Perspective at the Lowest Point

(Transcript of a talk given to an adult Sunday School class mid-1996, before treatment at Futures Unlimited, Inc.)

[Tell us a little about Irian Jaya and what brought you over there in the first place.]

Irian Jaya is the Indonesian half of New Guinea, just right above Australia. It’s the eastern-most province of Indonesia. It is as far from Jakarta, which is the capital of Indonesia, as Seattle is from New York. Indonesia is a long country, the biggest archipelego, actually, in the world. Where I was in Irian Jaya was way interior in the mountains, working with a mountain tribe, the Kimyal tribe, at a place called Korupun. These people were - I hate to use the term but, for lack of better - just emerging from the stone age, some would say. Actually, now they are just coming back to what they were originally, as God created us all. And I was there for 17 years doing Bible translation for them, mainly, and involved in all sorts of other things, too.

[Elinor, a few years ago the Lord changed some physical things in your life. You had planned on going back (to Indonesia), and he caused some things to upset that a little bit. Can you tell us a little bit about that?]

Yeah, sure.

It was in 1991 that I came back to Spokane. I had polio as a child. I was five years old when I had polio. I don’t know how much about polio some of you know. Some are of the generation that was alive and remember the terror of the epidemics, the polio epidemics, before the vaccination was first available in 1955. I got polio in 1952.

There are three kinds of polio. There is spinal, or paralytic polio, which is what attacks the limbs mostly. There is bulbar polio; that attacks the autonomic function. That’s why people were in iron lungs, because they could not breathe on their own. The polio attacked the nerves that operate your autonomic function. Not just the lungs, but heart and intestines and blood vessels and all kinds of things. And then there is supposedly non-paralytic polio, but... yeah.

I had both spinal and bulbar polio, and was in the hospital for seven months. The doctors told my parents that if I lived, and I may not even live, that I would be an invalid all my life. I had a very bad case. In fact, it was three months before I could even wiggle a big toe. But the Lord had other plans for my life, and I eventually made it to Irian, but then in - actually I think it was already in 1990 - that I began to know that something was going on. Something was not right in my body. I had a big crisis, I guess you’d say in April of ‘91 where my legs just gave out on me. I couldn’t stand on them, even. And just terrible terrible, terrible pain. And the pain was not just in my legs. It was like my whole -- as I described it to one of the doctors out there -- my whole central nervous system just felt like it was exploding. And I asked her what was going on, this missionary doctor. I said, “Do you think it could be post-polio?” I didn’t know anything about post-polio, except for five minutes that I had heard on Voice of America about it. She said, “What’s that?” But I wrote her a letter more clearly explaining my symptoms what was going on. I didn’t want to broadcast this over the radio; the whole island listens in to these things. She got the letter the day a tourist came walking through her remote mountain station. A tourist who happened to be an American neurologist. She showed the letter to him, and he said, “This gal needs to get back to the States for evaluation.” And so I came back in August of ‘91, and four days latter, I was diagnosed as having post-polio.

[It has been Elinor’s desire to go back, of course, deep desire to go back. A couple of years ago, Roger and Gail went back with you for a little bit, and that was a time for you to go back and just say, “I don’t know what they Lord has in my life,” -- unless you’re going to share that in a few minutes, so I’m just going to stop right now. (then question & answer specifically to do with first contact with Northview.]

What Roger asked me to talk about this morning ... he said you have been studying through 2 Corinthians, and last week anyway, you were in chapter 12, particularly in the part of chapter 12 there where Paul talks about his infirmity, and the principle there about God’s power showing up through our weaknesses.

Just to review for you, Paul said, “To keep me from becoming conceited because of these surpassingly great revelations, there was given me a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But he said to me, ’My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ's power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ's sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.”

There is a real principle here. Last night I was going through this again, just getting some thoughts fresh in my mind about this. This has been my motivating goal, I guess you’d say. My life verse, whatever - or passage - from the time I was in Bible School, at a time that I was really questioning the Lord. “Why did you even let this happen to me? Why did I have to have polio to begin with?” I knew that in my heart I really wanted, and felt the Lord was leading me to be a missionary overseas, and I knew that would very difficult -- for one thing I knew it would be difficult to persuade a mission board to let me do it! I thought, “You know it would be so much easier, if I hadn’t had this polio. I remember reading as a 20-yr. old, God said, “My grace is sufficient. For you. That’s enough. That’s all. For my power is made perfect in weakness.”

