Beyond the Smiles (Part II)

(For Part I, click here.) 

I remember him laying there. The bare white mattress in the Emergency Ward. The blanket stained with sweat and dirt wrapped around his waist. His ribs protruding from his thin, malnourished frame.

I remember him turning onto his side, obviously in pain. I remember his mother standing at the bedside, anxiety and fear written clearly across her face.

A group of American healthcare workers, part of a medical mission team I was working with, flocked around him and hooked up an ancient ECG machine to confirm a diagnosis of pericarditis—a diagnosis for which nothing more could be done in this rural Cambodian hospital. 

As they gathered around the bed adjusting ECG leads and talking among themselves, I stood in the back. Listening, observing, and praying.

I took in a deep breath, and I let it out. This young man was dying. There was nothing we could do about it. With all our knowledge, with all our experience, with all our compassion and good intentions, there was nothing we could do to prevent this man’s suffering and death. 

There was a time when seeing a patient like this young man broke me. It led me on a journey of desperate brokenness and incredible healing. It led me to face truths concerning what I believed about God and myself. Ultimately, it led me to rest in knowing I don’t have to be enough.

This time, as I stood near the patient's bed, everything was different. Outwardly, I was surrounded by Americans, and I was grateful to be with so many whose education and experience exceeded mine. Things had shifted inwardly, too; I found I had courage to reach out to this patient in a way I was too timid to do before but was incredibly important.

When I close my eyes, I am back in the hot, humid, Cambodian Emergency Ward. I breathe in deep, and I choose to rest in this truth: I don’t have to be enough, for Christ is enough. When I stop worrying about how much I can’t do because I am not enough, I hear Jesus’ quiet invitation to sit in His presence, even in the midst of such deep suffering. And I accept. 

I sit in His presence and bring this young man to Him, praying he would know the peace of Jesus’ presence, too. I sit in His presence and bring myself and my broken heart to Him, finding space to grieve and freedom to be sad because when I’m with Jesus, the lie that “I have to be the strong one” crumbles. Jesus is the strong one. I never have to act like I have it all together—because I don’t. Jesus knows this. He's okay with this.

The Americans clear out, and it’s just my dad and me left. With the help of our friend and translator, Dad explains why the American team is there, to teach and work with the local doctors. The patient’s mother looks up tearfully and asks if her son will live.

All our knowledge, all our diagnostic powers, all our education and good intentions—it means nothing in this moment. We have nothing to offer this woman and her son. Nothing except Jesus. So we ask if we can pray, and I reach out my hand to touch this patient’s dirt-smeared blanket and lift him up to Jesus.

And I know in all our heartbreak, in all their heartbreak, Jesus is enough, and He is with us. 

His presence is so strong. It always is, if we'll just acknowledge it. If we'll just accept His invitation and stop our striving to be everything, fix everything, and know everything. Perhaps this is the most important thing I’ve learned about poverty in the past few years. Poverty and suffering highlight our sense of helplessness, and so often our response is to push this uncomfortable feeling down and ignore it or to grit our teeth and take it upon ourselves to eliminate disparities. Yet I’ve found no freedom there. 

No, freedom is found in Jesus' presence, in trust. It's found in trusting God is enough, trusting He cares and is big enough for all the hurts in the world and my grief over poverty and suffering and death, and trusting God is, indeed, good.

He is good. Even when everything around us seems to be wrong and impossible and heart-wrenching and clouded with evil. He is, indeed, good, and He is enough.

Come and See

I have an ant problem in my room. I noticed them weeks ago, crawling around my room and sometimes on my mattress, but they never bit so I dismissed them after flinging them mercilessly off my bed. However, when I returned from a short expedition to Vietnam, I discovered the ants had begun making an ant pile near the base of one of the legs of my bed. Which meant…there were many, many ants on my bed. I cleaned out the ant pile, washed my sheets, and found the source of the ants. They were coming through holes in the poorly-sealed grout between the tiles on my wall. 

