Nothing quite says, “Welcome to a new country” quite like a 103 degree fever in 90 degree weather. But that’s what happened. The night before we left Malaysia, I got really sick- fever, headache, body aches, and, three days later, a rash. We flew to Cambodia and arrived in time for lunch. After eating Phnom Penh, we traveled two hours to a small village which would serve as our ministry site for the next three weeks. I don’t remember very much of the first few days, because I spent them trying to cool my body in the middle of the Cambodian heat- which is not an easy task. All I can say is thank the Lord for Motrin.
We are here with another team, who stays at the base to teach. My team travels an hour every day to teach English and do house visits in another remote village. Fortunately, we had a pretty light schedule for the first few days, so I didn’t actually miss that much ministry.
I went to a clinic in town the third day of my fever. It was everything that I hoped a third world clinic would be. Hot, under-staffed, open to the dust from the street outside, and the token dog (though, thankfully, no chickens). I laid on a bed and a random man came up to me to take my blood for tests. I assumed that he was a doctor of some sort, but I really didn’t care that much. The nurse who was with him drew some blood out of my hand (never fear, she unwrapped the sterile syringe in front of me), and then took it for testing. The doctor man then left the clinic with his family… we may never know if he was actually a medical professional. Another man came out and told me the results of my blood test… which we may also never know, because doctor number 2 didn’t know a lot of English. Somehow it was communicated that my white blood cells were incredibly low, and that I had some kind of virus- the name of which we will also never know, but it’s similar to Dengue fever.
Since the only way to treat a virus is fluids and rest, I have had a lot of time to lay around. It was an incredibly humbling experience for me. You see, the Lord has recently been teaching me about the importance of community. As a fiercely independent person, I have struggled for some time with the idea of “needing” community. This virus is one of the many ways that the Lord has been revealing my helplessness. There wasn’t a lot that I could do for myself physically- especially with a travel day packed into the second day of my fever. I literally had to rely on my teammates and squad mates for almost everything. I could walk, but not a lot. I could carry my day pack, but definitely not my big pack. I spent most of the morning lying on the floor in various places in the Kuala Lumpur airport.
And here’s the thing- they were happy to help me. They were even eager to inconvenience themselves to make my day easier. It was such a beautiful picture of the body of Christ. In the ten days of my sickness, my sisters did an amazing job of loving and encouraging and fighting for me when I couldn’t fight for myself. It was an incredible experience and a reminder that, while people have an enormous capacity for only thinking of themselves, people who have Jesus living inside them have a supernatural ability to love well. Because people who have Jesus living in their hearts know that they are deeply and intimately loved, and this frees them to love others better than they ever could out of their own strength.
