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From Luke’s Journal February 2024 | Vol.29 No.1 | Missions and Sacrificial Service

The baby was having a seizure. The midwife held an oxygen mask over the face of the newborn which barely gasped for breath. It quivered, blue around the mouth. Something was terribly wrong.

In 2016, Bethany and I metaphorically crash-landed into Timor-Leste with four young children and a justifiable sense of trepidation. We were tasked with overseeing a busy charity hospital in Dili which faced daily crises of resource shortages in the face of overwhelming unmet need. Learning as we went, we came to see that our greatest hope of making a lasting impact was in supporting the ongoing development of the fledgling local health workforce. Timor-Leste had, with assistance from the Cuban Medical Brigade, rapidly trained and deployed a thousand junior doctors to staff their community health centres across the country. Practising almost entirely unsupervised, this ragtag medical army battled to overcome the limitations of their decentralised health system: almost no locally-available diagnostics, only a handful of drugs in the dispensary and regular interruptions to the power and water supplies.

The infant was not responding, not improving. Measuring oxygen saturation was out of the question as the peripheral circulation was shutting down. The blue hue of the skin was clearly evident. If this child was to survive its best chance was an immediate transfer to the national hospital, just a ten-minute ambulance ride away. But where was our ambulance?!

Settling into our roles, we rapidly recruited Timorese junior doctors as well as international medical volunteers to oversee them. With sixty inpatient beds and a never-ending stream of critically ill patients arriving each day, the clinic was an ideal setting for supervised learning and professional development. The program began to take shape.

One Saturday morning during our first year in Dili, I led one of our Timorese doctors for the Saturday morning ward round which always began in Maternity with the mothers and newborn babies. The little one in front of us had been born a few hours earlier and was around two kilograms in weight – we very often handled much smaller. This baby looked well enough but was breathing up just a little. There was nothing alarming but the respiratory rate was a fraction higher than normal. That could have been an early sign of sepsis but equally could be nothing to worry about.

“Should we start IV antibiotics?”

Some days it felt like we started all the newborns on intravenous (IV) antibiotics – surely we’re overdoing this, I thought. I asked my Timorese colleague for her opinion. She was hoping to become a Paediatrician in the future and had been working hard to build her skills under our guidance. She suggested we ‘watch and wait’ and review the baby later in the morning. I agreed and we moved on – there were so many more to see.

The ambulance was out and about, picking up another patient to bring them in for review. We were on our own. I had a beat-up old RAV4 that could do the job, surely? It was better than waiting here for the inevitable. Hurriedly explaining to the parents, we encouraged the mother to hold the baby in her arms while we made the rapid transfer. I bundled all three into the back of my RAV4 and got going. 

The morning’s work was almost done. I asked my colleague about the baby and was reassured to hear that it seemed to have settled. She said the respiratory rate was close to normal and everything else seemed fine. Would I take her word for it or go back and re-examine the babe myself? In part, I was determined not to undermine her judgement. All over the country doctors at her level of training were expected to make the final clinical decision with life and death at stake. This was her country, not mine. I wanted to affirm her, to back her up and build her confidence. I also wanted to go home: it had been a long morning and I was relieved to have avoided starting yet another baby on IV antibiotics. I accepted her assessment and put it out of my mind.

The harem-scarem drive from the clinic to the national hospital could be navigated very swiftly if the traffic was favourable. If it wasn’t, then adventurous driving was required. It was easier in our ambulance with lights and sirens, but rather difficult to part the traffic in a lowly old RAV4. I was anxious to get there as soon as I could, pulling sharply through the slow-moving cars, minibuses and overloaded motorbikes, trying to bully my way through by pulling out into the oncoming traffic (as is custom in Dili). We were almost there.

Sunday morning brought another ward round, starting in Maternity as always. I was surprised to find a senior medical colleague already there before our usual starting time, having been called in from home by one of the midwives. He was standing over a baby that was evidently in some distress. It was soon apparent that this was yesterday’s newborn. The baby was having a seizure.

We screeched into the ambulance bay at the national hospital emergency department and hurtled in on foot to the first resuscitation bay which, thankfully, was unoccupied. My skills in speaking Tetun were woefully inadequate for this occasion, so I blurted out my summation of the situation in English. The receiving doctor took the babe from its mother’s arms and laid it gently onto the examination bed. He looked closely, listened with his stethoscope, and then looked at me in a combination of annoyance and disgust, as if to say, “And what exactly do you expect me to do with THIS?“

The baby lay still, blue-lipped… it was dead. In humiliation and grief I turned to the family, bereft of anything meaningful to say. I’m sure they saw it in my eyes, but my anguish could not compare with theirs.

