Day 19: Skin in the Game

Then he said to them all, “If anyone wants to follow after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross daily, and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life because of me will save it.” Luke 9:23–24

After I began the process of adopting Missy, who is from Haiti, someone sent me a couple of really cool “Pray for Haiti” baseball T-shirts. I loved wearing those T-shirts because they inevitably led to conversations with people in Starbucks about how it was our Christian responsibility in a First World context to help oppressed people groups in Third World countries. These people make less in a day than we Americans spend on a cup of fancy coffee—how in the world can we withhold the blessings God has given us when we know this? I usually walked away from those impassioned chats in my hipster Haiti T-shirt feeling pretty darn good about myself.

But then my friend Tracie invited me to join her and volunteer for a medical mission trip, which would actually work out perfectly, as the trip was scheduled a few days before my and Missy’s next planned visit in Haiti. As God would have it, this service-oriented mission dovetailed perfectly with my calendar.

Since I have no medical experience—I literally wrote “lifting heavy things and verbal encouragement” in the blank on the form where we were supposed to describe any useful skills we had that pertained to the project—I ended up being assigned to assist a nurse in the “Scabies Clinic.” This, of course, meant I stood in 110-degree heat in an outdoor pavilion under a tin roof and washed, then applied antibiotic ointment to a seemingly endless line of men, women, children, and infants whose skin was infested by scabies.

If you aren’t familiar with scabies, it’s a highly contagious, communicable disease caused when mites—sometimes referred to as body lice—burrow under human skin. Which of course causes manic itching, which leads to open sores, which can lead to much more serious, opportunistic infections and illness, especially in babies and children already suffering in impoverished conditions. And because little kids and infants who are suffering from scabies are typically fussy because they’re so miserable, I ended up cuddling most of them so they’d trust me enough to wash their wounds and cover their “owies” with cream.

It was easy to prance around in a “Pray for Haiti” T-shirt in an air-conditioned coffee shop in Middle Tennessee, but it wasn’t quite so easy to seal it (and all the other clothes I brought back from Haiti) in a plastic bag and burn it because I’d come home itchy and infected, too. We all need reminders that there is a huge difference between coaching from the spiritual sidelines and putting skin in the game. Between advertising for the cause and actually joining it. Between talking about it from afar and getting close enough for it to affect our comfort. God may not teach you this through a Scabies Clinic like He did me, but I wonder, how might He be trying to teach you this very thing in your own context?

• Where are you sacrificing time, money, and energy for the sake of the Gospel?
• On a scale of 1–10, with 1 being “sitting unconcerned on the sidelines” and 10 being “wearing a jersey covered in blood, sweat, and tears,” how invested are you in being the hands and feet of Jesus Christ to a lost and broken world?
• What ministry or cause might God be calling you to get close enough for discomfort?