Life as Usual

Ok so I know I haven't blogged in forever. Sorry about that. :) I think part of it is just that I am getting used to life here. Many of the things that happen during the day which I would have immediately typed out as a good story to share when I first arrived, now just are part of everyday life. I do have one story that I want to share with you all today though about a man that I met in Kroo Bay this week.

On Thursdays I go with Erin, on of the staff members who is a physical therapist, to Kroo Bay where we have been seeing different people who can benefit from Erin's expertise. Mostly we have been seeing people who have suffered from strokes or similar type things which cause them difficulty in using their arms/legs. There is not a whole lot we can do because we are in these peoples' "homes" which are usually just shacks made of sticks and so any sort of therapy equipment is pretty much out of the question. Erin has been helping them by showing them just some simple exercises they can do to help strengthen the weak muscles and stretch the ones that have tightened up from lack of use.

Yesterday we met a 20 year old boy sitting in the doorway to the one room house he shares with his mother, sister, and quite possibly several other relatives. We came to learn that several months ago during the height of the rainy season, he had an accident. For some reason he was running and slipped on a rock and landed on his back and ever since then he had not been able to move his legs. He had gone to the hospital but they had basically told him there wasn't anything they could do for him. So he has been confined to his house ever since where his sister does most everything for him, including dragging him to the doorway so that he can at least see his neighbors and not be completely isolated from his community.

Again we don't really have any kind of equipment and Erin is a therapist but not a medical doctor so while we haven't done any x-rays or anything, the logical conclusion is that he broke his back and has a spinal cord injury that has paralyzed his legs. After working with him for a little while we found out that as of right now he has zero function below the knee but that he did have some extremely minimal function in the muscles between his hip and his knees. If he was laying down, he could not move his legs at all but after I had helped him put his knees in the air with his feet on the ground he was able to squeeze a pillow that Erin had put between his knees. After that we helped him learn how to move himself from his pad on the floor to the doorway by himself by picking up his legs with his hands and pushing himself along the floor. We tried to encourage him to try to do as much as he could for himself and to continue the exercises Erin had given him until we came back in a few days to check on him.

This one encounter with this man has both troubled and encouraged me. I'll try to explain what I mean. Kroo Bay is a hard enough place to live. As I have been walking through it often, I guess I am no longer "shocked" at a lot of things but the reality of the hardship the people there endure is never weakened in my mind. As I was with this paralyzed man and even more as I kept thinking about him the rest of the day I was almost completely overcome with grief. The question in my mind was, "I mean seriously God, was he not suffering enough already that he had to become paralyzed too?" Yeah great timing too because that night we were doing a Bible study at Lighthouse that I had prepared from Romans 5:1-11 about rejoicing in our sufferings. Haha yeah God always has great timing huh.

Even through all the questioning and heart ache that I felt yesterday there was one thing that had happened that kept coming into my mind and I'm still trying to process it. Before we had left, we had knelt down to pray with him and while we were praying I grabbed his hand and he kept squeezing it so hard. When we stood up to leave I looked down at him as I shook his hand goodbye and he had the biggest grin on his face as he looked back up at me. At the time I was still kind of shell-shocked by the whole situation but as I thought about it later, that grin seemed so out of place to me. Here is this man who is in the midst of the kind of suffering I will probably never be able to relate to and yet he is smiling at me and thanking us for coming to see him.

After the Bible study at Lighthouse I was thinking about one of the other passages we read from Romans 8 that went along with our Romans 5 study.

Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? ³⁶As it is written:
"For your sake we face death all day long;
we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered."^{l]" style="line-height: 0.5em; ">[l]} ³⁷No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. ³⁸For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons,^{m]" style="line-height: 0.5em; ">[m]} neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, ³⁹neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Now I don't know if this guy was a believer or not. Most likely, he is Muslim as most people in that area are. He probably doesn't know this specific verse but the Truth that there is nothing in this world, no suffering or hardship that is able to separate us from the love of God is always constant whether we know it, believe it, or not. Yesterday, Erin, Jan, and myself were privileged to be vessels through which that ever-present love of God could be poured through in a real and tangible way. God most certainly does not need us to show His love but it only makes sense that if we as believers have the Spirit of God living inside of us that He would use us as vessels through which His love can be poured into the world around us.

I don't know why this 20 year old boy was smiling because His circumstances definitely did not warrant such a reaction. To be honest I think I have a great deal to learn from people like him as I am not sure I would react in the same way. All I can think of to explain it is that he felt that He was loved and cared for. He may not realize explicitly that it is his Heavenly Father that is the source of that love but I pray someday He will.

It has been experiences like this that have really begun to make me realize what true ministry or service really is. I even wrote several posts when I first got here about this same kind of thing I think but now I am beginning to know it better by experience. It is not merely about fixing problems or having the right "projects." It is about people with names, families, histories, passions, desires, hurts, sorrows, and joys. It is about being a vessel through which the love of God can be poured into their own lives so that they may know that they are loved and cared for and that through Christ there is nothing that can separate them from the love of God.

Haha ok I'm going to stop now cause this is really long. I have a lot more thoughts about this rolling around in my head but I'll leave it at that for now. Looking forward to seeing all of you soon!