Yesterday during the course of my duties as a senior resident on the Infectious Diseases service I had the pleasure to meet a most interesting woman from Africa. 

A refugee from the wars in Africa, orphaned at a young age and never having known her parents, she eventually ended up in, of all places, Tucson, AZ.   Her life has been punctuated by loss and adversity - now a vexing problem has manifested itself a few of her vital organs, as well as some of the cell lines of her blood involved in immunity and clotting.  Quiet, reserved, even withdrawn, she has a difficult time meeting your eyes when talking with her.

We have no idea what’s wrong -- a few possibilities perhaps, but nothing to grasp and hold before her to say “Aha, here’s the problem”.

To make the problem more difficult, she speaks only Swahili.  Fortunately the hospital has a contract with a translation service that can provide translators for nearly every major language on this earth.   We’ve become fast friends with their only Swahili translator, a thick-accented man whose visage I enjoy imaging when using him to translate via our translator phone (the service involves a special phone that merely requires us to dial the language we want and the system contacts the translator in amazingly rapid fashion).

I couldn’t think of a person whose life has been so markedly different from my own.  Yet during my interview with her yesterday, I could find a few points where we could understand one another, and I finally got a hint of a smile from her weathered, beaten face when I joked about us sharing the commonality of having grown up “in the hills”.  She thought the phrase “hillbilly” quite hilarious, in fact.

But what an amazing change came over her when we learned we each shared an even more common bond - belief in our Lord Jesus as Saviour and Lord.

Her face, nay, her entire being lightened up, and it seemed pure love flowed forth from her as she grasped my hand in delight.  I was among several Christians she had already met, she said, and it was good to know that there were doctors in the hospital who could understand her love of God. 

Before I left, I shook her hand, and I pointed to our hands, black and white, then to the sky above.  “See, though our hands are  different colors, before God we’re exactly the same”.

And this time, it was she who didn’t need a translator.