Our five years in Timor-Leste were so full of wonderful instances of God’s provision that it was easy to report back the much-anticipated stories of how ‘”God has shown Himself faithful”. We’ve all heard how those stories run: we had a plan, and we set out to do some particular thing, but it ran off the rails and almost failed entirely until God brought about a surprising resolution that was better than what we could have hoped for. God was faithful. But when we tell those stories do we imply that God isn’t faithful when the story doesn’t have a happy ending, or at least a silver lining? How was God faithful to the mother and father of that dead baby? How was God’s faithfulness on display for that shattered Timorese doctor who had to live with being the one who withheld the antibiotics that very likely would have saved that baby’s life? Or, for me, as the supervising clinician carrying the ultimate responsibility for that decision?

In those same years we endured some of the darkest hours of our lives. There was a particular period of three months which, to date, remains the hardest thing I’ve ever lived through. We were very fortunate to have been lifted out of those dark places, and to have been preserved through what looked like an inevitable failure but became an unexpected triumph. We have more than our share of “God was faithful” stories to tell. But what if it hadn’t ended that way? After all, there was no promise that it would. We’d seen other missionaries have to pack up early and go home due to tragedy or an insurmountable setback. We’d met families who had lost a child of their own to infectious diseases in the field and would live with that heartache and sense of guilt for the rest of their days. Reading stories of missionaries of earlier times is even more confronting: there was no guarantee that our story would end well. Would God still have been faithful if we’d come home, tail between legs, with mission failure or one less child than we set out with?

Earlier this year I put together a preaching series for our church on the life of Elijah and the many signposts to Jesus that can be found within it. We shared the preaching between a group of us, and one of my brothers in Christ preached on the curious period of Elijah’s life immediately after his extraordinary victory over the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel (1 Kings 18). Have you ever wondered why, just a few verses after what must have been the greatest moment of his life, we read that he is on the run and giving up in despair?

This sudden change in his demeanour is so incongruent that some scholars have judged it to be a transcription error: these verses must have been copied into the wrong place in the text. After all, it doesn’t make any sense. Elijah had seen enough in his time to know well the extraordinary power of God: he’d been fed by ravens, miraculously saved the widow, resurrected her dead son, summoned a regional drought, and then had taunted his enemies almost in arrogance on Mount Carmel, absolutely certain of his imminent success against them.  Then, after that mighty triumph, he hears word of a threat from a distant godless queen and we witness his total capitulation: running for his life, giving up on all hope, and begging to die. That sudden change in trajectory seems almost incomprehensible so we can imagine why some have tried to explain it through some other means.

There are clues in the text that may explain this sudden change. They point to Elijah’s expectation of what was supposed to have happened after Mount Carmel. Elijah surely remembered the time when God sent down fire from heaven in a display of divine power: at King Solomon’s dedication of the Temple (see 2 Chronicles 7:1-14). The response of the nation of Israel was appropriate:

³ When all the Israelites saw the fire coming down and the glory of the Lord above the temple, they knelt on the pavement with their faces to the ground, and they worshiped and gave thanks to the Lord, saying,

“He is good;
    his love endures forever.”

Just a few verses later we find this oft-quoted promise of God:

¹³ “When I shut up the heavens so that there is no rain, or command locusts to devour the land or send a plague among my people, ¹⁴ if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.”

Elijah lived in wicked times, under the reign of an evil tyrant, King Ahab, and his heinous Queen, Jezebel. God had indeed shut up the heavens, bringing sustained drought upon the nation. If ever there was a time to call upon this promise of God, this was surely it. God was going to appear again in a dazzling display of fire, consuming the sacrifice, humiliating his enemies and overcoming the rebellious hearts of His people, calling them back to worship.

When Elijah steps forward at the altar on Mount Carmel, he calls upon the Lord to honour this famous promise:

³⁷ Answer me, Lord, answer me, so these people will know that you, Lord, are God, and that you are turning their hearts back again.”

