Dear Friends,

Greetings from "the warm heart of Africa"!

My life has been filled with learning, learning, learning and serving at Church Central Africa Presbyterian (CCAP). I have been traveling throughout the Synod teaching, preaching, administering the sacraments, facilitating partnership relationships, attending funerals, and sharing my life with others through helping to make ends meet when it seems for most people that hardly ever happens!

Writing of "funerals" prompts me to share with you a problem that crosses cultural differences—the problem of pain. The way the problem of pain plays itself out in Malawi is different from in the U.S. but these different "faces of pain" are actually two sides of the same coin.

Pain came into our world when human beings disobeyed God, thereby separating humankind from God and God’s design for our lives, resulting in paradise lost. To redeem human beings, to bring us back to God’s intended plan for health, wholeness, and everlasting joy, God sent God’s only Son, Jesus the Christ, to show us God’s desired way of life for the creation. Through his life, death, and resurrection a return to paradise has been inaugurated, a new age of dramatic reversals that brings healing and new life has dawned. It is time for Pain Relief to commence! But the relief of pain that Jesus came to bring, pain relief that has lasting effect, may not be the type of pain relief we are accustomed to in the U.S.

In the U.S., we seek relief from pain no matter what the consequences, as long as it brings immediate relief. Seldom does our quick-fix result in long-term pain relief. To the contrary, quick-fix pain relief comes to us at the cost of burying truth and righteousness and multiplying pain for ourselves and for others in the long-run. Our quick fix pain reliever covers up the symptoms and the real cause of our pain and passes on spiritual, psychological, and emotional pain from one generation to the next.

Our technology has also give us long life here on earth, extending life beyond our ability to provide quality of life, resulting in suffering that makes us look for ways to end life, such as euthanasia. Yet while we seek ways to shorten our years so we don’t end up in a nursing home, the people in Malawi seek the means to lengthen their years long enough to become adults and raise a family.

People in the U.S. have learned "pain relief at any cost," while Malawians have learned quite the opposite, "pain endurance at any cost." Last week a visiting U.S. doctor at Embangweni Hospital in Malawi said that he had never seen people with such high pain tolerance. This Malawian long-suffering pain endurance is every bit as destructive as our U.S. quick-fix pain relief. The people of Malawi have become so accustomed to enduring great pain that many have lost hope for a better life here on earth, placing all their hope in the eternal life to come. This results in loss of incentive to fight for quality of life here on earth.

A Malawian friend, a young man in his mid-twenties, has endured great physical pain for most of his life. He was so accustomed to pain that he waited a long time before he sought medical assistance, which he thought to be unaffordable to him. For 14 years he lived with the excruciating pain of stomach ulcers. He was so emaciated that it is a miracle he was still alive. A Malawian pastor/colleague and I were invited to preach at the Presbyterian church in his village, and that is how I made his acquaintance. Perhaps it was God’s providential coincidence that gave his mother the courage to ask us to take her son to the hospital many miles away.

While in the hospital this young man underwent surgery that started him on the road to new life, with pain relief and healing. But then a brief set-back occurred. This young man had become so accustomed to pain that he failed to adequately communicate to the doctors how much pain he endured following the surgery. He was sent home prematurely without the proper medicine to bring relief. When we discovered that he was losing ground at home we took him back to the hospital.

This time the doctors could see the full extent of his pain and prescribed a medicine that is truly bringing healing and new life to this young man. Dramatic changes have taken place. His face is full, his eyes shine, his body is healthy and strong. He now talks about going back to school. For the first time in many years he experiences quality of life and hope for the future. But poverty remains a big obstacle for him to overcome in order that quality of life becomes a reality.

"It is not difficult to hurt, but it is difficult to repair," says a South Africa proverb. Both "U.S. Pain Relief at Any Cost" and "Malawian Pain Endurance at Any Cost" have failed to bring the kind of pain relief that can repair lives. Malawians need to live longer, and the American life span might well be shortened a bit. Malawians need to endure less pain, and Americans need to endure pain long enough to find the real cause of our pain.

We, Americans and Malawians, need one another in order to discover the Redemptive Healing Balance that God Intends for Humankind so that genuine, lasting healing can begin to take place now, here on earth for all God’s people!

Ucizi na Mtende (Grace and Peace),

Rev. Debbie Chase

The 2001 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 41