Never Miss an Assignment

I passed by a woman on the side of the road in Redlands yesterday, at a freeway offramp, who looked sick… really sick. She had a cardboard sign in her hand, but her head was hanging down, and so was the sign. I couldn’t read the sign but didn’t need to. My eyes could see and my heart could feel her despair by her body language alone. I was wishing I could help her or heal her but drove on instead, feeling sad and bad.

I know what you’re thinking, same thing I was thinking. Another drug addicted, alcoholic loser who will waste the money I give her on the wrong things. But what if that wasn’t the case. What if she was simply sick, or hurt, or suffering, and couldn’t afford a doctor? There’s no way to know her story, but it did get me thinking. Doctors and nurses are so important to this world we live in and always have been. They go to school and study medicine for years incurring huge student loans and then spend most of their time and energy helping and healing others. That point was driven home in my own life recently…

Due to a dental procedure gone wrong, I ended up with a very painful TMJD situation. Which basically meant my jaw on one side was locked up and I couldn’t open my mouth more than an inch without severe pain. An oral surgeon gave me warm compresses and exercises to stretch the jaw muscle, but that didn’t work. So he offered me a very painful and painfully expensive procedure that might (or might not) help. I didn’t want to spend $2K and go through even more pain, so at that point, I found myself very “hangry” to the max.

And then a two-part miracle happened! My wife put a notice on social media in our area asking if anyone had suggestions to fix my jaw problem. And someone responded! A doctor who lives in our neighborhood said he has had great success with solving TMJD problems. I went to see him for 15 minutes at a time, every other day, for two weeks, and my jaw is almost 100% better now. That’s the first part of the miracle. The second part is that he would not accept payment for helping me. He said, “Sometimes God’s love for us only shows up through his people - and it’s my promise to Him to never miss an assignment.”

A good physician treats the disease. A great physician treats the patient with the disease.

~ Sir William Osler, circa 1849