August 17, 2003

Scripture: John 21:15-17

Introduction of today’s speaker by Rev. Marietta Smith

I want to thank you for the opportunity to come and speak to you today. I am always happy to talk about my trips to Bolivia, anywhere, anytime, as my husband will tell you - sometimes non-stop. And I also like, though, to tell people about what God has done. And that is truly the story I want to tell you today - of what God has done.

Our scripture this morning comes for the 21st chapter of John, verses 15 through 17.

And he said to me, “Lynn, you can go down there and help those people, but you won’t change a thing.”

Well, I’m not too good at rebuttal. You know, it takes me a few hours to come back sometimes and that night when I was lying in bed and I was ticking off all those things that I had to make sure I had done before I flew the next day, I was coming across my answer to him, and you know what, the answer is: “You are right. And you are wrong. You are right. I’ll go down there and I will do all this stuff, and I won’t change a thing. But God will. I won’t, but God will.”

And he is wrong in that I know something will change, because something has changed every time I have gone on a mission trip. And that something was my relationship with God. I go, knowing that God has some little blessing for me and something special. And that was true in 2002 when I went. That is the summer of the two homeless men. That’s what I call it; that’s the way I’ll always remember it.

When I came back in 2000, I wrote up about a fifteen page report, telling stories from Bolivia. Year 2002, I basically had one story to tell. This is it. Now, it’s not that I didn’t do some other things; I did. But God used two homeless men to answer a question that I had been praying to him for eighteen months.

You see, I like to plan ahead, so I was asking God, “What is it, exactly, you want me to do in the year 2005, when I retire?” And for eighteen months, I was being put on hold. That’s the way it felt, anyway.

And I thought: “I’ve got to plan ahead, because (I was thinking), maybe it’s nursing. Maybe it’s this. Maybe it’s that. I need to be planning, Lord, so what is it?”

Well, who would have thought he would use two homeless men to answer that question? But, He did. He used one, whose name I do even know, and another one, whose name I know, but I never met. One of them I met in Bolivia. I had heard about him - several times - because the group of doctors I go with had gone also, year after year, and they always mentioned seeing this homeless man in la plaza Now la plaza is just a little town square which is kind of like a park.

I never saw the man. I had been there ­ that was my fifth trip ­ and I had still hadn’t seen the man. And they kept talking about, every time, about this “homeless man in la plaza.” And I hadn’t seen him. Well, I finally saw him. We live in a little motel kind of thing that’s not too far from the hospital and we walk to the hospital every day, and back every day, past this plaza.
And that day, that Saturday that we had arrived, we rested a little while and then we went on over to the hospital to unpack all this stuff that we had brought. You see, there were thirty-two of us on the team. Now, not everybody was there to do medical work. Obviously some of us were just interpreters. And there were also a group of people who were going to work on two different construction projects. So there were thirty-two of us. And the first two off the plane were me and one of the other interpreters. And so, of course, they see these two little old helpless ladies over there who are going to need help with their bags. And it’s a little airport. There’s only one little tiny carousel. That’s it.

So the porters come up and say, “Can we help you?”

And we say, “Oh, yes, we’re going to need help. We have eighty-tree boxes and twenty-three suit cases.”

Well, we said that in Spanish and that’s the language they speak, but they thought we didn’t know our numbers.

And they said, “Uh, Uh. No way.”

So it took both of us, standing there, saying in Spanish, kind of in unison, “Ochenta y tres cajas y veintitrés maletas,” in slow motion, too. And finally they realized we were serious. We said, “We’re with a group.” And so they went running. Of course, they also could smell that tip that was going to be coming to them for that many packages.

And in those boxes and some of those suitcases, we carry with us many supplies. We had a quarter of a million dollars worth of medicines and medical supplies to use while we were there. And you should see the room they give us, because we just pile it full of stuff and then try to organize it all. We fill up this one long wall, about six feet high, with nothing but surgical supplies, and that won’t hold them all. We have all kinds of medicines that we have to sort out, that the pharmaceutical companies, most of them, donate: everything from Nexium, Prevacid, all the latest medicines that are coming onto the market at that time. We had one huge box, big enough to hold a dishwasher, filled with nothing but allergy medicines for children. We filled 6-foot high shelves along one wall with surgical supplies, and that didn’t hold them all. There were toys for the children who would be our patients and cute little hospital gowns. And there was my box that held more than 2700 toothbrushes to be distributed to the patients and their families when we worked out in the country. Friends had been collecting brushes for me to take for an entire year.

It was on the walk back from the hospital that I finally saw the man I had heard described so many times. Immediately the verses from Matthew 25 came to my mind; you know the ones, the ones about the “least of these.” There before me lay a man who met five of the six categories that Jesus listed. The man was most certainly a stranger. He had no food and nothing to drink. He was sick and he was naked on an unusually cool day. The sole of his foot was bandaged with filthy rags and he had soiled himself as he lay there. It was when I tore my eyes from his foot that I looked into his face, and at that moment felt the impact of Jesus' words. I was looking at the “least of these”. In my heart I saw not the fact of a stranger, sick, alone, cold, hungry and thirsty, but I realized that I was looking at the least of these. And that meant that I was looking at the face of my Savior. And I was ashamed. My heart broke because, how many times had I walked past this man and not seen him? If the others saw him, how could I not see him? I was ashamed and I felt as if I must have been blind.

