Believers Health

Two Patients at Risk One Christmas Night
By Rolando Suffos MD

Two thousands years ago, to travel from Nazareth to Bethlem should have been exhausting even for a young man.

For a pregnant woman at term the jouney must have been even more demanding. At the end of the travel there was no shower no changes of clothes and no rest at all for that tired lady. After a desperate, fruitless search for a better place, only a stinky barn could be found as refuge and lie in ward. What followed were twelve hours of extenuating childbirth labor among insects, cattle, sheep, and their dejections. The energy expenditure of such a task is the equivalent of walking almost 30 miles with no pause, no chair, and no bed to rest in. After that a blood lost amounting to half a liter, excruciating pain and no privacy, or dignity at all.

For the child no less problems. Also twelve hours of hard, dangerous fight to open eyes to a poor, dirty world. The closing act, the cutting of his umbuilical cord with a common non sterile knife, amounted –in that full of tetanus bacilli enviroment– to a formal invitation to die. To die one of the cruelest deaths, among spasms and convulsions as result of Tetanus Neonatorum a deadly disease caused by that merciless bacterium.

Where was God at that time? Where is God in our times?

What happened later during and after the fly to Egypt? Were that boy and his family cordially received in that foreign country? Who knows? By the time of this last event perhaps Joseph and Mary were sometimes thinking of the message from Arcangel Gabriel, the visit of those magicians and all other related things as some kind of personal or collective allucinations. It seems that during many years Jesus’s brothers thought that way.

Sometimes, yesterday was one of them, I think the same about those umistakeable revelations of God to my own life. So, this night I will take a minute to look at the sky. I am sure I will see God’s hands at work. Then, my faith and my hope will be back in His words. “I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”


Copyright © 2008 Rolando Suffos MD.  All rights reserved.