Notice those words, “sufficient,” that means enough, doesn’t it? It means enough. Perfect, made perfect. “My power is made perfect in weakness.” Now wait a minute! Isn’t God’s power already perfect? How can our weakness make God’s power more perfect than it already is? While you’re contemplating that one, let me give you another one. Look at Colossians, something else Paul says here -- Colossians 1:24, where Paul says, “Now I rejoice in what was suffered for you, and I fill up in my flesh what is still lacking in regard to Christ's afflictions, for the sake of his body, which is the church.”

Hold on here! Does Paul have right theology? What was lacking in regard to Christ’s affliction? What is he talking about? Put these two things together. What is he talking about? What does it mean?

I really didn’t understand this myself for a long time, until finally it dawned on me what Paul was talking about. When Christ was on the earth, he personified God, didn’t he? He was the flesh and blood personification of God that people could see. They could see who God was by what Christ did. They could see how God loves by how Christ loved. Is he on the earth now in flesh and blood? Well... what does Paul say in Ephesians? He talks about Christ being the head of the Body. What’s the rest of the body? It’s us, isn’t it? It’s us! We now are God with skin on, if you can put it that way. You’ve got to be a little bit careful not get too carried away. But really, we are what shows God to the people around us.

Jesus isn’t here now. We are, though. We are the ones who alongside our neighbors, alongside other people in the world, show them Christ. When I suffer what other people in the world suffer, yet with a power and a joy that they don’t have, what does it say to them? It ought to show them, “Hey, something is different here. This person has something else And they can’t be around me very long before knowing what that is. That it’s the Lord. That is the difference, and that’s what they ought to see.

When I returned to Korupun after my second furlough, the Kimyals had a welcome back feast, which is a common thing for them to do. I noticed that after that they started calling me by a different name. Up until then, they had called me, “Elinot,” which was the best they could do with my name. But now they started calling me, “Yan Meeli Gel,” or just “Yan Meeli,” for short. “Yan Meeli Gel,” means “Bad Legs Woman,” and “Yan Meeli” is just “Bad Legs.” I knew that there had to be a special reason that they were calling me that -- besides the obvious -- and I knew it wasn’t a derogatory thing. If someone called you that in this society, it wouldn’t be too well accepted. Not politically correct and all that. And so I asked Siud one day -- Siud was the local pastor -- I said, “Siud, I notice people are calling me Bad Legs. How come?” And he said, “Weren’t you listening?” and I said, “Uh, listening to what?” He said, “At the feast that we had. When I announced to everybody that that was your name now.” I said, “Oh! Umm... well, I know I have bad legs, but why did you call me that, why did you name me that?” And he said, “Because your bad legs are important to us. There are people in our villages who have Bad Legs, and they can’t go out of this valley. And yet God has brought you all the way over here to us, and there are people with good legs who have come here and they have left again, but God has helped you stay because he loves us, and he wants us to hear his word.”

Isn’t that neat? It really was, so I thought, “Wow! That’s a really neat name!”

But what was that? Did you see what that was? Up until then, all they had known of these Americans were big, strapping strong people, but here came one with weaknesses just like they have. And they could see, though, that God used those weaknesses in a particular way for them. That’s what this is talking about when Paul says, “God said, ‘No. My grace is all you need, because my power is perfected - made perfect - in weakness.’”

Not that God needs His power to be any better, but it is though our weaknesses that people see God’s power better. The mirror is wiped clean. It’s the same thing that he said there in Colossians.

It’s so different from when Roger and Gail went with me back to Irian. When I left Irian, I thought I was coming home for two months to get my knees fixed, and I’d be back. At least that’s what I told myself. And so I didn’t pack up anything, didn’t prepare to leave at all. Didn’t say goodby to the people, I just locked the door, got on the plane and left. Well, I came back to the States and was diagnosed with post-polio and was just really going down-hill fast by then. Two weeks after that I lost 80% of the use of my arms. And it was obvious I could never go back there, but I needed to go back to get a few things, but also to say goodby. I had to say goodby to the Kimyals. But by then I was too weak; I could not make the trip by myself. So, Roger and Gail volunteered to go and take me. Actually, Roger came a little bit later. Gail and Luke and I went first.

