six hundred

Update #3 (5 August, 10:30 Africa time) : 239 of the patients are being prayed for. That is almost half, in less than 2 days. Keep it up. Spread the word. Pray.

Update #2 (4 August, 19:30 Africa time) : 164 names have been spoken for. God is stirring up hearts, and I am so humbled to be a part of His process in all of this.

Update #1 (4 August, 12:30 Africa time) : 102 of the names on the pink sheets have been e-mailed out across the world, and people are starting to pray.



We laid them out on empty stretchers in the recovery room. Six hundred pink sheets, filled with information we had gathered at screenings throughout the outreach. From all over Togo they came to us, and we sat with them, learned their names, recorded their pain, filed their stories in a desk drawer and asked them to wait for their healing.

Six hundred pink sheets.

They were the ones we turned away. The ones who were too sick or not sick enough. The ones who missed their surgery dates and couldn't be rescheduled because there were hundreds more to take their places. The ones we tried to call but couldn't reach.

Six hundred of them, and when I looked at all the pages strewn across the room I wanted to scream.

Because they've always been there. They're in every country we visit, but we've never seen them before, never made it to their villages to peer into the darkness of their little mud huts and bring them into the light. And this time we did, this time we drove to meet them and we said we'd call if we could help and then we never did.

Instead we laid them all out in an empty room and we did the only thing left to us. We prayed. We didn't finish today; there were too many, so we're going to do it again tomorrow. We prayed over each one of them. Over Yema, the little boy who just turned one in July, too small for his cleft lip to be fixed but probably not getting enough to eat at home because of it. Over Maka, eight years old with a left arm that can't straighten and fingers crippled from the burns he suffered when he was two. Over Abel, a young man with a hernia the size of a football who we tried to call and who never picked up his phone and so his paper was moved to the back of the pile again.

Over Yema and Maka and Abel and hundreds more, lives reduced to words on a sheet of pink papers. A pile of cleft lips. Important, more often than not checked on the bottom of the forms, no, no, no scrawled across the tops when we realized that time had run out. A handful of tumors, all marked positive for HIV and turned away because in the time it would have taken for them to get their CD4 counts done, we would have found five more to replace each one of them.

I cried this afternoon. Frustrated, angry tears, and I don't think I've ever been so aware of the scope of the need here in West Africa. By the end of an outreach, we usually have a few pink sheets left in the drawer in the OR office, lumps and bumps that didn't quite make it into the surgery schedule but weren't going to mean the difference between life and death. This time we found the forgotten, called out to the ones who've never heard the voice of hope and then we turned away because the time was too short and there were too many of them.

Six hundred pink sheets. Hundreds and thousands more sleeping on dirt floors tonight, nursing their pain and their fears as we get ready to sail away.

Pray with us. Please pray with us.

If you'd like to pray specifically for a patient, let me know in a comment or an e-mail, and I'll head down to the office and choose one or five or twenty names for you. If it's children who touch your heart, I'll find you a child to pray for. If you're drawn to those who have suffered burns, there's a whole pile of them. There are mamas and papas, old men and little girls, and they have all been told no.

Wouldn't it be incredible if we could find six hundred people willing to pray for these six hundred?

Please pray with us.