When you think about the spiritual landscape of this region, to put it in agricultural terms as Jesus did talking about soils of the heart; this region is traditionally hard soil. Yet, we know the Father is always working & changing hearts. The gospel has gone out so little here that the good soiled hearts may not have had an opportunity to hear. Currently, I work as a doctor for an NGO that is owned & operated by our sending company. My wife & I are in full time language learning which consists of 20-30 hours of language learning weekly. However, this has not stopped us from seeking to serve medically. The past year has been sporadic with COVID & the country not renewing visas for a period of 7 months; leading to having to do a short stateside assignment awaiting re-entry. Prior to leaving, I had helped assist the surgical department at our local hospital by doing training conferences for scrub techs & OR nurses as well as helping consult medically on cases as they came up. I've been teaching national medical students who are followers & seek to use medicine to reach our people group. Additionally, we have been working on a new opportunity with the local school where myself & their students would do community health assessments of surrounding villages. Obviously tons of front porch medicine, house calls, local village day trips to visit with sick members of the community, attending regional health bureau meetings & consulting on active statewide medical issues, and assisting problems like children with cleft palates get surgery in the capital, etc. Our ministry continues to be life-on-life as we live in & seek to engage our local community through relationships. Medically, we use our opportunities to open doors to show love & God's healing; seeking to follow up personally in relationship. This is a hope for getting into more villages via research. It would allow time with muslim students while establishing relationships with villages so that we could return on personal time to deepen relationships & sharing opportunities. We have been working on a health lesson story set that incorporates prophet stories & hope to use these in villages & different parts of the community as well. Lastly, COVID postponed a potential opportunity to help build water wells at 60 clinics in a nearby part of the state. Our hope would be to help them with water as well as help train their medical staff & see what possibilities arise. We continue to look for avenues to push the gospel further east into our state where there are little or no known gospel workers.
*Name withheld for security reasons
Mission Work