Saturday, January 24, 2009

The good part to that story was...

If you have read the previous post on "our Saturday afternoon", you were made aware of a lady who was trying to have a baby in the dirt in front of our place and the whole rigamarole that followed during that afternoon. I just wanted to add a strong highlight to that story.

As John (a former cop turned missionary), Darryl (teacher at Logos), Dr. Kim, Lesley, and I were trying to get this pregnant lady to move from her present location (in front of our house) and to a hospital or clinic, we all noticed how futile it was going as at every turn, this khmer lady, unable to talk, refused to let us take her somewhere to deliver her baby.


At one point, I turned to John and asked if he had any "cop" field experience with pregnant ladies. He responded with "Ya but I never knew one who didn't want to go to a hospital before." Well we weighed the pros and cons of lifting this lady physically and placing her in a Tuk Tuk. After I said, "if she has the baby here in the mud, or if things go wrong, I am not sure I would feel very qualified to deal with that. Nor would I like all the spectators (including my children) to have to deal with something like that." So with that logic, we decided to lift this mute and uncooperative lady into a Tuk Tuk. And Wow... did that go badly.

Despite our best efforts, John and I were futile against the raging strength of a woman in labour. Actually, I think John wimped out (just kidding). This lady would have let us break her arms the way she was swinging around with a crazy hormonal birthing rage. So we stopped and had to back up a step.

Well no one was able to communicate with this lady as she moaned, screamed and mumbled the whole time. We had been dealing with this uncooperative lady for over 2 hours, there were now at least 25 interested Khmer onlookers, and we finally decided to pray. We prayed, "God, we have no idea what to do! There is no social network here. The local clinic will not accept her because they think she is on drugs (even though we never said that), the tuk tuk driver won't even stay around to help, and we seem to be out of options. Lord please give us direction and help."

Immediately after we finished praying, John (who spoke Khmer) crouched down to the dirt and tried to assure the lady we were there to help. Dr. Kim (also in language training) then immediately spoke to her and convinced her to move to our driveway to help deliver this baby out of the dirt and onto the concrete. Amazingly the lady decided to move! John and I immediately took this lady, lifted her up and while she was moaning and leaning heavily on us we started to move her to our gateway. As we were in transit, Darryl shouted out, "Hey, why don't we put her in Dr. Kim's van and get her to a Japanese Hospital". John and I didn't even bat an eye, and in a flash, we quickly spun her around and she was placed into the van. She didn't even know what hit her!!! Next thing I know, Dr. Kim and Lesley are in the van with this lady (and her 3 year old boy was placed in there too) and John is on his Dirt bike trying to lead them to the Japanese hospital because neither of the two ladies knew where to go.

So in a flash, after 1 minute of praying, it was all over in front of our place! Those of us who were left behind literally looked at each other in stunned relief. The moral of the lesson, "think about praying first???"

The good part of the story to share here is that we are thankful that the Lord heard our prayer because He knew we really felt hopeless at that moment when we called on Him.

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