Ebola, Faith, and Friends of Ours

Yesterday, Anderson Cooper interviewed Nancy Writebol and her husband. Nancy is an American ebola survivor and a missionary, with her husband, in Africa. Her interview is moving–full of realism, compassion, and faith.

This interview reminded me of another missionary couple–also with SIM–we’ve known for more than thirty years. I describe Steve and Mary Hawthorne on page 71 of Inspired: the Holy Spirit and the Mind of Faith. I think you should know them, too, because they share a faith with Nancy Writebol and her husband that is full of realism, compassion, and faith.

A few years ago a career missionary couple sat in our living room with us. Decades ago, the husband passed up the prospect of a lucrative career in the United States as a medical doctor. The wife had just completed her masters in intercultural studies. Both have spent well over twenty years in the farthest reaches of South America in order to work among the poorest of the rural poor. They have sent remarkable letters over the years—not the sort that talk about all the grand and glorious things God is doing in their lives but letters about walking for two days through fields to treat a sick old man with two aspirin, or telling us about the old Quechua women, all of them seventy-five years old because no one knows their birth date, who unwrap their shawls to unveil two or three eggs—their payment for an intricate medical procedure, or as intricate as our friend can manage in the small clinic he and his brother built in an isolated rural village. Our friends mentioned that they would probably move to a nearby city, since there are now seven medical staff in the clinic they founded, a clinic where they once labored alone. In the city, they will tender medical care to native Quechuans who have moved to the city to find work. They described the racism in the city perfectly: the native Quechua are small and dark, while the descendants of the Spaniards are tall and white. Enough said. They have thrown in their lot with the small and dark people.

Realism.

Compassion.

Faith.

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Here is an example of Steve’s writing.