When Kindness Wears Blood-Soaked Gauze

Benjamin

In the list of desired character traits, kindness often falls near the bottom, sharing the same line with "nice." My friend, Jon Heller, blows that thought right out of the water, with his story today on kindness. Jon and his wife, Layne, and three young girls, serve the sick and dying in their home, Casa Ahava, in Mozambique, Africa, a country with only two oncologists for the population of 25 million.

Please welcome Jon to the blog today as we continue the conversation on kindness.

I am really not sure what Benjamin was thinking that Christmas morning as he joined my wife, my three daughters and I at the oncology ward of the only hospital in Mozambique with any treatment for cancer. Benjamin and I laughed as we stuck our hands into the cooler filled with melted ice water and soft drinks, both of us pulling our hands out of the biting cold and shaking/flexing them in the heat of the Mozambican summer after pulling only one or two cans out. We eventually filled the little cold bag Benjamin held with about 15 or 20 cans and joined my wife and kids who held small cloth bags filled with mangos and walked up the stairs and into the cancer ward.

Here, on a sweltering African Christmas morning, we returned tired smiles, kissed tear-streaked cheeks and pressed a ripe mango and a cold drink into weary hands of each patient spending Christmas morning fighting a dark disease in an overheated hospital room instead of singing a Christmas carol in front of a fan at home. Benjamin’s smile never wavered. His laugh echoed down an empty ward corridor and his one good eye beamed with delight on this missional Christmas.

Last year, Benjamin’s right eye was removed because of a tumor growing behind it. He has spent 6 months receiving chemo treatments, blood transfusions, pain medication… and has watched the tumor only gain ground.

When he exerts himself too much his raw tumor releases discharge and often bleeds.

He never hesitated to push through the sweltering sun and hand out drink after drink after drink, whispering “Merry Christmas” and giving a smile to his fellow Mozambicans fighting for their very lives against a cancer so very few of them understand.

A mere 6 months ago, 1 month after he traveled the 800 miles from his hometown to the capitol city to be treated for his cancer, his 4-year-old daughter, Anita, died of malaria. He did not get a chance to say goodbye to her.

I remember holding his hands and weeping with him and pleading with a good God for comfort and peace. I remember seeing bitterness and defeat casting dark shadows across his soul as he sat weary, clothed in sickness and sorrow.

Now, Christmas morning, Benjamin smiled and lived mission as he walked through Matthew 25:35-36, giving food and drink to the hungry and thirsty, visiting the stranger and the sick. A sheep at the right hand of his Good Shepherd, he shrugged of weariness and cancer and took on kindness in all its humility and bound it tight to his soul.

As I said at the start, I’m not really sure what Benjamin was thinking that morning. I’m not sure if he wondered if his pain level would increase as a result of his exertion (it did), I’m not sure if he feared his tumor bleeding heavily that afternoon after a full morning (it did), I’m not sure if he counted the cost of his kindness before he joined my family in the car on the way to the hospital.

Proverbs 3:3 says, "Do not let kindness and truth leave you. Bind them around your neck. Write them on the tablet of your heart."

Sometimes the binding of a thing leaves marks. Sometimes the writing of a thing leaves scars on the parchment. Sometimes not letting kindness and truth leave means accepting the pain and blood that the binding of them brings.

Benjamin may or may not have known of the cost of his kindness before he became a Christmas Morning Missionary. But I’m sure his Good Shepherd saw the price paid. I think nail scarred hands applauded blood-soaked gauze that Christmas day.

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Have you experienced the giving or receiving of this type of kindness, where you have felt the binding of kindness that has left marks on your own soul?

You can read more about Jon and Layne's life in their blog. Please consider supporting their ministry of compassion.