WE ARE HIS HANDS
by Vicki Penwell, founder of Mercy In Action
For you, O Lord, have delivered my soul from death, my eyes from tears, my feet from stumbling, that I may walk before the Lord in the land of the living. - Pslam 116:8-9
I lay in my bed, unable to sleep, my mind strung out on emotions. Two weeks earlier I had come to the Philippines to run Gentle Hands clinic, a small maternity home for the poor in Manila. The missionary couple who started the clinic had returned to Canada on furlough for a year. They had been faced with the necessity of shutting down the entire ministry, until God called a few of us to carry on the work. We responded by putting together a team, raising the operating budget, and traveling across the ocean to meet the need.
We delivered on average one baby a day at Gentle Hands. It was a common occurrence for the wretchedly impoverished mothers to experience problems in childbirth. As midwives we dreaded malnutrition more than anything, because nothing complicates childbirth like not enough to eat during pregnancy. It seems as if every calamity that hell can conjure up is visited on the nutritionally-deficient mom and her stunted, frail little babe within. Especially at risk are the mothers who have already borne too many children, too close together. Their overworked and exhausted bodies have no chance to recover before the next pregnancy comes along.
Before the existence of this free maternity clinic, most poor mothers in the area delivered in the slums, with no trained birth attendant to help them. Others managed to borrow enough money to deliver in the charity hospital, where staff were overworked and often uncaring, and conditions were deplorably unsanitary. Either way, many of their babies died, and sometimes the mothers did too.
Statistics report that in the Philippines one mother dies in childbirth on average every six hours, while one newborn baby dies every five minutes.
Death was like a wolf, always baying at the door, and at times we were forced to fight with our whole arsenal of medical weapons and skills. It was a war - us against the statistics. Usually we won. For the time we were running the clinic our infant mortality rate was four times lower than the nation as a whole, and we had no maternal deaths. But even when we won, the battles wore us down, drained us, as we poured out everyting we had to save the mothers and children.
Now it was two in the morning, and I couldn't stop thinking about the events of the previous evening. Elena and Fidela were friends, both from the same impoverished barrio. They had gone into labor a few hours apart. After giving birth, both of them had come closer to dying from postpartum hemorrhages than I ever hoped to see.
Hours after the crisis was over, when both mothers and babies were finally tucked safely into bed for the night, I went up to my room. When sleep refused to claim me, I finally got up and put on some music. The Vineyard song "Lord of the Poor" began to play, and as I listened, it became my prayer:
Lord of the poor
God of the weak and helpless ones
Stretch out Your arm
And be a safe refuge for the ones
Who have no hope at all.
Arise Oh Lord and have compassion
On the poor and needy ones.
Suddenly I was sobbing as the words in the chorus, "Arise Oh Lord," repeated over and over. My heart was breaking for the people around me: for the mothers who sometimes didn't survive what should be the most natural of events; for parents who wouldn't choose names for their babies until days after the birth because so many died young; for all the fatherless, weak, and helpless ones with no hope at all. I was weeping this song out as the deepest intercession to the Lord.
"Arise! Do something! Have compassion!"
In the midst of my anguish, the still quiet voice of the Lord came to me and said, so gently, " I have arisen, and you are My hands."
God rarely tells us what might have been. Perhaps He knew how desperately I need reassurance that I was in His will. Just before I came to run this clinic, some people whose opinion I valued had questioned the validity of mercy ministries like this. Now, in the middle of the night, in the middle of my pain and intercession, the word of the Lord came to me. He spoke to me of the two mothers resting peacefully downstairs, with their newborns beside them in bed. For Elena it was her seventh child; for Fidela, her ninth baby. God revealed to me that 16 children would have been orphaned that night alone if the clinic had been closed as planned, if these two mothers had not received medical intervention, if I had not obeyed the call to come to Manila
" I have arisen, and you are My hands." It was a heavy, heavy word.
Through that experience I came to understand a little better how His mercy works, and the role our obedience plays in it. Jesus uses us to advance His kingdom here on earth, as channels through whcih He can intervene in what might have been. We are His hands.