On the way to Irian, you have to stop at an island just north of the main island, a place called Biak, and you’re there for 12 hours before you get a flight across to the main island. There is a missionary there who invites missionaries travelling through to spend that twelve hours at the Bible School compound -- actually his house and Bible School compound there, to rest and spend the day. Have somewhere to be during those 12 hours. So we went over there, and close to lunchtime, of course I couldn’t walk, and there was no way then to carry my scooter on those little planes, so I had a wheelchair and Gail was pushing me in the wheelchair, pushing me in the main house where the bathroom was. I had to go to the bathroom. We went in there and this missionary says, “Why don’t you just put diapers on her? You know this is so unnecessary. If people in churches in the United States just had more faith.” And, umm, I didn’t ... I just you know ... I don’t even remember what I said. Just joked and let it roll off, but that really hurt. And later, when I was in the room while Gail and the others went down the street to go to this little restaurant to get some lunch and bring it back to me, I was thinking about that and I was crying. I said, “Lord, how can one of your people do that to another one?” What was the matter with his doctrine? He didn’t understand something very basic about God’s use of us. Take Job. Compare Job and Paul. Job was physically afflicted, wasn’t he? He was awfully sick, very sick. His whole body was infected to the point that it broke out in boils all over. And of course we know too that all his children were killed and his wife turned on him and all that. But physically, Job was very, very ill. God restored him. Did he restore Job because of his great faith? You read the book of Job. Job asked God questions that Paul never would have. Not that it was wrong for Job to ask those questions. God did not restore Job because of Job’s great faith. God did not say “no” to Paul because of Paul’s lack of faith. Rather, God knew what he wanted to do. He restored Job because in doing that, we would now have for generations after generation the story of Job in the Bible, and see God’s faithfulness, God’s power, but more than that, the tenacity of a man who said, “Though he slay me, yet will I trust him.” God did not restore Paul, because God said, “No, I want my power to show up in your weakness.” Very different view-point.

I think the Kimyals had a better handle on theology than that missionary did. There was another time when I first went to Irian where I was trying to learn the language and I was practicing and some little boys were sitting on the end of the airstrip with me. I was trying to figure out this one verb ending. I was telling them the story about when I got polio. I said, “And the doctors said, ‘Somagdoblul,’ she’ll die. And the little boys corrected me, and they said, “No. ‘Somagdobso.’” I said, “OK. What’s the difference? What does somagdobso mean?” They said, “She should die.” Meaning “for as sick as she is.” Then these little boys said, “But you didn’t, because God wanted you to come here.” They had their theology right, didn’t they.

Well, I’m not in Korupun anymore, so what now? You know what? God’s plan for my life has not changed one bit. I can say that because I know what his plan is. His plan does not depend on where I am geographically.

I love the Servant passages in Isaiah, the passages where God is describing through Isaiah the Messiah who would come -- THE Servant. The Servant. In one of these places, Isaiah says, this is in Isaiah 49, if you want to look it up later, he says, “Before I was born ..” this is the Servant speaking, the Messiah who would come ... “Before I was born the LORD called me; from my birth he has made mention of my name. He made my mouth like a sharpened sword, in the shadow of his hand he hid me; he made me into a polished arrow and concealed me in his quiver. He said to me, ‘You are my servant, Israel, in whom I will display my splendor.’” I just love the imagery here, where he says, “Before I was born the LORD called me; from my birth he has made mention of my name... in the shadow of his hand he hid me; he made me into a polished arrow and concealed me in his quiver.”

Sometimes when I talk to kids I’ll read this and talk about how God has made us to be his secret weapon. I tell the kids, “You know, people may say to you, “Ah! You’re too dumb to do that, or you’re not big enough to do such and such, or whatever. But what does God say? He says, “Uh, uh. I’ve got you. Before you were born, I called you. And I have you hidden away in my hand, and made you into a polished arrow and concealed you in my quiver.” We’re all God’s secret weapons. We are. We may have physical weaknesses that anyone looking on would say, “Can’t do much.” But what is it we’re supposed to do? He said to me, “You are my servant in whom I will display my splendor.” That’s what we’re supposed to do.