I always carry food with me. I always have my back pack, and I always have food and water in my back pack, because I am one of the crazy interpreters; I go out in the country. I don’t just stay in town. And I never, really truly know, whether I am going to need food, water, when I get out there, or ­ whether I’m going to come back that day, just to be honest. So I take a few things with me, just in case. And that day I had packed as I always do, and so, I took out my bottle of water and my little pack of nabs (that’s crackers for those of you not from Ya’kin County) and my bag of peanuts, and I bent down and I put them close to his hand. And it was then that he opened his eyes.

And I looked at him and said, “Es para usted.” “It’s for you.”

And I’ll be honest; I got out of there. Because my heart was beating; it was pounding. I mean, I didn’t know how this man might react. I didn’t know if he was violent. I didn’t know anything about him. And so, I took off. And every day after that, on my way to the hospital, and on my way back from the hospital, I looked for him. I made sure I saw him. He wasn’t always in the same place. One time he was in the middle of the street, dodging the traffic. Or really, he wasn’t dodging, they were dodging him. One of the group kind of hypothesized that maybe he wanted to be hit by a car.

I don’t know the man’s name. I don’t know why he lives on the street. I never found anybody who could tell me anything about him. I don’t know if he is mentally ill; I don’t know if he is mentally handicapped; I don’t know anything about him, except he wears the face of the least of these in my heart.

I helped the doctors treat hundreds and hundreds of patients, but it is his face that I see. I remember some of the others. I remember the woman who is my age - who was my age - who looked twenty years older because cancer was consuming her body. I remember the four-year old whose grandfather brought him into the clinic that day, because he knew he wouldn’t have to pay, and the little boy had an enlarged heart that had never been diagnosed ­ and several other problems, I might say ­ but who would never have been treated had we not been there to pay for his expenses to get to the hospital, and for treatment once he got there. And I remember that little baby who came in, and the little baby probably would have died if we hadn’t been there, but God sent us there that day, because that baby had meningitis and would never have gotten treatment had we not been there.

There are hundreds of patients, hundreds and hundreds of patients, but my mind always comes back to the homeless man, because it was him, he was the one who made me ask God, “Just how blind am I? How many more people am I walking past and not seeing? How many times am I walking past You, and you need me?”

And so, that’s probably why the second homeless man had an impact on me, even though I never even met him. You see, I love my newspaper. I mean my day is not complete until I have read my newspaper, done the CRYTOQUOTE, worked on the crossword puzzle. My day is not complete until that’s done. And so my poor husband, while I am there for two weeks, has to stack up those newspapers while I am gone, and he knows that I will read the Elkin Tribune first, because that’s pretty short work. Those of you who have ever seen the Elkin Tribune, you know that’s the truth. And so, he puts those right on top for me and the Winston Salem below that. Well, God made sure I didn’t miss this article, because He put it in the Tribune and the Winston Salem Journal for me. It was about a homeless man in Elkin. It was about a man who had died for the lack of insulin. And the really hardest part of the story was, for me: he died before I ever left for Bolivia, and they had just found his body when I got back. He died within two miles of my house. His name was Robert Cantrell and I never met him, but I mourned his death.

God answered my question pretty clearly: How blind was I? How blind am I? This man wasn’t suffering a thousand miles from my home; he was within walking distance. He died on my turf, on my watch, because he was watering down his insulin. How’s that for blindness ­ and deafness? Because Jesus had been calling me to think in a new way, and to serve in a new way. But I was blind and I was deaf.

Did Jesus say to me in that scripture, did he say, “Lynn, you feed my sheep in Bolivia, but just in Bolivia.”? No. Did Jesus say, “If you love me, tend my sheep, but not if they are mentally ill, and not if they live on the streets, and not if they use drugs.”? No. Did Jesus say, “Lynn, tend my sheep, but just the ones you like.”? No.

You know, that’s the thing about Jesus. I’m living proof, here today, to you: He’ll take anybody. Anybody. He took me. And I’m just a sinner, like everybody else, but He took me. And so, God said to me as clearly as I ever heard anything, after eighteen months of saying, “Lord, what do you want me to do in 2005?”: “Be a Deaconess.” I had never thought of that. Hadn’t even thought of that. I knew what a deaconess was. You know, I had met Deaconesses. I know current Deaconesses and retired Deaconesses, but never entertained the concept of being a Deaconess. Now, you might be visiting today and you might not know what a Deaconess is in our Church, and so I am going to give this short explanation, and that is: It’s kind of like being a missionary, but you don’t get a check. You have a relationship with the United Methodist Church; you agree to work at least twenty hours a week in a caring profession. Most deaconesses work in child care, teaching, health care, and justice issues. That’s the basic thing.

