Rev. Jeff Wood, First Presbyterian Church of Sebastian
WeLoveFirst.org & Facebook.com/welovefirstsebastian
Mountain Beyond Mountains
Summer and reading go hand in hand. Reading, from poetry to sacred texts, is one of the ways to enlarge the soul and draw close to God. On occasion, a biography will do that. One of the summer books I read was Mountain Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World by Tracy Kidder. It had a spiritual impact on me. Jesus said, “If you have done it for the least of these, you have done it unto me.” (Matthew 25:40ff) Dr. Farmer put his life into the least of the least.
Paul Farmer grew up in a family that lived in a refurbished but dilapidated bus. He eventually gets both a medical degree and a PhD in anthropology from Harvard. As a student he gets connected with Haiti and all through medical school, residency, and tenure at Harvard, he spends the week in Boston and the weekends in Haiti. Eventually it is almost all Haiti.
Dr. Farmer is, in Haiti, among the poorest of the poor. He is unwilling to say all people who people suffer equally. Some suffer more. And some suffer more because some of the resource rich became so on the backs of the poor. His thoughtful, persistent, exhausting service is jaw-dropping. He not only wants us to treat tuberculosis, for example, but to treat what made tuberculosis possible to breed in the first place (simple answer – incredibly inadequate housing).
I found his story personally challenging. Give it a read and let me know what you think. Jesus said, “If you have done it for the least of these, you have done it unto me.” (Matthew 25:40ff)
Rev. Jeff Wood, 1405 Louisiana Ave, Sebastian FL 32958.
Find us online at facebook.com/welovefirstsebastian or at www.welovefirst.org. Call for further information 772-589-5656