When I went back with Roger and Gail to tell the Kimyals goodby, I had one particular time set aside in my office there to talk to the church leaders. While I was there, I was not good at all. I couldn’t sit up, so we set a cot there in my office where I could lie down and talk to them about the whole thing. Of course, they were shocked, just really shocked to see me like that and to know that I wouldn’t be there with them anymore. And they were questioning, and they said, “What is God doing? Why is God letting this happen to you? We thought God’s work for you was to give us his Word. You can’t do that anymore. Were we wrong? Wasn’t that God’s work for you?”

As I lay there, I just silently prayed, “Lord, help me. Give me some way to explain to them.”

The Kimyal love to talk in picture language. They’re always using images, always using metaphors when they speak. It’s a wonderful language - wonderful way of talking. And I looked up and I saw a light-bulb in the ceiling. Now, they had watched and even helped Mike Johnson put in the hydro-electric system there, and string the lines and put in the bulbs so they could have light and I could have a computer to use for translation. So, they knew a little bit about what that was. I said, “That light bulb in the ceiling -- if that light wasn’t on, could we see each other? Could we see anything in this room? When the light is on, it reveals what’s in this room. If that light wasn’t there, we couldn’t see what’s in this room.” And that’s kind of like the truth about God. If it’s not shining, people can’t see it and they can’t see themselves and they can’t see anything rightly. But, does that light-bulb need arms and legs to shine? It doesn’t need arms and legs. What’s the job of that light-bulb? It’s job is just to shine. But, how does it shine? The only way it can shine is by accepting the power that flows through it. If the wire was cut, and that power wasn’t going through it, it couldn’t shine. It doesn’t have any power to shine on it’s own. That’s like you and I. Our real job -- my real job -- is just to shine. Just to show God’s glory.” (How Isaiah puts it here, “Display God’s splendor.”)

“And I don’t need arms and legs to do that. All I need to do is accept that power of God and let it flow through my life. That’s my real job. Where and how I do it, that’s up to him. Whether it’s here at Korupun, doing that here with you, translating Scriptures for you, or whether it’s back in the States.”

And that’s really the principle, back in Corinthians here, that Paul is talking about. God says, “My grace is all you need. That’s it. For my power is made perfect in weakness.” So Paul says, “therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses...” And the Greek word used there means physical weaknesses. But then he expands that: “...weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, difficulties ...” if you don’t have a physical weakness, you probably have one of those other things. “For when I am weak, then I am strong.” When I get out of the way -- my strengths get out of the way, -- God’s power can show up.

So, what am I doing now? Well, three of us who are Christians and who have post-polio -- and we’re going to be bringing on two more -- onto a board that we formed called Polio Experience Network. It’s a state-registered charity board that aims to give practical help, emotional support and spiritual help to other people with post-polio. You know, if you went to our support group meetings or anywhere, just talking with somebody who had post-polio and said, “What you need is the Lord.” they’d say, “Yeah, sure. You don’t know what I’m going through.” But they can’t say that to me. In fact, my post-polio and Sharman’s is probably worse than anybody else in the group. So that is one avenue of ministry the Lord has given me. And here again, back to Colossians, where Paul says, “I fill up in my flesh what is still lacking in regard to Christ’s weaknesses.” I have a disease that other people in this world have. We are In a world full of diseases. If God protected us from those diseases, who would show people in the world that there is a source of strength outside themselves to cope with it? Who would show them that there can be joy in the grief. And I’m not saying that there isn’t grief. I’ve cried a lot. It’s pretty awful to lose your independence and not be able to do things and have the terrible exhaustion that comes over you. But there is a source of strength there. And I can go into this one area of people with the same disease that they have and display God’s splendor to them.

We produce a newsletter in which we always talk about the Lord, in a careful way, but in a way that lets them know that there hope and there is another source of strength, another source of power. ... We’re also on the Internet. I can do that in the afternoons when I have to be on a ventilator machine.....

(more such details)
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2007 Update: Due to the vast improvement of so many of us after treatment at Futures Unlimited, Inc., the support group, Polio Experience Network and the newsletter no longer exist. However, if you want help or advice, please email me! (Click on "e-mail" in the side bar.)
Oh - and I'm no longer using a ventilator.