Beyond recovery

I wish I could tell you that life here is all sunshine and happiness and smiles and dancing...

I can't.

I want to forget sometimes that there is more out there.  It's so easy to focus on the ones we can help.  That would be a shortsighted escape into a fantasy world, where everyone lives happily ever after.

That is not my reality.  That world, while we eagerly await it with the return of our Messiah, is not always tangible in the here and now.

This is my world, wounded and bleeding and full of pain and loss:

Inside the ICU a toddler sleeps peacefully as her parents pray desperately for a miracle.  Outside the gate a boy lies dying in the dust...faceless, nameless, burned beyond recovery even if we sent him to the best burn units in the world rather than the small hospitals here.  There are the hundreds of people with goiters who we can't safely operate on because there is no thyroid replacement hormone available in the country, the surgeries we can't do because we don't have the surgeons or the bed space.  There is four-year-old Christophe, sent back to his village with club feet because the casting didn't work, told to wait six years until he's old enough for surgery.  Each represent thousands of others with only prayer to hold to now, when we in our human fallibility recognize that there is nothing else we can do for them, when our surgical capacity is limited and our medical treatment relies heavily on local hospitals.  If I could run an emergency room out of my own cabin I would, even as it too became overrun with overwhelming need, a drop in the ocean.  How could I have thought that Africa needs me, that we can do anything with a truly lasting impact except by the grace of my God?

Gathering my tiny faith in my hands I will stand and proclaim with these hopeful masses that He is King and Lord, and there is no other.  I will stand with the fathers and mothers and nursing staff in the dim hospital lights of an early morning and pray for a miracle, even when it's not the miracle we might expect.  I will sit and laugh in delight with the mother as her son who was ventilated 2 weeks before proudly shows us how far he can stick out his tongue, and comfort the panicked man even as I feel the pulsing spray of his arterial bleeding stop beneath my hands.  I will lie prostrate in awe at what I have witnessed and say with complete assurance that God has done it.  I will cling doggedly to joy and promise, even when everything around me threatens to collapse.

Through my tears I can thank Him who deserves all the glory for everything that happens here, whether clearly miraculous or seemingly ordinary.  And I will not limit my God.