Stretch!

“We are all stretchable!”  As I sat listening to a sermon our first Sunday here at Mukinge, I felt somewhat uncomfortable and I couldn’t quite figure out why.  Then I heard the minister say emphatically “We are all stretchable!”  He was talking mostly about making New Years resolutions for being a better person.  But his words gave me insight into why I was feeling the way I was.   I was feeling stretched, stretched in many different ways and many different directions.

I have already been stretched here medically.  I’ve been assigned to the Maternity ward, which I was excited about, as it would allow me to use the skills that I spent extra time in training to acquire.  However, along with it came responsibility for the neonatal nursery, which I’ve had exposure to, but never to this degree.  I remember picking up the chart and seeing the weight of one baby in particular that was born at about 28-30 weeks and feeling a slight sinking (or maybe stretching?) feeling in the pit of my stomach.  The child weighed 1.162 kilograms or 2 pounds 8 ounces.  She was one of two twins.  The other twin didn’t make it. 

We’ve also been stretched culturally.  Of course, there have been many introductions to our new teammates, hospital administration, nursing staff and nursing students, not to mention the patients.  There has been a constant self-imposed pressure to make good first impressions in all of them, to avoid blunders such as saying the word for “urination” when you are trying to say the name of the local language or, even worse, saying the word for “diarrhea” instead of saying the word for “goodbye”, both of which I have done before.  But it has also been a challenge to understand the worldview of my patients on a deeper level.  Take for instance the mother of two premature twins who would pull out the nasogastric (NG) tubes out of her twins’ noses each night.  The infants were too young and small to meet their nutritional needs just by breastfeeding, which made a NG tube necessary.  But during a long talk with her, I discovered that her view of the NG tube was that it was a sign that her children were going to die, not a necessary treatment to help her children grow.  Taken at face value, her view might seem pretty reasonable as some of the patients who do pass away here may have an NG tube at some point before they die.  While I thought the very long detailed explanation from the nurse and me made everything somewhat clear, the next day…you guessed it…both NG tubes were mysteriously out again.

Finally we have been stretched spiritually.  Like many of you, we find ourselves straining to discern where the Lord would have us invest extra time probing deeper into the stories of people who He puts in our path.  Is it the 15 year-old who just had her first child?  Or is it the middle-aged man just diagnosed with HIV?  Or is it the anxious mother of a young sick infant?  Or is it all of them? Is that even possible?  These are some of the questions that we continue to wrestle with.

But even though stretching is uncomfortable, even at times painful, the good news is we are all stretchable.  By God’s grace, He gives us all the capacity to go beyond any self-serving limits we may impose on ourselves to live out the calling He places in our lives.  The Hebrew writer says it this way:

“Now may the God of peace….equip you with everything good for doing His will, and may He work in us what is pleasing to him, through Jesus Christ, to whom be the glory for ever and ever. Amen.”

May He continue to stretch us all.