So, God said to me, “I want you to do here what you do in Bolivia.” And I did the Moses thing: I gave him all the excuses I could think of why I can’t do that, starting with, “You know, God, I kind of practice a little medicine while I am there and I’m pretty they would arrest me if I did that here.”

Well, I went all the way down that list: “Lord, I can’t do it because…, but, …” And you know, He didn’t even argue back with me because He knew where I was going to come to. “Alright, You’re right, I can. I can. I just had never thought of doing that.”

Now that’s my story. That’s my story of God and me. But each of you has a story. God’s not just calling me. He surely needs more help than I can give. He’s calling you to tend his sheep as well. And now, I saw the award this morning, so I know you’re already tending the sheep. You’re feeding the lambs. I understand that. I’m not here to say you’re not.

I’m just saying to you, “Open your eyes, because it’s awfully easy to be blind.” I can speak from experience. It’s awfully easy to walk right past the opportunities. It’s awfully easy to close up your ears at all the noise of our lives around us, and the busyness, to not hear what God is calling us to do. It’s awfully easy to close up our hearts, sometimes just out of plain weariness, that you are just tired. And sometimes we don’t like to hear the call because ­ ­ we don’t like the sheep. Because the sheep aren’t what we want them to be. But you know what we have to remember: Jesus died for us on that cross while we were still sinners. Jesus died for us ­ ­ before we became perfect. Because that still hasn’t happened for me. I don’t know about you.

God used two homeless men to show me a new opportunity. And I know one thing for sure; I can promise you this: That if you listen to Him, and if you will follow His call, and if you will tend His sheep, you will know joy like none other. And I know that there are people out there in the congregation right now who know what I am talking about. Joy. The joy that comes.

Now, when I am in Bolivia, I come back with a lot of sad stories. There are a lot of tragedies. But I also come back with stories of joy, and I will give you just one of those. Now, I told you that I go out in the country most of the time. But once in a while I get to stay in and work in the hospital. It’s like a vacation compared to going to the country. And this time I got to work with Dr. Stan Gilbert, who is an orthopedic surgeon in Fayetteville. And his Spanish, so long as he is in medical terminology, is pretty good; he doesn’t need an interpreter. But if he has one it speeds the process up a little. And part of my job as his interpreter that day was to keep him on time because he has surgery to perform at a certain time, and as soon as they are ready, he needs to be ready.

Well, I told him, “Stan, you only have about fifteen more minutes before that first surgery.”

He said, “OK, Lynn. Go out there and tell me what I’ve got.” So, I go out there, and he’s an orthopedic surgeon; it’s pretty easy to see. These are people who have had polio, or they’ve been injured and the bones weren’t set correctly; it’s something you can see.

So I came back in and said, “OK, you’ve got this, this, this, and a little girl with a club foot.”

He said, “Oh, a girl with a club foot! Was she here last year?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, go find out.”

“OK.” So, I went out and I talked to the mom, and I said, “Were you here last year?”

“Uh huh.”

“OK.”

Went back in (meanwhile he is treating a patient) and he says, “Well, bring them back here!”

“OK.”

And when the two of them saw each other, it was like long lost relatives had been reunited. They broke in to huge smiles, and I realized there was something going on here I didn’t know about. This is the story: They had been there last year. He has seen the little girl and agreed to fix her foot. And he agreed to fix her foot again.

He said, “Tell her, ‘Bring the little girl tomorrow. We’ll do the surgery.’”

And I did. And she immediately got this tormented expression on her face. And I said, “What’s wrong? If it’s the expense of staying overnight, we’ll pay for it.”

“Oh, no, no, no.” She said, “Last time, my little girl got sick, and then Dr. Gilbert had to go, and we couldn’t do the surgery. What if she gets sick again?”

Well, Dr. Stan understands enough Spanish; he got that. He said, “Go tell them we’ll be doing another surgery today.” And then he told her, “We’ll do it today.” She didn’t want to miss that opportunity.

Now my friend’s husband can say that to me if he wants to. He can say, “Lynn you’re going down there and you do all that stuff, but you won’t change a thing.”

But if he ever got to talk to that mother and that child, I feel sure he’d tell you, “Oh, yes, something changed. That little girl is out playing with her friends now. Now she can walk like everybody else. Now she’s not stigmatized.”

We changed something for that little girl that day. Mother Teresa has such wonderful quotes. I hadn’t found this one until recently:

Mother Teresa said, “I slept, and I dreamed that all of life is joy. I awoke, and saw that life is all service. I served, and saw that service is joy.”

Jesus is calling us all today. You, me, to tend his sheep here; to tend his sheep elsewhere, because we love Him. The cross is a reminder to us of just how far God is willing to go to show how much He loves us. The question for us is: How far are we willing to go to show God that we love Him?