Despite His tiredness, despite His hour of anguish, Jesus did not cease showing compassion to people coming to Him for help (see Matthew 14:10-14 for an example).
I was tired and hoping for a break from the people coming to me with requests. My to-do list was long, and I felt I had to focus on those items without extraneous distractions. I was in no mood to triage the medical case that was soon to present itself.
Sometimes, it takes a bit of mental energy to decide if the emergency is really one that warrants a run to the hospital. Our fuel supply was running low, and several people had borrowed fuel from me recently and had not resupplied it when they said they would.
Then I saw Winston outside. I had to look twice. I had not seen him in many years. I used to see him often and had once purchased a lockable metal cash box for him at his request; he was trying to run a small store at his house and needed a safe place to keep his cash. But Winston never came to get or pay for the box, so I finally gave it to someone else.
Winston had a shifty way about him. Many of the villagers didn’t trust him. In fact, some people accused him of practicing sorcery. As time passed, Winston stopped coming by to visit. He just seemed to vanish. I occasionally wondered about him. I asked about him, and people simply said that he had moved to another village. Now, after many years, he was back. For me, it was like seeing a long-lost friend. We greeted each other in the yard with a firm handshake and a shoulder bump. He had been talking to our mission caretaker, so I left them and went back to our house.
After a little while, there was a knock at our door. I was changing into my work clothes, so Laurie answered. It was Winston. I overheard him telling Laurie that his wife was having some abdominal pain, and he wanted us to take her to the hospital. His explanation of the situation was not clear. He said that she had been sick for two weeks and had a bad pain in her stomach. Laurie recommended that she drink some charcoal water and promptly went to get a jar of the black liquid to give to him to pass along to his wife. Charcoal water often relieves abdominal pain. But Winston wasn’t satisfied. He insisted that she go to the hospital.
About then, our neighbor, a close relative of Winston’s sick wife, came up to me, explaining that though his wife had been sick for two weeks, she was hit with extreme pain in her side just that morning. She thought it could be appendicitis and anxiously requested that we take her to Balimo. After discussing it with Laurie, I hurried down to the fuel shed to get some fuel for the trip. Winston’s wife was already waiting at our waterfront, sitting in a dugout canoe. I called our boat driver. When he arrived, Winston helped transfer his wife from the canoe into our fiberglass dinghy, and I prayed with them before they sped off to the hospital.
Watching the dinghy disappear in the distance, a Gogodala man beside me said, “Okay, now I will tell you what happened. Winston was chased out of the village for practicing sorcery and magic. They blamed him for causing his wife’s previous illnesses. While her husband lived in the other village far away, she was fine while staying there alone. Coincidentally, when he returned home just two weeks ago, his wife got sick again. The men of the village are angry at Winston because they believe he put a spell on his wife to cause her illness.”
Two days later, it was Sabbath. I woke before dawn to the distant sound of wailing in the village. Still half asleep, I suspected that someone in the village had died. Later that morning, at Sabbath School time, almost no one was at our little church. This is very strange, I thought. A few more people showed up later, including some elders. They bore the sad news that the woman I had sent to the hospital at Balimo had passed away early that morning. Because she was connected to many of our church members the family requested that I do the funeral service for her. We canceled church and held a funeral service in the village instead.
I never knew the woman. But at the funeral I learned that she really cared about people. Though she never gave birth to any babies, she adopted and raised a couple of children herself and helped to feed many other children. She was like Dorcas in many ways. Her acts of kindness are a shining legacy in the memory of the lives she touched.
The accusations against Winston and the stories of his practicing sorcery, I am not able to judge as true or false. In the Gogodala culture people often blame sickness and death on sorcery. I can only testify what I witnessed. I saw a spirit of care and concern in Winston’s persistent and earnest pleas for me to take his wife to the hospital. I also witnessed his gentle manner in lifting her from her canoe and placing her in our boat for her ride to the hospital. Through these I sensed that he loved her. But I also noticed the woman’s relatives directed a subtle spirit of anger towards Winston, not even allowing him to ride with his wife in the boat to the hospital.
Please pray for Winston, that whether he is guilty of practicing sorcery or not, he will want to give up his sinful practices, whatever they may be, and follow Jesus.
