Sarah Thebarge felt God’s divine calling for her was to be a medical journalist. Her plan was to practice medicine internationally – to bring services to the “least of them”. She earned her physician assistant degree at Yale and was working on her master’s degree in journalism at Columbia when she was diagnosed with cancer.
A year after a bilateral mastectomy, the cancer returned. Treatment brought it to bay, but all short-term missionary agencies denied her placement due to her health record. She moved on and wrote a book about a Somali refugee family – about finding redemption in the most unusual places in the most unusual circumstances – and went on book tours.
Then a friend forwarded an urgent plea email from the Hospital of Hope in Togo, Africa, and Sarah felt compelled to apply. She was accepted for a three month stay.
When she arrived in Togo, her airport contact didn’t show, and she was hassled by a local. Tired, hot and frustrated, she began crying. A local woman observing her asked, “Sista, if you don’t mind, are you sure you’re strong enough for Africa?”
Sarah found Togo and the hospital duty (often 30 hour shifts) to be more physically demanding and emotionally challenging than she expected. The ruthless conditions and heartbreaking experiences led her to question her toughness, her mission and her faith. With courage and truth, she chronicles it all in her book, Well. She exposes her questioning of God, wondering if she was forsaken.
REFLECT:
Have you lost faith before? In yourself? In your God?
How was it resolved?
How did it change you?
According to the World Health Organization, 16,000 children under five die each day, mostly from preventable causes. In her journal, she writes:
Jesus said, “Suffer the little children to come unto me.” But instead we let little children suffer while we spend money on tummy tucks and SUVs and laser tag and ten-thousand-square- foot houses and forty-dollar T-shirts and X-box games and cruises and all-you-can-eat buffets.
Why does God allow suffering?
What I really want to know… is the answer to a different question. Not why does God allow suffering?
But …Why do we?
Still weak from malaria, after a long shift with multiple deaths, including several children — most of which would have been preventable with adequate medical facilities and drugs — she said, “I AM DONE”. She knew she had to leave immediately or she would have a complete mental breakdown or die.
She tried to change her plane ticket to leave the next day, but the internet wasn’t working. So she sat on her bed and listened to a random podcast she had downloaded a few days before about the Greek myth of Sisyphus.
Sisyphus angered the Gods, so as eternal punishment, he was to carry a large rock up a hill. Just before reaching the top, the rock would roll back down to the bottom. And ad finitum. Forever.
Sarah related to Sisyphus because she was doing the same thing. Each shift was like rolling the stone uphill, with people dying unnecessarily. And the next shift was back to rolling the stone uphill again. The Hospital of Hope was her rock.
The podcast included Albert Camus’ perspective that Sisyphus was the victor, not the victim. Intrigued, Sarah immediately researched other perspectives. And she found Stephen Mitchell ’s conclusion that Sisyphus was happy — because the rock had become his mysterious other. He cherished every
feature of it. He talked and sang to it. He was in love with the rock. (This brought to mind the coconut’s role in the movie, Cast Away).
Awestruck, Sarah realized the only thing that would make her stay at the Sisyphean Hospital of Hope was love. She related it to the Christian tenet, “Now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”
Her interpretation was:
* if Sisyphus only had faith, he would have waited for God to perform a miracle
* if he only had hope, he would have been looking for a future event to change his circumstances, like someone coming along to help
* but he had love, so he was like Jesus
Her heart and attitude transformed. She began to believe it wasn’t the results she got in Togo that mattered: it was the fact she was there with love. Certainly, she could not single handedly change the world, or fix every problem. But she could make a statement by being there with love.
She decided to stay to practice medicine with love. She began praying for God to help her fall in love with the rock, to give her the strength to push the rock back up the Hospital of Hope hill each day. Repeatedly, continually, consistently, she prayed , “Help me love this rock”.
REFLECT:
Imagine this story without the synchronicities:
— if Sarah’s friend hadn’t forwarded the urgent plea email
— if Sarah hadn’t randomly downloaded a Podcast on Greek mythology a few days before her meltdown
—if the internet hadn’t been down when she was going to change her flight to leave the next day
Are you like Sarah?
— open to receiving “guidance” from a source outside your belief system?
She is a committed follower of Jesus and his teachings, yet she gained inspiration and insight through a myth about Greek Gods.
APPLY:
Watch for synchronicities.
Notice your responses to ideas from different religions, races, cultures, traditions, ceremonies, beliefs.
WELL, Sarah Thebarge, FaithWords, New York, 2017
