Indebted Prayers
For Sarah Thebarge
I feel as though I owe Sarah
Thebarge so much for the blessing she has been to me in the last couple of
years through her writings. I have never met her but I have felt as if through
her life as well as her words God has spoken to me of a Christian life that is
more deeply to be experienced than I have hitherto recognized it to be. In this
blog I want to do a couple of things. I want to give thanks for Sarah by
telling you how much her life and writing has meant to me. Secondly I hope to
get people to pray for her as she has come down with malaria while serving at a
medical facility in the West African nation of Togo.
I remember the first time I read
something by Sarah was an interesting blog on the church and how we might do
church better. She used the story of the building of the Golden Gate Bridge as
a metaphor. The first color decided upon when engineers planned on building the
bridge was “not blue” but “not blue” was not a color; so the blog drove home
the point of “not blue is
not a color”. When Christians think about doing church better we usually
begin with what we don’t want. I loved the piece because she turned a negative
into a positive, a complaint into a consideration. I was and remain someone who
is pretty conservative but listens to progressives and I thought from reading
her that though she identified as a progressive, her Christ was walking in the
midst of people throughout the earth. The more I have followed her writing and
the things she has shared, the more I have seen that she serves Christ without
letting the ideological wars keep her from focusing on being God’s instrument
to be a person embodied for the purpose of sharing the love of God set forth in
Jesus Christ.
I read a couple of more blogs by
Sarah and I knew I wanted to read her book with the title The Invisible
Girls.
I struggle as a reader. I fall
asleep easily for a plethora of reasons including type II diabetes, not going
to bed soon enough, getting up too soon, etc. If I sit down I can easily begin
to nod off. If I start to read a book I can start snoring. So usually when I
read a book it is a few pages at a time until I plod my way through it. Sarah’s
book remains to this day the only book of more than a few pages that I began
one evening and read to the very last page before I went to bed. The only
disappointing thing about the book was that when you reached the end, you
wanted more pages of this wonderful book. It was more than a good story. Her
story was the expression of her having felt like an invisible girl that people
no longer saw when she had a bout with cancer. Then she discovered a family of
invisible girls while riding on a metro train in Portland, Oregon. The story
was about how her recovery from cancer became intertwined with the discovery of
the invisible girls she met on that train. Not only was it a story that held my
attention; it was a story that took hold of my heart in my life situation. For
days after I read the book I found myself feeling a sense of how each person I
saw was a sort of invisible person going through something that hardly anyone
around them noticed. Maybe just a little bit of the story of Sarah’s memoir had
wormed itself into my heart so that some of the essence of her story was coming
alive in my heart. I could only be thankful, for truly before that time I had
gotten to a point in life where I was going through the motions.
I followed her as she moved from
Portland to California and I got the sense that part of that time she was
struggling for direction, not necessarily in a hopeless way, but in a way that
there was more out there for her than to work in a California medical facility,
have speaking gigs, and write. Then she went to Togo. It was in Togo that her
writing and experiences seemed again to speak to me. She wrote a heartbreaking
story of watching a patient die of tuberculosis, someone who might have died
had the facility had all the proper medication supplies and medical
instruments, but who didn’t even have a fighting chance without those supplies
and instruments which the facility in Togo didn’t have. It was a heartbreaking
story you can read here. In
recent months I have been struggling in my work. I will turn 60 next month and
my goal is not so much to retire in the future but to move towards a new chapter
in my life, that works better for a person than my present work will in my
senior years. It is still a ways off before any changes take place. But when I
read this blog it seemed as if for the first time in all my questioning of what
to do next I felt that there is such a need to tell people about how there are
patients dying because medical facilities don’t have the supplies and equipment
that we in the industrialized world take for granted. Don’t you think we ought
to be seeing what we can do about that? I want Sarah and the physicians,
physician Assistants, and nurses of this world not to have to watch someone die
because they only have two of three needed medicines and can’t transport
someone to a better facility because they lack a portable oxygen machine. I
realized I want eventually in God’s timing to work at helping provide solutions
for these kinds of problems.
The most recent news from Sarah, to
her readers, is that she has come down with malaria. She told the story with
humor. You can read the most recent blogs at http://sarahthebarge.com/blog/
especially the posts about “Malarious” and “to get to you”. I think you will
then be hooked on her writings. But mostly right now I hope you will join me in
praying for this lady’s recovery so that her life might continue to encourage
and give birth to compassion in the hearts of those of us who are touched by
her life of caring.
And Sarah, may you get well very
soon. You are making a difference.
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