageous” those attracted to fire who disregard its potential destructiveness; we try to construct pleasurable, pain-free lives while preaching “tolerance” of destructive, fire-starting behavior; we discuss and study the fire with our new technology and disregard the vast history of fire’s destruction; the “noble” among us spray water in the direction of the fire with little regard for whether the result is or, is not, addressing its destruction…

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“Healthy people don’t need a doctor, sick people do.  Learn the meaning of this Scripture:  ‘I want you to show mercy, not offer sacrifices.’  For I have come to call not those who think they are righteous, but those who know they are sinners”. We all are sick; some of us know it…

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As we seek wisdom and perspective, how often we look for human support and confirmation.  In his letter to the church in Galatia, Paul wrote that when Jesus revealed Himself to him, Paul did not seek the counsel of “flesh and blood” but went away to be alone with Jesus to determine his perspective, how he would live, on what he would focus/emphasize, in whom to place his trust (himself, his religion, the government, Jesus…) and what choices he would make…  From where/whom do we seek wisdom and perspective?

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One of the ways we seek to improve medical care in Cavango is to send local people to receive medical training in the city and return to serve in Cavango for the rest of their lives.  We have four beautiful individuals who have completed their four-years of training and have returned and work with us.  One of these told me some time back that he sees in Cavango a health care work unlike any he has been exposed to in Angola.  He said he sees a diligent pursuit of an accurate cause of illness and treatment specific to that cause.  Otherwise, in ignorance of the global knowledge and progress stolen from this culture during over thirty years of war and the subsequent unaccountable power/control, health care in Angola is largely a “shotgun” approach, where most people who seek care receive “the medicine” – the same five medications (an antipyretic, an antibiotic, a vitamin, an antiparasitic, and an antimalarial) hoping that one of them might be an effective remedy.  What our nurse has observed in Cavango is “evidence-based medicine” and is simply the application in rural Africa of accumulated global knowledge and intervention gained over the past several hundred years.  We hope that Angola will learn and catch up…

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The culture in which we live and work knows nothing of evidence-based medicine, science, research, etc, which certainly isn’t a cure-all, but which creates a more known risk/benefit profile for a procedure or treatment regimen after better enabling the identification of a specific cause.

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We study, we invest, we apply what we know… and we care… for those with 100% mortality.  An emphasis on eternity and our relationship with the living King has incalculable value and, yet, the omniscient, omnipotent, “Alpha and Omega,” when confronted with the suffering of those He loved… wept…

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