love thy enemy

We have just finished our last day at the hospital in the current city we are living in. Crazy to believe that we are finishing up our time. In the last few weeks we have really been pressing in to have a greater heart and understanding of the Indian culture and a refreshed passion for the work we do here. Even though we love what we do, it can still become exhausting. And with exhaustion comes a greater risk of responding by the flesh and not by the spirit. There is often miscommunication that can occur between our team and the doctors, nurses, and cleaning ladies at the hospital. We disagree with the way the patients are treated. We don’t like the way pregnancy and labor is seen as a “problem” that needs to be fixed and therefore rushed along. The extreme measures they take are often painful and unnecessary. Fundal pressure. Episiotomies. Induction, in every manner possible. The women are left to labor alone. They are hit, yelled at, and left unknowing of every medication and check that’s done on them. The women aren’t valued. There are babies that are dying that shouldn’t be. Its filthy and the standards of cleanliness and overall sterilization is nowhere near the way we think it should be. 

Everywhere we look we can see corruption. Injustice. Pain. Heartache.

We use an instrument we shouldn’t have on a HIV patient. We’ve allowed a mother to come into the labor room and console her daughter whose weeping with the pains of childbirth. We stop the cleaning ladies from making the poor women who have just delivered pay them for pushing their wheelchair. We give the laboring women water. Get them to be in positions besides flat on their back on metal beds. We let the mom’s keep their babies after the delivery instead of immediately rushing it away to be weighed and left alone in a separate room. We hold their hands. We pray. We don’t rush the delivery. We generally disrupt every “normal” way of doing things at the hospital and as a result we have seen the beginnings of Word War 3 break out on several different occasions.

The things we are doing at not wrong. In fact, it doesn’t take much arguing for the average person to see the value in what we do. But so easily, as I have had to learn over the past couple months, pride can take the front seat of our actions. Even what we had originally done and desired for good can become used as a way of bringing disunity and more disorder. When we respond out of our flesh and frustration we see that what was once meant to honor a woman can become a way to “show a doctor a thing or two.”

Ouch. This attitude is disgusting. Instead of working with the staff at the hospital we can quickly find ourselves working against them. And this is just something that can’t happen. It can never become us verses them.

The thing is, if I didn’t have Gods eyes I would have had enough of this a long time ago. The things that I see at the hospital not only hurt my heart on a regular basis, but they genuinely irritate me and cause me to be frustrated. But I serve a God who is loving and gentle and kind and patient.  A God who deeply loves all His children, even the ones I disagree with. At the end of the day, the way the doctors, nurses, and cleaning ladies respond to the women is the way they think is okay to respond to the women. And even though its easy and even justifiable to disagree with them I must remain in a place of love. The staff at the hospital need the hope that Christ offers as much as the women who are being mistreated in the hospital do.

Humbly I have been reminded that I have come not just to serve women but to serve.  Period. To wash feet. To love my enemies.  To work in unity. To partner with the healthcare, not to try and argue with it. And in all of it, I have been reminded that I must remain in love. Because it is in and through the love of God that things change. It is not by our efforts or opinions of right and wrong that move people to repentance. It is God’s kindness that leads people to repentance.

And when we respond out of love and kindness we have seen the most breakthrough. It wasn’t when we argued. It wasn’t when we disagreed or disobeyed their orders. It wasn’t even when we did a really good delivery. It has always been when we have loved beyond our own understanding. It’s when an intern sees us pray for a woman and is touched by it, even asking us to speak up so they can hear. It’s a cleaning lady joining hands with us as we cry out to God to raise a little life from the dead- because they have seen us do it before and they know God hears our prayers. It's a doctor noticing that we value the individual as they see we have come in late at night outside of our shift just to labor with one woman we’ve connected with. It’s a nurse who pauses and  feels compassion alongside us as we cry over a lost life.
This is it. This is the fruit. This is the Kingdom coming here on earth.

It is Jesus who said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”

Yeah-so it's been a humbling few weeks. Learning to serve. To make myself less. To be humble, always. And to love thy enemy.

“Jesus Christ lived in the midst of his enemies. At the end all his disciples deserted him. On the Cross he was utterly alone, surrounded by evildoers and mockers. For this cause he had come, to bring peace to the enemies of God. So the Christian, too, belongs not in the seclusion of a cloistered life but in the thick of foes. There is his commission, his work. 'The kingdom is to be in the midst of your enemies. And he who will not suffer this does not want to be of the Kingdom of Christ; he wants to be among friends, to sit among roses and lilies, not with the bad people but the devout people. O you blasphemers and betrayers of Christ! If Christ had done what you are doing who would ever have been spared' (Luther).” 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

(pretty much sums up everything I was just trying to communicate, and it was put so much more eloquently than me. Bonhoeffer, your a champ.)