The Source of Missional Power
What would cause a physician to run toward the Ebola epidemic in West Africa?
“This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.” — 1 John 4:10
Dr. Ian Crozier was born in Masvingo, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). When he was ten years old, his family moved to the United States and he became an American citizen. He attended medical school at Vanderbilt University on scholarship, specializing in infectious diseases.
Eventually, his heart led him back to Africa.
While living in Kampala, Uganda in 2014, treating patients with H.I.V. and training doctors at the Infectious Diseases Institute, the Ebola epidemic broke out in West Africa.
Seeing such a desperate need and having skills to help, Dr. Crozier immediately signed on with the World Health Organization—without pay—and by August was in Sierra Leone, at the very heart of the epidemic.
The epidemic was even more heart-wrenching than he had imagined — the sights, the sounds, the smells, the steady stream of deaths. The afflicted arrived day and night. Even though the facility was mopped with chlorine several times a day, blood, stool, and vomit were ever-present.
What would cause someone to intentionally enter that environment—to volunteer?
On the morning of Saturday, Sept. 6, during rounds on the ward, Dr. Crozier developed a headache. Then a fever. Three days later he was on route via airplane to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta.
As his blood teemed with the virus, he became delirious, sustaining a temperature of 104, his heartbeat grew faint, and his lungs, liver, and kidneys began to fail.
During his forty days in the hospital, there were dark stretches when his doctors and his family feared he would die, or at least sustain severe brain damage.
Infectious-disease specialist, Dr. Jay Varkey commented, “Ian was by far the sickest patient with Ebola virus that we’ve cared for at Emory.”
What would cause someone to volunteer to serve in those conditions? Why would someone risk so much for so little? Why expose yourself to the stench of someone else’s sickness?
Love.
The kind of love that drove Jesus to volunteer, coming from the glory of heaven to our sin-sick world to save afflicted sinners.
It is the kind of love that moved Jesus to enter our stench and to become our sickness, where on a cross he received the wounds that would cure us of the disease with the antivirus of his blood.
This is love.
Or as John puts it in 1 John 4:10, “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.”
Such astonishing love is the source for the missional power that motivates us to volunteer to be conduits of the same love we’ve received.
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