Let me preface this blog by saying two
things: 1) Prior to coming on the World Race, I had never seen the movie Patch
Adams-all I had heard was it was really good and really sad; and 2) I have
spent most of my life avoiding the sick, diseased, dead and dying.
Yesterday, we
went for our first hospital visit. We drove up to a large compound, with big
concrete buildings-it was pretty dreary. We walked through the gates, received
our visitors’ passes, and hiked up five flights of stairs to reach lucky floor
number 7, where we would be visiting patients.
Our groups split
off, and Noe, Megan and I headed to the end of the hall with K, our translator.
We walked in to a room with eight beds, some of which had people crowded around
and others with just a solitary patient-three were handcuffed to the bed.
with patients and praying. We asked them about their lives, about their
illness, and how we could pray. It was hard. We prayed for one of the convicts,
and then the warden came in. He was upset we had not asked him if it was okay
to pray. K said we would pray anyway, so we did. The warden made a comment to
the effect of “They are in prison-they can’t hear God.”
This really made
us angry. Jesus tells us to look after the sick and visit those in prison
(Matthew 25:36). We are all criminals-we have all sinned against God and
against our brothers and sisters. Maybe what we did was not “bad enough” to
warrant prison, but we are all still prisoners to our sin until we accept
Christ.
These men were
sick and a few were very lonely, and my heart was already breaking.
Then we went to
pray for a man who was hard to look at. The skin on his head and face was
coming off in white flakes, and he had open sores. He had something wrong with
his foot. My initial reaction was repulsion-then remorse. When I made eye
contact with this man, I saw Jesus. He was pleading with me, asking me to love
this man, this man who had no visitors, who seemed lonely, who may have been
forgotten. So I smiled. I waved. I said, Jambo.
And when it was
time to pray, I prayed. I prayed for God’s healing spirit to fall on this man.
I prayed for his diseases to go away, but I also prayed for him to know love.
Megan was praying out loud, and her voice started to crack. Tears sprang to my
eyes. I just tried to blink them back and keep praying. God was telling us what
to pray and was breaking our hearts for this lonely man. Too soon, it was over,
and time to move on to the next bed. We said good-bye and I smiled again, and
this time, he smiled back.
We moved on,
praying for those with chest pain, for those with stomach hurts, for a young
boy with a sore neck and headache, for the broken and lonely, for the hurting
and struggling. We met a Muslim man who wouldn’t let us pray for him-even
though his catheter was full of blood. It was against his faith. (I prayed
anyway when we had moved on to the next bed).
We prayed for
physical healing, but more and more, we realized the need for spiritual
healing. We felt the burden of love for these men, many of which seemed
forgotten, almost all seemed lonely. They seemed hopeless and the joy seemed to
be sucked out of this place. My prayer all along on the race has been to bring
hope and joy to those I meet, and yesterday I had the opportunity to do it in a
place that felt truly hopeless.
My prayer is they would know their great
Father, the lover of their souls, and that Jesus would be so tangible they
would no longer feel alone, but feel wrapped in the arms of their Father. I
pray they would know hope, they would know love. I pray they would be
physically healed but also spiritually healed, that they would have impactful
encounters with Jesus that would lead them to salvation and a deeper walk with
the Lord.
