Grouse or Give - My Choice

May 1997

I wonder where this all began, this attitude that we deserve, are owed or have the right to a life unencumbered with tragedy, disease and disappointment. It is an issue that everyone who had polio runs into. If we didn’t think of it ourselves, someone else brought it up. I can’t count the number of times people have said, “You didn’t deserve that,” about my original polio and again about my post-polio condition. You mean I deserved not to get the disease and it’s caboose? What special merit do I have above anyone else? Who did deserve it? The virus was there, and was going to invade, not on some moral basis of deservedness or rights, but by route of physical susceptibility or -- who knows? As for me, I’m not going to waste my energies grousing over whether I “deserved” this or not. All that leads to is anger, bitterness, despair and a bunch of other things that give people maybe heart disease and surely unhappiness. No, thank you. So, what are the other choices? Ignore or deny? Those aren’t healthy alternatives, either. My choice ... well, let me tell you a story that will explain it better.

During the time that I was a missionary in Irian Jaya, Indonesia, way back up in the interior mountains at Korupun, which is accessible only by single-engine airplane, helicopter or foot, there was an unusual up-surge of polio among the Kimyal tribe I worked with. Polio is endemic in Irian Jaya, and at that time there was no vaccine available for most of the tribes. In fact, they have only very basic medicine of any kind.

During this bad siege of polio, 3-yr.-old Meeyus was hit hard. I watched his paralyzed limbs partially recover, toes and fingers first, as mine had after I contracted polio at the age of five. Watching Meeyus mirror so many of my memories was uncanny. He, however, will have no hospital memories because there is no rehabilitation hospital or center available for him. When Meeyus's parents brought him to me and asked, "Can't you do for him what the doctors did for you when you got polio?" I had to tell them no, there were no doctors or therapists there who could give Meeyus the help I had received.

I described to Meeyus's parents the physical therapy I had been given, simplified it to what they could do and impressed upon them that they must do what they could. Meeyus progressed from scooting along the muddy paths on his bottom to crawling on all fours, but there his progress stopped. At least he was somewhat more up out of the mud crawling rather than scooting. I hear that now, as a teen-ager, he gets around by sort of a hop-crawl. He has no braces, no wheelchair (nothing wheeled could negotiate those muddy, rocky mountain paths anyway) -- none of the medical help and aids that I had and have.

So now, back to the “rights” question. Let me turn it around. Why am I so blessed as to have all of this medical help, relative ease of accessibility and conveniences that make life comfortable and easier, when most others in the world who have my disease, are not so fortunate? The positive inequities of life are no more my right or what I deserve than the negative ones are. Fussing over them is unproductive at best, destructive at worst.

I prefer to ask another question: “What do I do with what I’ve been given?” The answer to that is where I find joy, not bitterness; peace, not turmoil.

I believe that God did not give me these advantages to just hug to myself or to accept without passing along what I can to others in gratitude. They are a part of God’s love from which He says not even trouble or hardship can separate us. But his love isn’t just for me. I couldn’t stand not to pass it on. In Meeyus’s case, all I could pass on medically was the encouragement and advice I gave his parents. Indonesian and Irian Jaya politics and culture make it impossible for him to be taken anywhere else for help.

And in my own country and culture? The same medical advantages are there for anyone - at least theoretically. In some cases someone might need some help to access it; I can point them in the right direction. Another time someone needs a look at the right-side-up perspective of gratitude in place of the upside-down attitude of resentment. That is a treasure I must share. You might say I’m hooked on the “high” of the joy there is in passing the love along. Through the prophet Isaiah, God explained to the Jews a wonderful principle. Though the examples are not exactly what I’m talking about, the principle certainly fits. He said, “...if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed, then your light will rise in the darkness, and your night will become like the noonday.” (Isaiah 58:10)

Sure, my life has some darkness and some black nights. But I’m not going to spend my energy uselessly comparing my dark times with someone else’s. No! Instead, I want to spread the love, and turn the darkness to light and the night to noonday. Now, really -- doesn’t that beat the alternative?