until we are filled

I feel like I don't know anyone on the wards these days. The last of our long-term plastics patients have been packed up and sent home (just in time for Dr. Tertius to come back in a couple weeks), and Greg is with Jesus. The surgeon we have at the moment has been doing lots of hernias, who only stay overnight after their operations. Hardly time to forge deep, meaningful relationships.

Relationships like the one we have with Joanna and her daughter, Angela. Joanna is better known as The Queen of Mercy Ships. It's a well-earned title; she's been a patient every time the ship has docked in this port. During this outreach, she received a skin graft to cover a chronic ulcer on her leg. The graft failed and she spent long weeks enduring painful dressing changes and more surgeries. At some point in the process, her daughter, Angela, came to live with her. In an endearing role-reversal, Joanna (the caregiver) slept in the bed while Angela (not a patient, but definitely not old enough to be running any kind of show, despite her own best efforts to the contrary) camped out in her little cave underneath. My roommate, Jenny (who I'm eagerly looking forward to working with again next year in Benin, and I'll try to limit my use of parentheses from this point forward), left today, and Joanna and Angela, long since discharged and living at home, showed up to say goodbye. That's Liberia all over. It doesn't matter how far you have to come or how hard it's raining (forgive the parentheses yet again, but one of my favourite moments of the day was when Joanna looked around at us, huddled on the dock like drowned rats, and suggested we move under cover because this rain is getting too serious, a phrase which perhaps loses a little when taken out of Liberian English), relationships are hallowed.

Still, these stranger-patients manage to have an impact. I was at ward church this morning when a man stood up to give testimony. He was well-spoken, a college professor in fact, and he wanted to let us know that he was grateful. He plans to write a report on Mercy Ships and send it to Dr. Gary when he gets back from his vacation. In it, he's going to explain how he came to screening and was told that there was no doctor to do his surgery. How he went back home and laid the problem in God's hands, trusting that he would be taken care of. How a doctor then came and he was called back to the ship to receive his surgery. How the doctors and nurses work with joy in their eyes and love for their patients so evident in what they do. How he's traveled many places but never been treated as well as he's been treated in the one day he's been on the ship.

How Mercy Ships lifts burdens from bodies and from spirits.

This may have been just what I needed to hear. Because it comes hard on the heels of losing my little man, when all I can think is that we've failed. Failed Marion, failed her family, failed to make an impact. Failed.

I have to remember, though, that that man has been with us for just under two days. He's seen us love for less than forty-eight hours. We had Marion and Greg with us for over a month. A month of days filled with countless moments of care and compassion and pure, unfettered love. I can't help hoping that, once the raw edges of this terrible grief have been worn down some by the passage of time, Marion will be able to look back to this month and see Jesus. Not nurses and translators and crazy, hare-brained schemes to keep a little boy alive. Just Jesus. Arms stretched wide, love poured out like rain.

It is raining all around me.
I can feel it; it's a lot of rain.
I ask Jesus to send more rain.
Until we are filled,
Until we are filled
With a lot of rain.