On Mercy Ships

A couple weeks ago I called my friend who is a nurse at the  missions clinic two hours from me. I asked if I could stay with her for a few days to rest. She said yes, but there was also a Mercy Ships team arriving for a screening, would I want to help with that?

When I was in nursing school I was interested in Mercy Ships in a nursing capacity. Though I have changed directions over the years,the concept and driving force behind the Mercy Ships ministry has remained something that excited and interests me. I will give a short and incomplete summary of the ministry here, but you should check out their website to see more.

 The ship stays at the port of their host country (usually African) 10 months and then goes for maintenance for the other two months of the year. Crew members from around the world fly in and serve on the ship, some long term and some short term.

Part of the job is finding candidates for the surgeries they offer, so they send screening teams around the country to find those who qualify for care. This is what I got to help with yesterday. The logistic work behind these screenings is amazing. Hundreds of people showed up the night before or the early morning to be seen, and the nurses and security and admin teams worked from 5am to nearly 11pm, seeing candidates, scheduling accepted patients, giving them the documents and information they will need to travel to the capital for surgery. The sheer number of factors in this process overwhelmed me. Think medicine, think developing country, think poverty and ignorance colliding with Western medicine.

 Of the 1100 people that were screened at the site I was at, 100 were accepted for care.I was asked to pray with people who came to wait hours in line but were rejected in the end for any number of reasons. Maybe their blood pressure was too high to safely do surgery, maybe whatever condition they had was too far advanced for intervention to be an option, maybe their condition was not bad enough to warrant the risk of surgery, etc. I so admire those screening nurses who have to tell people they cannot help them. Yesterday, whenever there was someone who seemed particularly upset or like they needed comfort they would call me over and I would pray with them.

I saw some very sad things yesterday.

But I remembered as I was praying with them, for hope in the midst of severe disappointment- that I truly believe that we do have hope, if not in this life then in the one to come. Some people had no hope medically speaking. But with Jesus our hope is never gone. In the local language I work with,  we say ‘don’t cut your hope!’ when someone is very sad. And that saying only finds its true home in the Gospel.

I am so thankful that Jesus was a Man of Sorrows, that he knew suffering here on earth, that he can enter into our suffering with us, and ultimately he will take our suffering from us by having suffered for us on the cross.