Pain

I'm sure, like me, you've been watching the disaster in Syria and Turkey
unfold before your eyes.  Over 20,000 Dead, almost 100k injured, countless
homeless. One of the benefits of modern technology is we can live stream the
rescue attempts. It's no longer a journalist painting a word picture of the
devastation. We can witness it as it takes place in real time. We cannot
unsee the scenes of mayhem and destruction.

For me one of the saddest sounds were the mobile phones going off as people,
buried below the rubble, try frantically to pass on their locations to those
above ground. Sad.. because for so many their pleas for help will go without
the support they need as the emergency services face a huge triaging problem
in such a cold and uncompromising backdrop. Such hard choices are not new
for disaster response teams.

I remember 40 years ago when I was involved in a disaster emergency
committee's famine relief response in N Uganda, so many times when volunteer
medics had to decide which starving child amongst hundreds they would
administer precious life-saving drips to. Their decision was based on a snap
assessment of the child's potential for life. I'm glad I never had to face
such a choice.

On one occasion, after an intense session in the clinic, a young nurse sat
down beside me, and broke down in tears. I let her weep uncontrollably for
several minutes, before asking her, did she want to talk. She did. For the
next 15 mins she poured out a torrent of emotions and questions about the
situation she found herself engaged in.  "This isn't why I came here. I came
to help improve people's health and to support the local staff in developing
new ways of reaching into the villages. I feel like I'm on a conveyor belt,
with no end in sight. We don't have enough medicines or hospital beds.  I
didn't come here to play God and to decide who lives and who dies. And, when
I'm talking about God, where is He in all this?"

We sat in silence I had no answers. All my theological training had been
theoretical, This is where real life happens, where hard questions have no
obvious answers.

Then a Mother from a local village approached us, knelt down and addressed
my young colleague, in soft broken English. "Today you saved my daughter.
May God bless you. Today, you were his hands and his heart." And with that,
she left. There was a silence, filled only with a deep sigh from my nurse
friend. That, she said, makes what I am doing have meaning. With those few
words, she got up and went back to the clinic to make more life changing
decisions... but this time, I got the feeling that she no longer wondered
where God was. She knew he was standing alongside her.