Since I stepped out of the Chinggis Khan airport in the cold evening of February, the question: “Why am I here?” has always preoccupied me.
E.M Forster in the book “The Longest Journey” once said: “A life without an ideal would be like a sky without a sun.” And I think it is, it would be a pity of having a life without purpose- like this bird forever chained and incapable of doing what it was meant to do: To Fly.
What is my purpose here and why did I take this risk?
I was reminded how it all started: my first volunteering experience for UP Pahinungod in a remote town in Bicol Region seven years ago. I spent my entire two month summer vacation in a small community in Buhi, Camarines Sur while all of my college classmates were having their respite from the stressful hospital duties and academic classes. I was eighteen that time and I was at the right time and place of finally realizing what I want to be after my college.
We were popular in that small community, news about the three UP volunteers spread even before I set up my mosquito net on the day we arrived. They particularly placed me in a family of a bed-ridden elderly woman. I was a young nurse aspirant who back then knew nothing but taking people’s vital signs and a little pharmacodynamics of few over-the-counter medicines. I knew nothing on saving lives and that time I wasn’t ready of saving lives. Not yet.
For two months, I had my own dose of “Tuesdays with Morrie”- different from the actual dirty job of nurses during emergencies. Although I did use the sphygmomanometer for a couple of times, had small health education outside the “sari-sari” store I was helping out and had been awaken at 2 o’clock in the morning of people having high blood pressure. It was not a “Nursing Spectacle” but it ignited my courage to take small faithful risks for the great plan that the Lord has for me.
Because His plans are higher than mine and His thoughts surpass my thoughts, He allowed people and circumstances into my life and molded them into His perfectly designed plan. Patients, friends, obstacles and victories- all took part in crafting me into the person I am now.
After I finished my Nursing degree, I worked as a researcher for five months. My boss who has and always been my Christian mentor would remind me not only of allowing myself into God’s intricate plan but to abide by it with a joyful and humble heart. With all the countless nights of doing statistical analyses for her pesticides researches and daydreaming about carbamates and organophosphates for five months, my attention was drawn into doing health researches.
Immediately after my short stint in the UP-National Institutes of Health (UP-NIH), God positioned me in a charity ward in a tertiary hospital. I was young and idealist at that time, filled with a strong enthusiasm to try out what I had learned in college. Every day, I hoped for new and complex procedures; every minute, I was thrilled of having my hands and uniform splattered with blood and intravenous medicines.
But I was disillusioned I could not do the complex nursing procedures I wanted to try out; I was surrounded by children and parents who had either life or death. I witnessed suffering and been part of it, I had seen how death snatched a child’s life in seconds and parents doing nothing to ease their child’s suffering. I had wept with them and wept for them. God positioned me especially in a place where I could see pain and affliction because He wants my hands to be dirty. He wanted them to be His helping hands. When you are a fresh nurse, you thought of yourself as someone who could save lives, I had once thought myself that way. But then, God rebuked me and made clear that I can never save a life, not ever; I could not even save my own. I can only touch people’s lives as much as how they had touched mine.
Therefore, after five years of working as a nurse in a hospital, here I am in a foreign land with not a single idea of why I am here. Taking a post-graduate course in Public Health Epidemiology because of my interest of doing researches probably inaugurated this volunteering. I do admit that I have always envisioned myself as a volunteer, probably as grandiose as working in WHO doing health researches. I may not have the luxury of travelling to countries by whim nor a hefty bank account, but I will go wherever He wants me to go, do whatever He wants me to do.
I don’t have my own future figured out in a spreadsheet. I only have a full confidence that this risk I am taking now is a result of a mustard seed faith of the One who created this plan. With a joyful and humble heart, I have a full assurance in Him who would help me get through this. I am willing to get my hands dirty for Him because I know that…
my sky has its sun in Him.
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| Sunset at Saishand Train Station |
Isaiah 55: 8-12 ( The Message Bible)
“ I don’t think the way you think. The way you work isn’t the way I work.” God’s Decree. For as the sky soars high above earth, so the way I work surpasses the way you work, and the way I think is beyond the way you think.
Just as rain and snow descend from the skies and don’t go back until they’ve watered the earth. Doing their work of making things grow and blossom, producing seeds for farmers and food for the hungry, so will that words that come out of my mouth not come back empty-handed. They’ll do the work I sent them to do, they’ll complete the assignment I gave them.”
