Dokta Grace

By Dr Sharon Brandon in PNG

“No medicines available, we only offer tender loving care”. This has been the recent joke Dr Addy and I have enjoyed sharing.

Work in the hospital has been crazy. But taking stock of the last few months forces me to acknowledge the many good things I have seen. Some patients have become Christians; numbers of patients are going home well; and I’m having some great times speaking Aekyom with the patients. We’ve had times of desperately needing rain to supply the hospital tanks – and had great downpours. Our long-awaited medicines and supplies have finally arrived, finishing a difficult time of being without aspirin and many basic things. Recently I took the health worker student devotions and delighted in discussing the probing questions of one of them afterwards. Actually, God is at work and many prayers have been answered!

At times I have been walking through a fog of sleep deprivation, gathering resolve to face another emergency surgery at an unsocial hour and struggling to speak to the staff patiently when yet another set of my orders has not been followed. The hospital is bursting at the seams, and there has been little let-up. Comparing the World Health Organisation statistics has been telling. New Zealand has two thirds the population of PNG and a wealth of resources. PNG has such difficulties in patients even getting physically to a health centre, getting supplies there as well, and then having the staff to do something with them. 

But I’m learning that it’s not all up to me or my fault what happens to the patients! We are a team in our hospital and this is a resource poor country with huge geographical and spiritual challenges. Success has to mean a different thing here for me than what it did in New Zealand. Hospital work is not all about getting the greatest good to the greatest number of people and there’s no way I can hold up the standard of the latest “best practice”. In the midst of it I wonder now what submitting to God being in control of my work looks like. The ways of God are to not worry or feel fear and guilt.

I think that was part of the point of Jesus telling the story of the good Samaritan. Jesus made such an expansive claim of who is your neighbour that it was clear to the man who had originally asked how to receive eternal life that Jesus had set an impossible standard – he could not personally be that neighbourly to everyone. And Jesus knew that. He wanted the guy to believe in Him and be saved by His grace, not his own careful following of the law!

As usual, the most therapeutic thing to do is to look to God. Please pray that I will learn to enter into God’s rest, that I can meet the trials with joy and knowledge of His grace, and know the reality of His burden being light. The old song says “turn your eyes upon Jesus… and the things on earth will grow strangely dim…” Actually, I think turning your eyes to Jesus brings great clarity.

Dr. Sharon Brandon is serving as a Medical Doctor in Rumginae Rural Hospital, Papua New Guinea.

back