This Time and Place
I’ve learned my limits. A few articles from The Atlantic or NYT or Washington Post. No television news. Social media screen time is set at ten minutes per day. I quickly scan email subject lines. More than that isn’t helpful or healthy for me. I know what is at stake and don’t need continuous unrelenting reminders of how bad things already are and could be in the future.
In the end we all want the same things.
I hear it all day long every day. Patient after patient. And I see all types- from Chillicothe to Iola, from Lee’s Summit to Johnson County, from the Plaza to Cherith Brook. All socio-economic groups. First generation immigrants to city leaders. I’ve seen changing trends and attitudes and worries. I’m blessed beyond measure to help so many people and to be helped by them.
And I have slowly, over years and years, learned from these small interactions. How to glean information quickly, to create a plan and a connection. I am continually putting myself in other’s shoes. Forever taking on the anxiety, anger and confusion of my patients. It’s exhausting, but I am so grateful for my life and my job and am fully aware of the blessing I have been given. Of the miracle of being born at all. Of being born in this time and in this place. And of the responsibility I carry to do something positive with my gift of life.
This land is my land. This land is your land.
Yesterday I talked to a woman about my plan of care for her husband. It’s going to be complicated and not an easy road. But her warm “God bless you” felt more real and sincere than anything I had heard that week. And the fact that she was holding her husband’s “Farmers for Trump” hat made it that much more poignant.
We are many things at once.
My Malian friend Ibrahima has taught me much since we first met in 2012. And really it’s the same things over and over. Be patient. Be optimistic. Be kind. Work for the common good. Always pray.
It could always be worse.
Every year life in Mali has become more difficult and more dangerous. When he wrecked his motorcycle literally in the middle of nowhere, fracturing both bones in his lower leg, he was helped by the very extremists who had tried to kill him last year. He recovered in a tiny village, sticks and vines for a splint, eating chickens donated by the villagers as he learned to walk again. Three months later he was back at work, one leg slightly shorter than the other, getting Grace School ready for another year.
It never gets easier.
The projects and complications are too large for this short devotional. But the difficulties only get worse, even as our school grows and its reach extends farther. Ibrahima tells me that the extremists are requiring all adult Christian men in a village less than ten miles away to pay 25,000 CFA- about two weeks pay for most Malians- as insurance that they not be killed. This is real. I asked him in several different ways. Yes, life is that cheap and that tenuous. They have collected half the money from the men already and are returning in two weeks for the rest.
Ibrahima continues to dream big, possibly starting a school in a marginally safer and larger town along the Niger, possibly buying a group of abandoned school buildings and land in a more convenient area of Koro. He is meeting with the mayor and other leaders of Koro to try to protect the Christians in the area. He is discerning, gathering information and praying.
We each have our own gifts and interests and sphere of influence. We each have this one life to enjoy and to share.
Holy One, help us to do your will. Help us to learn and grow and become more effective as we convert grace into love. Amen
Brandon is a member of Peace Church and is thankful for the unexpected grace of a new Cure album.