"But How Many Souls Did You Save, Doctor?"

Sometimes, I hear that question aggressively asked when I speak about medical missions to American audiences.

The answer is, “How many did I save? None. Jesus saves souls. But I hope I sometimes helped him.”

American Christians who have never been outside their homeland often assume that the missionary is the star performer on the foreign field. For the pioneer in an area never before touched by the Christian message, that may have been true. There are few more heroic tales than those of William Carey in India. Or of Adoniram and Ann Judson in Burma, who labored for seven years before even one person believed their message, but who lived to see thousands accept Christ.

But even then, the goal was to teach people of the country to tell the Gospel story in their own language and cultural view. That is even truer now, when in Burma, for example, there are over one million Christians—Baptist, Roman Catholic, and others.

There are still foreigners who become expert communicators. Among my close colleagues, Paul Clasper and Emily Ballard stand out, each completely fluent in conversational Burmese; Paul and Elaine Lewis in the Lahu and Akha languages, and Don and Janet Schlatter in Lawa. But they are far outnumbered by citizens of the land who have given their whole life and effort to telling their neighbors about Christ.

Sala Ai Pun, headmaster of the Lahu high school at Pangwai, felt called to resign his post and devote the rest of his life to the leprosy villages. (I had nothing to do with this decision; I was as dubious about the idea as anyone else.) The Lahus were aghast, protesting that he was needed at the school and, moreover, he was in his sixties, diabetic and almost blind. He replied that this was what God wanted him to do. He and Yakop (the young man who had visited the villages for years) made an unlikely pair, walking the mountain trails. The younger man limped with a deformed hip and had a defective heart; the elder was too blind to see the single-log bridges clearly that spanned rushing mountain streams. He had to crawl across them on his hands and knees, guided by his wife.

For the next several years Ai Pun visited leprosy villages, giving them the personal attention and spiritual guidance that no one had offered them in twenty years. At first I was concerned about his diabetes, because he never had any refrigeration for his insulin. But for him, the insulin always seemed to work. He and his wife are long gone now, but today most of their eight children are college-educated leaders in the Lahu community.

Sala Yawtha Chang was my next-door neighbor in Kengtung, and a leader of another group of Lahu Christians. I differed with several of his theological and medical beliefs, but I’ll never forget that, even though he believed blood once lost is gone forever, he still gave a pint of his own blood three times to help a man I was treating for recurrent internal bleeding.

The pastor of the Shan church at Kangna once came to me with a sore eye. I diagnosed dendritic keratitis, a viral infection that never responds to bacterial antibiotics, and that can destroy the eye. I painted his corneal ulcers with a special iodine compound repeatedly, with eventual success. The Kangna congregation, fifty or a hundred people in the l960s, now is reported to number around a thousand. The pastor must have continued to do good work. And the pastor in 2001 is a former hospital night watchman, on whom I performed an emergency appendectomy forty years ago. So even though I am not a prolific preacher, God has enabled me to be instrumental in other ways, as he can with each of us.

Some of God's servants are cultivators, some are harvesters. I perceived my work as preparing the ground. Or, if you prefer, I am the salesman with a foot in the door, offering a product (medical care) to which the householder could relate, until he saw that God had something even greater to offer.

Lois and I were sometimes parental surrogates to some of the nurses whose own families lived hundreds of miles away. Inevitably, these young ladies attracted suitors, and marriages took place. Fascinated by Western wedding customs, and seeking an exotic touch to the ceremony, they would ask me to give the bride away, or Lois to make a wedding cake, or blonde Susie to be one of the flower girls.

Lois was also able to assist others in bringing God’s word to those who had never heard it. For about a year, she went weekly with a Shan friend to Wan Mai, a village of new Christians, to teach reading and Bible. When a group of armed insurgents demanded a ride to a village farther on, her Shan friend told them, “We are women, we can’t do that.” This was apparently an acceptable answer. For a couple more weeks, I went with them, once passing a truckload of young men with rifles sticking out of the vehicle at all angles. Soon after, the Burma army shut down local travel outside the city. Lois often drove the hospital jeep truck to pick up market supplies or to drive a patient home. Even with no overt evangelism, small-town girls saw a woman actually driving a truck, and perhaps caught a vision of what might be possible for them some day.