Finding Hope in Unexpected Places
Dr. Francis Collins, head of the Human Genome Project, is one of the world’s leading scientists.
He is also a man of unshakeable faith in God and the way of Jesus. In his book, The Language of God, Dr. Collins relates a story about a trip to volunteer in a small Nigerian hospital.
When he arrived at the small village of Eku, he was overwhelmed by the limited medical equipment, the lack of medicine, and the complications of the advanced diseases before patients ever arrived at the hospital. Dr. Collins’ high hopes for making a significant difference in the lives of the villagers soon turned to discouragement, as he doubted he could help anyone in such an environment.
One afternoon, a young farmer was brought to the hospital by his family. The farmer had massive swelling in his legs and a large amount of fluid in the pericardial sac around his heart due to advanced tuberculosis. Drugs would not act fast enough to save the man’s life, and the only other option in the primitive conditions was to drain the fluid from around his heart by inserting a large-bore needle in his chest. The choice was to attempt the risky procedure or watch the man die.
Dr. Collins explained the procedure and the risks, and the young farmer told him to proceed.
After a harrowing moment of thinking he had punctured the heart of the man, he drained the fluid from around his heart.
In less than twenty-four hours, the farmer’s condition dramatically improved.
Instead of hope and happiness for helping the man, the thoughts of the farmer’s limited chances for long life kept haunting Dr. Collins. He visited the man the next morning, finding him reading his Bible.
Seeing the discouragement in Dr. Collins’s face, the young man said to him, “I get the sense you are wondering why you came here. I have an answer for you. You came here for one reason. You came here for me.” Dr. Collins reveals his thoughts to the young farmer’s words:
I was stunned. Stunned that he could see so clearly into my heart, but even more stunned at the words he was speaking. I had plunged a needle close to his heart; he had directly impaled mine. With a few simple words, he had put my grandiose dreams of being the great white doctor, healing the African millions, to shame. He was right. We are each called to reach out to others. On rare occasions, that can happen on a grand scale. But most of the time, it happens in simple acts of kindness of one person to another. Those are the events that really matter.
Dr. Collins discovered that the act of kindness and caring is the most meaningful of all human experiences-a burden lifted. He concluded:
This was true north. And the compass pointed not at self-glorification, or at materialism, or even medical science–instead, it pointed at the goodness that we all hope desperately to find within ourselves and others. I also saw more clearly than ever before the author of that goodness and truth, the real True North, God himself, revealing His holy nature by the way in which He has written this desire to seek goodness in all of our hearts.1
What Dr. Collins discovered is what C.S. Lewis called, agape. It is the love that wills our good and the good of others. It seeks no repayment. It is an affront to materialism and naturalism that dismisses the landscape of the spiritual. And it is the greatest joy that one can experience as Dr. Collins attests.
What is your True North?
1Francis S. Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (New York, NY: Free Press, 2006), pp. 213-18.
