Incongruities

Twisting balloons outside the medical clinic at Yaule.
This is my talent I bring to the Medical Clinics!

Sometimes life’s incongruities clobber my senses like a hurricane through a delta.  Take for example, one 24 hour period in my life last week.   

On Thursday afternoon, I stand on the porch of a small, brick community center in the poorest section of the village of Yaule, in the mountains of Nicaragua.  Inside the center, an American medical mission team, led by a Habersham County doctor in partnership with First Baptist churches in Cornelia and Matagalpa (Nicaragua), has set up a clinic for the community.   On benches built with planks and bags of dirt sit the patient residents waiting to see three American doctors.

What happens in the center represents the heart and soul of the practice of medicine:  physicians, laypersons and missionaries working together to care for underserved families in great need.  One woman presents a complaint of bad hearing to the doctor.  After the examination, he finds her ears full of wax.  While the lady sits in a plastic chair, the doctor uses a patient hand to open her ear canal.  The woman exclaims she can hear!  In this unseen place in the world, basic medical care has been provided in the name of Jesus.

Now, fast forward 24 hours.  I walk into a sterile, world class intensive care unit at the Northeast Georgia Medical Center.  My mom has gotten very ill and I have come home early from Nicaragua.  In this unit, one nurse cares for only two patients.  My mom lies on a bed designed to keep her skin and body healthy.  Every drug my mother needs immediately arrives from the pharmacy.  Teams of highly trained specialists make rounds each day to critically manage my mother’s health.  No medical need goes unmet.  My mother has the incredible fortune to get sick in the mountains of North Georgia instead of the mountains of Nicaragua. 

As I sit by her bed now, I try to make sense of this incongruity – the irony of what 4 hours on a Delta plane can make.  Arguing about health care and its costs seems to be a national pastime.  Soon, the Supreme Court will step into this fierce conversation.  At the same time, there is no one who reads this article who cannot walk into the emergency room at Habersham Medical Center and not receive the best medical care in the world.  We take this luxury for granted.  This is not the case in many places in the world.

We often call Jesus the Great Physician.  Like in our medical clinic, lines of very sick people from small villages with no access to health care often lined up to stand before Jesus.  They wanted the healing he offered.  Jesus wanted more for them, though.  He offered them freedom from sin and entrance into the Kingdom of Heaven.  The same is true today.  Whether we find ourselves in one of the most advanced medical centers in the world or a medical clinic set up in community center – our most basic, desperate need will not be met.  Only Jesus, the Great Physician, who loves us deeply, can heal the scars and sickness of sin and welcome us in the Kingdom of God.  Thanks be to God.  Amen.