Transference

I lived in China during three of my college summers. While there I volunteered a couple of times in an orphanage located just outside the city limits of Shenyang, which is located in the Liaoning Province in the northeast, about a day's train ride from the North Korean border.

One of the orphanages I volunteered at was situated in the middle of rice fields as far as the eye could see. This photo was taken not too far from the orphanage. This couple was excited to see two foreigners in their neck of the woods.


One particular morning I was to bathe a small boy who couldn't have been more than a couple of months old and who lay in a crib surrounded by his own waste. His eyes were dried shut by layers of dried mucus, and his whole body was rigid and trembling terribly. He was dying, and he had not been attended to in quite some time. Unfortunately, limited resources breed a survival of the fittest mentality in such situations. The resources are portioned to the strong while the dying often die without dignity. I hated how this sight made me feel. Helpless. Desperate. Heartbroken. Angry. I wanted to leave.

As I began to bathe him, he wailed a raspy cry that sent chills down my spine, and this only increased as I had to scrape off all the layers of dried mucus from his eyes. It was one of the worst experiences I had while in China. I cried the whole time.

I couldn't understand how a loving God would allow such things to exist. Why would he even put me in a situation that I actually had very little impact on? Sure, I bathed a dying baby. Kudos to Ann. But what difference was I really making? I left that day feeling so thoroughly defeated. While there, I heard God whisper to me, "If you've done it unto the least of them, you've done it unto Me," to which I initially replied, "Ok. I have no idea what that really means, and it doesn't make me feel any better. Why would you say that?"

Of all the things God could have said, why that? Years later I've come to a few conclusions. God intentionally placed me in a situation I would never recover from to create in me a capacity for mercy manufactured by unnatural means. I learned perhaps the most important lesson of my life: to follow Jesus necessitates a willingness to touch the wounds of others. God was trying to teach me that change will never take place in isolation. The change God is adamant for requires more than just passion. It requires intentionality, sacrifice, and engagement -- a willingness to be scarred with the pain of others.

I am still haunted by a dying child and his grotesque condition. Yet in him I saw a vision of myself. That infant's physical condition mirrored my own spiritual and emotional condition. I had been drowning and was drowning still in years of depression and inner pain. I had wounds that would not heal no matter what I did or who I turned to. My eyes were dried shut with the mucus of lesser gods and destructive habits, which ultimately became a breeding ground for an ever increasing craving for an ever diminishing pleasure, as C.S. Lewis says. I was never strong enough to face my own pain though I pretended otherwise. There can possibly be no greater misery than suffering alone.

Yet somewhere in all this, I discovered a God who stores up resources for those who admit they are unfit for survival apart from his grace. Unlike me God is never afraid to touch our wounds or hear our ragged confessions. In this way God makes the weak strong and transforms those unfit for anything good into those who stand to stoop down and embrace others who are hurting.

When God said, "you've done it unto Me," he wasn't trying to make me feel better. In fact, when it comes to doing the right thing, my comfort level has never been his priority. Here I discovered a profound observation and irony. God rendered my own healing incomplete until I reached out to touch the wounds of a dying orphan (Isaiah 58:10-11). I wasn't at that orphanage that day to transform an institution. I was there to make an invisible God tangible to someone in excruciating pain and this transference would both scar and heal me simultaneously.

There is a good God. And though he gets misrepresented and his message and mysteries reduced to sound-bite preaching and cheap gospel peddling, he is unchanged and his mission remains (Luke 4:18-19). And this is a mission and a God I will gladly orient my life around.