Certainties and uncertainties

From February to July 2021, Jess and I (Stuart) served together at Chitokoloki Mission Hospital, Zambia, where we deployed our medical training alongside the resident staff and contributed to the life of the mission station. We hugely enjoyed this experience and counted it a great privilege. Three years later, we have returned with our 14-month-old daughter Esther in tow.

Our home for the next 3 weeks

We arrived on day 5 of our journey, now significantly extended by our new home in the Shetland Islands. Our itinerary from Lerwick took us to Aberdeen by Northlink ferry, Glasgow by car, Lusaka via Dubai with Emirates’ A380-800 and 777-200ER aircraft, and our final leg was courtesy of 9J-CTO, the Cessna 206 light aircraft which is operated by the mission and was flown by Chris Brundage, a missionary pilot based at Chitokoloki. On the way we were grateful for some special times with family in Aberdeen and Glasgow. We will be here for an all-too-brief 3 weeks.

Our purpose in this long journey is to encourage and reconnect with the co-workers and friends that we established 3 years ago, to add some additional short-term medical capacity to the team and to maintain our own skills in this kind of environment. We also anticipate that we will have fun in doing so! In being here, our ultimate aim is to honour God and live out God’s ‘kingdom values’, to demonstrate his character to those we serve and work alongside, and to practically respond to the injustice of healthcare inequality that exists between rural Zambia and our UK homeland.

Preparations for this trip began some time ago with logistics and risk management: travel bookings, vaccinations and insurance. This time around, the major change in our circumstances is that we have come not just as a couple but as a family. As we have counted the various types of cost we incur in visiting here, personal risks take on a very different flavour as a parent. We may be able to weigh up the situation and make a rational personal choice, but this is not the case for baby Esther. She will remain entirely dependent on us and our choices for many years to come. There is an exquisite vulnerability that accompanies parenthood, an unbreakable bond between your child’s wellbeing and your own. In the course of our African experiences, we have treated children with severe malaria, schistosomiasis, snake bites and many other health problems that are particular to this environment. As we have considered this, we have made risk mitigations (antimalarials etc), but ultimately have made a choice to come here knowing the uncertainties and to trust that God is good.

 

Making good life choices to serve and honour God has never come with any guarantee of personal safety. The Bible says this of some who followed God in faith: “Some faced jeers and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. They were put to death by stoning; they were sawed in two; they were killed by the sword. They went about in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, persecuted and mistreated— the world was not worthy of them” (Hebrews 11: 35b-38). One of the most thought-provoking locations on the Chitokoloki Mission station is a beautiful clearing overlooking the Zambezi from an elevated position, which is the site of a number of missionary graves. On the right is the grave of Jay and Katrina Erickson. Jay served as the mission’s pilot in 2012 and he and his wife were tragically killed aged 26 in a flying accident, making instant orphans of their two little girls, 3 years old and 16 months old.

The uncertainties of life are magnified from the perspective of a rural Zambian hospital, but we would all do well to remember our fragility. The book of Job puts it poetically: “Mortals, born of woman, are of few days and full of trouble. They spring up like flowers and wither away; like fleeting shadows, they do not endure” (Job 14: 1-2).

 

For Jess and I, the only clear certainties lie ahead of us, in the life to come. We do not hold ourselves to be sufficiently righteous to enter heaven; rather, we know the inadequacy of our attempts at true goodness and the adequacy of faith in Jesus Christ. As we approach Easter time we remember that He absorbed in his body the wrath of God against sin that we deserved to bear. His subsequent victory over death provides proof that we too can know eternal life. The apostle Paul said, “If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied. But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the first-fruits of those who have fallen asleep. For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive” (1 Corinthians 15:19-22)

 

Shortly before his life on this earth ended, Jay Erickson wrote some reflections on death in their family blog, which I quote from here:

 

“Oddly enough, I (Jay) have been pondering the concept of death since arriving at Chitokoloki. Living next door to a bush hospital, we hear quite clearly the wails of mourning with each death. And these occur frequently, being about every other day.  In addition, I have been reading through Israel’s wanderings through the wilderness and all the times God’s wrath was poured out such that each time thousands were consumed, bitten, swallowed, or otherwise perished. Still again, I have been reading Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis, which though a fictional work, deals philosophically with death. Even in eating meat here when I saw the creature alive that morning reminds me of the topic.

 I did not plan the correlation, but it caused me to think along these lines and realize again in a new way that there is nothing sad about the death of a Christian. The only sadness (and I do not intend to belittle this aspect) is in the loss of companionship by those left behind. And yet, to contrast this, the level of tragedy is so vast for the passing of an unbeliever. To borrow from physics, it seems the “equal and opposite reaction.”

 It warms my heart to hear the frequent and fervent preaching of the Gospel here. Perhaps it is the real presence of death here that we seem so surgically removed from in the USA which is the motivation.  At any rate, I hope it will inspire me to get over those inhibitions which so easily hinder me from speaking.

I will close with a quote from C.S. Lewis which is at the foundation of my thinking: “You don't have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body.” And I know that when this body dies, my soul will get a new one.”