Piloting Faith: Why you were born...
A Word for the Day...
Dr. Leila Denmark was an old country doctor who lived up by Lake Lanier in Atlanta. Every day, she would walk from her home over to an old schoolroom. She stepped onto its sagging porch, the floorboards worn smooth from a century of sliding shoes.
She would stick her head through the doorway, glance at the babies inside and ask “who is the next little angel in my waiting room?”
Leila Denmark opened her practice in 1928. Atlanta's first female pediatrician had been healing sick babies for seventy years. When she started out, she recalled, they had no immunization. She treated a set of triplets who eventually died from whooping cough. Their deaths so touch her that she went home and developed a vaccine to prevent the disease, the same vaccine that now protects millions of children worldwide.
At the age of 100, Leila Denmark was still giving lectures at medical conferences. She said, “I took an oath one time to look after sick people and they never told me when to quit.”
Most days, the sun had set before Dr. Denmark quit for the day–she often worked ten hours. She did not schedule appointments; she just served whoever showed up. Some people would drive for hours to be there before the clinic opened and would share the advice the doctor had given them with others in the waiting room. No one complained about waiting. They knew that seeing her would not only heal their bodies but being in her presence somehow healed their souls.
In an interview at her retirement at the age of 103, she said, “my parents taught me when I was a little girl that God loves everyone, and if I loved God, then I should too.” Dr. Denmark was 114 years old when she died, the oldest, and perhaps the wisest, doctor who ever lived.
Dr. Ernest Campbell, the former pastor of Riverside Church in New York, once said, “there are two great moments in every human being’s life: the moment when they are born and the moment when they begin to discover why they are born.”
God's great dream for each of us is that we all discover why we were born. What would change in your life if you sought your own wholeness?
- Rev. Cameron Trimble, author of Piloting Church: Helping Your Congregation Take Flight
Prayer for the Week
To the One
who laughingly gave us
language
and absconded
with its limits:
I smile
to think of all
your names
I may never know.
May the God who dwells beyond us
and the God who dwells among us
and the God who calls us to dwell together
bless you now
and always.
- Jan Richardson, Sacred Journeys