Meg, formerly one of my two’s teachers is now a doctor. After the earthquake in Haiti, she dropped what she was doing and went to Haiti. This article was published in the Erie Times today.

Erie doctor works long hours treating patients in Haiti

“I made it through today and only actually came to tears three times,” Chilcott wrote in one of three Facebook posts that she also e-mailed to her Saint Vincent co-workers since her arrival. “Once, I made it look like I was laughing and once I hugged someone to cover it up. The third time, I put my forehead to the teenage girl in front of me and cried with her.”

Chilcott, 29, is spending two weeks in Haiti as part of a medical mission with Samaritan’s Purse, a Christian emergency relief organization.

She and a team of doctors and relief workers flew into Port-au-Prince, just hours after a 6.1-magnitude aftershock rattled the Haitian capita

It was a makeshift field tower. The tower itself had collapsed in the earthquake.

Chilcott rode to the first hospital they visited in a vehicle so small that she had to sit on the laps of several other doctors. The group was greeted on the road by Haitians wearing breathing masks and holding signs with the words “I need food” and “I need water” written in English.

“We saw camps in former parks that literally thousands of people are staying at with no homes, or (who are) afraid to re-enter their dwellings,” Chilcott wrote. “There is a sewage-looking ’stream’ that runs along the roads, and people dip into it to drink whatever they can.”

Chilcott said she works at the Fermathe hospital 14 to 15 hours a day. She spends the day dressing wounds, starting and replacing I.V.s, putting casts on broken arms and legs, and fighting infections.

Sometimes she has to wear a breathing mask because the smell of infection is so overwhelming.

“We have wounds here that are unbelievable — babies with legs literally hanging off them,” she wrote. “I helped bag a woman who arrived that was pregnant and unresponsive. … Three and a half hours later, she and her baby died. I took off all the tubes, wires, etc., and her husband was on his hands and knees shaking outside the door.

“I never even knew her name.”

On Monday, Chilcott was treating a young woman who had her leg amputated just below the knee.

The doctor started removing the old bandages and saw that the amputation wound was still completely open.

“I took off the bandages and worked as quickly as possible, but the screams from the patient could be heard throughout the hospital,” Chilcott wrote. “It became quiet at the end, and I looked up to see the younger sister of my patient with tears running down her face, and the patient has stopped screaming because she was trying to hold and comfort her sister.”

Chilcott said before she left Erie that she planned to stay in Haiti for two weeks, then travel there again in March. This is her third mission to the Caribbean country.

It hasn’t been easy. Besides working long days, Chilcott has also gone more than 48 hours without a change of clothes or a shower. Supplies, especially medicines, remain in short supply, she said. They even have to cut aspirin in half.

But the patients are grateful for the medical care.

“They ask God to bless us. To bless us,” Chilcott wrote. “I have never felt more alive all day long and more at home as a doctor.”

I’ve blogged elsewhere on this site about how we tend to atomize and moralize scriptures to the point that Bible becomes a collection of fables that teach well instead of the story of God’s salvation history. Well, Phil Vischer– the creator of Veggie Tales– has a new website that helps Sunday School Teachers present the Bible as a unified whole. I’m thrilled. Scoot over to http://whatsinthebible.com/ to check it out.

Oh, and in compliance with new FTC rules for bloggers: I received no material resources for mentioning this website. I don’t know Phil and I took no cash. In fact, Phil and I both did book signings at a conference and were scheduled at the exact same time. Phil had a 45-minute line of fans. Meanwhile, I tried to not look to pathetic, alone, on the opposite side of the book store.  So on second thought…

My church is offering what might be an unusual parenting class. There’s a psychology professor in town who goes to our church and we’ve got her presenting a Sunday School class that emphasizes adolescent brain development. I suspect that class is unusual for two reasons. First, most parents stop paying attention to a child’s developmental stages when all those big milestones are navigated: teething, walking, potty training, language development. The stuff of photo albums. But somewhere along the line, the changes in our children become less dramatic and we’ve already worn our friends and family with stories out how little Johnny and Jane can count so high.

And then we eventually we can stop paying close attention. This is tragic because the brain development that occurs in our teens is dramatic, and yes, debilitating. The frontal lobe is the part of the brain responsible for self-control, judgement, and emotional regulation. Somehow in God’s wisdom he determined that this part of the brain would get a complete restructuring at this. This might explain why my sixteen-year-old can hit sulking, laughter, melancholy, frustration, and righteous indignation all during a single meal. The corpus callosum is the gray matter manages self-awareness and won’t finish developing in Alex until his early twenty’s. This sucks as Alex’s high school is filled with hundreds of students who all think that everyone is watching them and that “everyone has their life put together but me.” The temporal lobes provide a person with emotional maturity. Naturally, they are still developing after the age of sixteen.

All this brain development, coupled with vats of hormones washing through the brain, and it’s no wonder that emotion lives of teens are volcanic. Dr. Nixon explained that all this development creates a white noise that makes it hard for teens to think and function. If every teen didn’t go through it, you could label adolescence a mental disorder.

We’re giving Dr. Nixon a forum to discuss brain development during a time slot normally reserved for studies of the Bible because we want parents to empathize with what their children are going through as they attempt to discipline them and teach them godliness. What we’re finding is that parents are becoming more understanding of the civil war that’s taking place between their child’s ears. We suspect our parents will be more supportive with their kids as they navigate all the moral and emotional decisions that come with emerging into adulthood.

It occurred to me that this must be how God deals with all of humanity. We tend to view ourselves as strong and rationale, a least until life overwhelms us and we find ourselves taking on water. But the truth is that if everyone wasn’t going through it we could label humanity a mental illness. When we are in a place of weakness we remember that we are fragile and foolish. And we want our Heaven Father to know it:

I think this is what the Psalmist was getting at when he wrote these words:

“As far as the east is from the west,
So far has He removed our transgressions from us.

Just as a father has compassion on his children,
So the Lord has compassion on those who fear Him.

For He Himself knows our frame;
He is mindful that we are but dust.

As for man, his days are like grass;
As a flower of the field, so he flourishes.

When the wind has passed over it, it is no more,
And its place acknowledges it no longer.

But the lovingkindness of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting on those who fear Him,
And His righteousness to children’s children”

Psalms 103:12-18

God, We strive to please you but in spite of our best intentions we can’t get out of our own way. We imagine that we are strong and moral, but we imagine this because we are frightened by our own brittleness. We want you to remember that you are the one who made us this way, but you already know this.  So this prayer is our way of reminding ourselves of who we are. Please help us to see you as who you are, a nurturing parent who accommodates our weakness. Amen.

During my supervision meetings with my youth pastor we’re reading Mark DeVries Sustainable Youth Ministry. I’m not able to give a wholesale recommendation of the book, there’s chapter with “norms” that I feel are unrealistic, unobtainable, and unnecessary for most churches (a 1:50 pastor/student ratio and a youth budget of $1,000 to $1,500 per student  to name a few).

That said, DeVries has an excellent section where he talks about that Panama Canal.  For years, merchants struggled to find a short cut that would prevent ships some having to round South America to go from Europe to Asia. Panama is only 48 miles wide but engineers were about to design a suitable water way for centuries. In 1914, the goal was accomplished. Not by blowing away obstacles but by creating a system of locks and channels to lift the ship from one level to another.  A ship would be raised 25 to 30 feet at a time, not by brute force, but the natural power of rising and lowering water supplies.

DeVries goes on to say that youth ministries (the same is true to children’s ministries) can raise their level, not by one person killing themselves to be the celebrity leader, but by building sustainable systems that raise the quality of the ministry, one level at a time.