Of a week, weariness, and wonders

The baby pictured near his mother’s face, at the top of the last entry, died this week, as did the little preemie with the oxygen mask.  This is a hostile place to the vulnerable and weak.  The first patient to receive oxygen, who had a severe congenital heart malformation had died a week ago.  And this morning, as we gathered around to treat and pray, another little girl, Beatrice Biira, about 4 years old, also died.  The place of healing has also become a place of death, inevitably so when we invite the sickest and weakest through our doors.  Beatrice had survived meningitis two months ago, and seemed to be doing well at home, until she suddenly started convulsing and lost consciousness.  She came this morning burning with fever, limp, twitching.  Our overworked staff rallied to give her all the care at our disposal.  I even called staff around her to pray specifically for her (besides my general opening prayer) as we treated her.  But her mother saw it coming, began wailing hysterically even as she took that last sighing gasp that dying children make, and her heart stopped.  She was not revivable.  Her father began shaking with sobs and her aunt also writhed on the floor in loud grief.  Beatrice’s face was finally peaceful as we wrapped her lifeless body in the shroud of a gold patterned kitengi, her ordeal over as her family’s began.  It is always hard for me to see the cloth pulled tightly over a child’s face, I resist the suffocating look of it, the uncompromising reality that that face is no longer breathing.

Four deaths.  Part of me wants to look away and focus instead on forty lives—as of yesterday our 27 bed ward held 40 patients, a record.  People are coming, hoping.  And we are being pushed to the limit and past the limit to care for them.  We just started a book called Walking with the Poor by Bryant Meyers, excellent so far.  He points out that our Western world view accepts words (philosophy, truth) and deeds (science, development), but skips over signs and wonders, the area of unseen spiritual powers.  I asked the team to pray for me to not be too confident in the cause and effect world of medicine that I lose sight of the signs and wonders God performs as people are healed.  My courage to pray specifically over Beatrice was a step of faith, I hesitated to feel I was putting God on the line, and what if He didn’t come through in this public way?  Well, He didn’t, not the way I asked anyway.  And I don’t feel it shakes my faith so much as worry that I’ve shaken theirs.  No easy answers in this broken world.

But then a glimpse of God’s power, as a boy I care very much about at CSB, one of my orphan students, has struggled with some sort of arthritis.  We have prayed for him and treated him.  This week he had a very powerful dream about being healed, and came away from it convinced that God was pursuing him, and that he wanted to study Scripture in a more disciplined way.  So I’m thankful for that, not wanting to explain it, accepting the good as well as the sadness that comes to us here.