This coming Tuesday, December 8th, will be my third monthiversary here in Wau. It really hit me today as I was taking my daily anti-malarial pill and I realized there were only a few left in my first 90 day bottle. One bottle down out of four, only three more bottles of antimalarial pills to go. It made me think of the Seasons of Love song from Rent. I’m sure most of you are familiar with it. It goes through the different ways that you can measure a year. While it hasn’t been 525,600 minutes yet, I have spent approximately 129,600 minutes in Africa and there are many other ways I could measure my time here as well.
Just like in Rent, it could be measured in daylights, sunsets, midnights (although I’ve only actually seen a couple), or cups of coffee (or lack thereof). It could be measured in inches (usually trying to convert from centimeters), or miles (from kilometers). There are many, less conventional, ways to measure my three months here as well. It could be measured in the times traffic was stopped because there was a herd of cows on the road, the times someone thought I was speaking English when I was actually attempting Arabic, or the times I thought the noises from a goat were coming from a human. I could measure my time by my work, how many patients I have seen, how many malaria diagnoses I have given or how many prescriptions I have written. I could measure it in the times that I have been called Kawaija (white person), been told “I am fine” without having even asked how are you, or been pointed at by little children.
It could be measured through all the negatives, how many holidays or weddings I have missed back home, how many times I’ve had to refer a patient to the hospital, or how many mosquito bites I have gotten. It could even be measured through the number of daily masses I’ve attended, rosaries I have prayed or churches I have been to. But even measuring in these, would not be pleasing to God. There are things that are so much more important and these things cannot be measured.
The reason that God placed me on this mission was not to achieve anything that can be counted or measured. My time here is about so much more than all of the things that I listed here. It’s about loving God with such fervor that it overflows into every move that I make. It’s about having the deepest desire to share that love with every single person I encounter. Seeing patients is an important part of my mission here, but the medicine that I give them isn’t the priority, I must first love them, every single one of them. It doesn’t matter if I’ve already seen 63 patients and one more comes in after all of the others have finished and gone. It doesn’t matter if I’m exhausted or feeling incompetent. It doesn’t matter if there seems to be nothing I can do for them. It doesn’t matter that I can’t speak their language. I must love.
I could not possibly measure the love that Christ has poured into my heart these three months. I could count the number of my sins that He has forgiven, the number of times He humbled Himself to enter my body in the form of bread or the number of nails that held His body to the cross for my sake. I could count these things and contemplate them every second of every day and still not be able to fully comprehend the love that my lord has for me.
The things that are important on this mission, in this life, cannot be counted or measured. It’s not important to count the days, the minutes or the anti-malarial pills. It’s important to be present. Everything is in loving Jesus and loving His people as He does. A day’s success isn’t based on the number of patients that I treated, but in the joy that I was able to bring into someone’s difficult day. God delights more in the moments when I’m making a scene in the waiting area trying to teach some toddlers how to high-five and say “good job!” than He does in me writing a correct prescription.
As I enter this next month here, my prayer is simply that I am so consumed by Christ’s love that everything I do is an extension of the love that I receive from Him.
“Love God, serve God; everything is in that.”
-St. Clare of Assisi