If I had wooden walls, they would literally be coming out of the woodwork. As it is, they were actually coming out of the tilework. And they had started to bite! It was war.

After trying several different battle tactics (including spraying them with Lysol and insect repellant, attempting to seal the grout with glue (and failing), and googling how to make homemade grout so I could more effectively fill the holes), they still wouldn’t stop crawling around. I managed to keep them off my bed by spraying the base of my bed with lemon-eucalyptus insect repellant, but they continued coming out of the tilework day and night. They were driving me crazy. I won’t elaborate on the paranoia I developed except to comment that I one night I had a dream a giant ant attacked me. Finally, though, it dawned on me that I had tape. I could tape over the ants’ entry points and keep them from congregating around my bed. (No matter that they can come in through the half-centimeter gap under my door. My door is far away enough from my bed.) Who needs to make homemade grout when they have tape?

Thus far, it’s working! Granted, at the time I’m writing this it’s only been about thirty minutes since I taped over the grout in my tile (with black electrical tape because that’s all I have), but I have high hopes for this plan. I watched one ant coming back to the holes in the grout, looking for the way back home, passing the tape confusedly, and then scurrying around in a panic-like state before heading back to wherever he came from. You know how ants crawl in a line? How they travel to a place and return using the exact same route? Well another ant was coming up that same route but hadn’t yet discovered the way home had been sealed, and I always imagine the ants talk to each other when they bump into one another going opposite ways. They bumped into each other, and the panicking ant waved his little antenna around like crazy, and the other ant paused for a millisecond before continuing hesitantly on his route. This is how I imagine their conversation went:

“Dude!! Dude!! I can’t find the hole to go home! It’s gone! Something happened! Something terrible is going on! You can’t go back that way! You can’t!!!”

“Really?!”

“Yes!!! What are we going to do?! You can’t go that way! Help me find a new way!”

“Oh. Thank you for the information. I’ll go see for myself.”

And then the ants continued on their way. What I like about ants (and I like very few things about ants, and I only like this trait sometimes) is that even if they bump into another ant that has updated news, they never listen. Over the past several days I’ve had plenty of ant observation time, and it’s true: I don’t know what kind of communication ants have, but they never take another ant’s word for it. They must see for themselves.

It reminds me of a woman in the Bible who told her friends about Jesus, and they went to see for themselves. It happened in a town near Jacob’s well in Samaria.

In the story of the Samaritan woman at the well, the woman’s friends heard the woman’s testimony and came to see Jesus for themselves. Eventually they told the woman, “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know this is indeed the Savior of the world” (John 4:42).

Sometimes, it’s a good thing to be like those stubborn little ants. When we hear something so strange and radical it’s nearly unbelievable, we must go and find out for ourselves.

“Come and you will see.” That’s what Jesus told two men who asked where he was staying, and they did. They followed him and saw for themselves. And they ended up being two of the twelve disciples (John 1:39).

The Psalmist wrote: “Taste and see that the Lord is good” (Psalm 34:8). It’s an invitation.

Come and see for yourself. I can tell you all the stories in the world about the Lord and what He is doing in the nations, about missions and the international church and how life-changing living with faithful Christians of a different culture can be. I can tell you how rewarding it is, how difficult it is, how it helps me see Jesus more clearly, but sometimes that doesn’t do it justice.

You must come and see for yourself.

So here is the invitation, friend! Come and see. Come to the nations and see what God is doing. Come to a cross-cultural setting and experience the joy and the wonder of learning about God from a completely new perspective. Come begin friendships with those who are not like you and see the beauty of diversity.

Come to Cambodia, or come to Mexico, or come to China town in your city, or come to an international students’ gathering. Come to a church service in a different language, or come to an apartment complex housing refugees. Come to a lifestyle built around Jesus. The Lord called us to make disciples of all nations, and the adventure and joy of following His call—that’s something you can only truly experience for yourself.

