It's times like these when I feel so helpless, when longing eyes stare at me with hope for help. With illness everywhere I look, unsanitary conditions filling the building, and emotions running high, I can do nothing but pray. Pray that these people will soon be able to escape this place, pray that they will be healed and that money with miraculously appear so that their imprisonment will be over with.
You see, the hospital of Nakuru Kenya is the last place I want to be when doing ministry. The conditions are so bad that patients have to share beds, others lay on the ground. They hold the patients in this hospital until they can pay to be discharged. So they sit there for months and months because nobody can pay for their way out. I see their IV needle placed horribly in their hands covered with blood, their hospital beds elevated with slabs of concrete, and doctors holding ex rays up to the windows in order to see the picture.
My heart breaks.
I go from bed to bed hearing horrible stories each time of malaria- even cerebral malaria, pneumonia, broken bones, stomach illnesses, you name it. I have no money in my pockets and no money in the bank account. So I rack my brain to think of things I could possibly do for these people, and all I can think to do is pray.
(My new friend Mary who is stuck in the hospital until the doctors find her some blood. They have been looking for a week and have told her it may take a long time.)
So then we begin to leave with hearts shattered. As we are leaving, my team and I watch two people dragging a lady out of the waiting room and bring her to the ground. The lady is hysterically screaming and crying. I wanted to run to her and pray over her, tell her it will be okay. Luckily the hospital Chaplin requested for us to go pray for her. When we got to her we found out that her twenty year old daughter JUST died in the waiting room. The body was within twenty feet away, still in the waiting room while the shock and reality hit the family outside. With this news,
my team’s already broken hearts was in pieces.
After my team laid hands on her and prayed for a few minutes, I was able to have our pastor translate for me. With my shaking voice I told her to “Find strength in the Lord. Through him all things are possible. Ask him for strength and courage, and he will help you.” By this time my shaky voice has cracked into attempting not to cry. “I know this is really hard right now, but all things happen for a reason. Keep faith in Him!” I couldn’t say anymore and began to cry along with my teammates. All I could do was pray.
Here is a hospital that people are dying waiting in the waiting rooms for hours for a bed in which healthy people are sitting in because they can’t pay their way out. Here is a hospital that the sanitation levels are not much help for healing. Here is a hospital in which I am helpless.
All I can do is pray. This seems like the smallest thing in the world that I could do. I wish I could pay for all the healthy people to go home, for all the unhealthy people to get proper treatment, and for the broken bones to get casts rather than an elevated bed and metal rods on both sides of their legs to straighten them, but I can’t. ALL I can do is pray. I cannot carry this burden. It has to be the Lord’s.
Prayer is a powerful thing, but sometimes it doesn’t feel like enough. I am only but a child taking on the big world, when I should let the man bigger than the world take care of these things.
“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways” declares the Lord – Isaiah 55:8