And God makes His appearance in a most spectacular display, just as Elijah knew He would. The prophets of Baal are slaughtered and the nation of Israel turns back to God at last! No, that’s not how I remember it either. To Elijah’s dismay, the people do not rise up against the tyrant king and queen, they do not repent of their idolatry and they do not return to the Lord. Rather, things continue to deteriorate until their ultimate destruction and deportation at the hands of the Assyrians, though Elijah won’t see that in his lifetime. His despairing response starts to make sense to us, in light of this. The victory on Mount Carmel was supposed to be the turning point for the nation. Instead it was a flash in the pan. Jezebel still holds power, and when the threat against Elijah reaches his ears he realises the coup has failed in spite of the triumph on the mountain. He despairs, flees, and succumbs to self-pity, “I’m the only one left!”

“It is absurd to draw parallels between our experience in Timor-Leste and the seismic events of Elijah’s life, yet we tasted something of the bitterness and crushing despair during moments in which mission failure felt inevitable.”

It is absurd to draw parallels between our experience in Timor-Leste and the seismic events of Elijah’s life, yet we tasted something of the bitterness and crushing despair during moments in which mission failure felt inevitable. There were days in which we wrongly imagined that we too had been abandoned, as “the only ones left”.

However, we read in 1 Kings 19 that God didn’t leave Elijah in that swamp of self-pity. We see that God ministers to His broken prophet with tenderness, patience and mercy. Then, without castigating him, God leads him back to Mt Sinai (Horeb) – back to spiritual solid ground, the very place where the presence of God dwelled with Moses. God speaks to him softly there and blesses Elijah through his own encounter with the presence of God. Then, and only then, He gives Elijah his next assignment (v15-18).

Even so, God doesn’t give Elijah the happy ending he longed for. Israel does not turn back to Him in faithfulness and slips further into idolatry: Elijah’s despair was in some respects well founded. The mission had failed. But it seems Elijah couldn’t comprehend that God had a far grander plan for restoring His wayward people to Himself.

In our lowest moments in Dili God spoke gently to us, led us, steered us, surrounded us with His presence (though there were most assuredly plenty of times when I was utterly insensible to that), and then gave us our next assignment. It’s a story for another occasion: from the wreckage of what seemed an unsalvageable situation He enabled us to rebuild something far better. It did end well for us, but we must not expect that it always should.

In reading about Elijah we should be looking for signposts to Jesus, and they are seen in every twist and turn of his remarkable story. Here I’ll point to just one: the parallel stories of Elijah’s sacrifice on Mt Carmel and the death of Christ on the cross. In each case there was a worthy sacrifice offered up to God on the hilltop, and in each case the sacrifice was found to be acceptable to God. In each case there was a triumph over the enemy: Colossians 2:15 states it this way:

And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.

However, when you look more closely, the differences are more striking than the similarities. 

Where Elijah triumphed on the mountain, Jesus allowed himself to be defeated.

Where Elijah ran, Jesus – though He could have run – stayed, unto death.

Where Elijah saw failure through earthly eyes, Jesus saw success through God’s ultimate plan.

Elijah’s sacrifice was ultimately powerless to restore God’s unfaithful people to righteous worship, while Jesus’ sacrifice was perfect and total in its accomplishment of God’s salvific purpose.

This brings us back to the earlier question about whether we consider God to be faithful even when it seems that devastation is upon us. Is God only faithful when we can see that things worked out for the best?

“Is God only faithful when we can see that things worked out for the best?”

If we view our situation through Elijah’s eyes sometimes all we can see is loss and despair. However, the same situation viewed through the lens of Christ is something very different. God’s faithfulness is not about happy endings in our earthly life. His faithfulness is revealed in what He has done in Christ. What we discover in Jesus is the fulfilment of the promises of God that date back to very the beginning. Every covenant God ever made – every promise of a glorious hope and future for His people – is caught up and fulfilled in Jesus and that is where God demonstrates His perfect faithfulness. He keeps His promises.

His promise to us is that we are invited to share in that story with Him, and everything that happens to us, and through us, as we serve Him for the glory of His Name is subsumed into that overarching story of His faithfulness to an unfaithful people. That includes the good and the bad. In fact, there is a strong argument to be made that failure is the far more powerful agent for the advancement of God’s Kingdom than success could ever be.

We serve a faithful God, whose faithfulness is shown to be perfect in the work of Christ. We are invited to participate in the work of our faithful God, to partner with Him, to serve as His messengers and ambassadors, vessels of His love and grace. We share in His power and in His suffering, His death and His resurrection. That is our privilege. No matter what happens for good or bad along the way, all of it points us back to that cross and the Risen Saviour.

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