Don't take my word for it! Come and see for yourself.

(If you want, you can come see the tape on the tiles in my room for yourself!)

Beyond the Smiles

I remember her lying there. The bare metal bed frame. Her hair pulled back behind her head. The blood on the floor. The coughing and then the bright red vomiting as her thin frame twisted and shook. And the pool of blood grew.

This woman had no family. In this Cambodian hospital, family members are the ones who bathe, clean, clothe, reposition, provide food for and feed patients. They are the ones who faithfully stand at the bedside and move plastic fans back and forth, back and forth, creating air movement in an un-air-conditioned building and preventing the ever-present flies from landing on the sick. 

This woman had no family. 

Her eyes were closed, her body weak. There was nothing with which to clean up the crimson puddle. “Wait,” they told me. “The cleaning lady will come later with the mop and bucket.”

I remember the moral dilemma when a doctor told me they had no more blood to transfuse for this woman. The need for blood, the safety concerns if I dared donate, the fact that even with several transfusions this woman may not live because we could not correct the bleed at this facility… These are the moments that pushed me to the end of my rope again and again until eventually, when I came back to the States, I felt I had completely lost the rope a long, long time ago.

Yet, as Bethany Williams writes in The Color of Grace, “when our level of desperation becomes greater than our pride, true healing can begin.”1

It has been in the pride-swallowing desperation following those experiences that I have discovered true healing. 

True healing, I found, requires courage—and learning what courage is. Courage isn’t going without water heaters and microwaves; it isn’t forcing my eyes open to watch drivers navigate the wildly crowded streets of Phnom Penh. It isn’t becoming comfortable riding on a motorbike or even eating fried crickets and silk worms.

Courage is living the story that is happening beyond the smiles, beyond the Facebook posts and beyond the Instagram snapshots. Courage is struggling—hard—and being vulnerable with others about those struggles. Courage is walking into a counselor’s office; courage is asking for help. 

Courage is learning to acknowledge grief and wrestle with suffering, being willing to embrace my humanity, and humbling myself enough to recognize I'm in over my head. In that moment in the Cambodian hospital, standing at the bedside of a dying woman, I felt helpless and defeated. What had eaten away at me for years was shoved in my face: I was not enough. This time courage meant wading through years of lies to find the truth that although I am not and never will be enough, I don’t have to be.

True healing, I found, happens in the presence of Jesus. 

I can never do enough, say enough, sacrifice enough, love enough; I can never be enough for Cambodia, for those around me, or for myself. Yet when I relive that moment in the Cambodian hospital remembering that Jesus was present, too, I find that He is enough.

As healing happens within, grace creeps into the relationships with those around us. We don’t have to be enough, for God is enough. When we believe this truth for ourselves, we can extend grace to ourselves for our imperfections and failures. When we believe this truth for others, that they don’t have to be enough either (for God is more than enough for all of us), we can extend grace to them. True healing embraces Truth, brings forgiveness, and overflows with grace.

Healing is a process, and it requires humility and perseverance and sincerity. It is not easy. But the freedom on the other side is well worth the work. For me, it has brought freedom from the pressure to please, perform, and perfect. I am free to feel and to fail and to forgive, to be the imperfect me He created me to be.

If healing happens in the presence of Jesus, what glorious news that Jesus is Immanuel, that Jesus is here with us! And He is enough. His sacrifice is enough for our sins. His love is enough for our souls’ deepest needs. His compassion is enough for our grief. His strength is enough to catch us when we fall. His presence is enough to heal. He is enough.
 

Deepest gratitude to my wonderful counselor, Lynette, who continually ushers me into Jesus’ presence and who walks with me in this healing process. I am truly thankful, from the bottom of my heart…

1) Williams, B. (2015). The color of grace: How one woman's brokenness brought healing and hope to child survivors of war (p. 29).