WE MUST DO THE THING WE CANNOT DO

Throughout their thirty-five years of service, PC(USA) medical mission co-workers Les and Cindy Morgan faithfully wrote eloquent letters home, and their many supporters in the U.S. felt we knew intimately the people they ministered to in the slums and rural villages where they served in Dhaka and Rajshahi, Bangladesh.

In 2015, four of us from their home church in Shreveport had the opportunity to make a pilgrimage to join them for two weeks, standing alongside them as they ministered to the suffering in the most desolate corners of that country, one of the world’s poorest.

Serving Christ in an impoverished country, 99% of whose people are Muslim, was never an easy thing, and those days of heightened terrorism only compounded the difficulty. They often ministered to those for whom they could offer only the comfort of their peaceful presence, even those whose problems might have been easily resolved by access to modern medicine in a well-equipped hospital.

For they had learned that theirs was truly a ministry of presence. As difficult as it might be (and it was always hard), often the best they could do was to show up and sit at the bedside of the suffering and the dying. To watch Les place his hands on the arm of an emaciated man whose broken legs had mended unset, leaving him unable to walk or earn a living to feed himself or his family, was to see Christ at work. And to see the eyes of a terrified teen-aged mother fill with light as Cindy took her malnourished infant in her arms was to witness a kind of miracle.

Eleanor Roosevelt’s rule for living, “we must do the thing we cannot do,” might sum up the Morgans’ work in Bangladesh. Each day was surely as difficult as the one before it, yet they continued their work, knowing they would be given the ability to minister to those in need. Acting as Christ’s hands and feet in that place, they watched for glimpses of the kingdom of God wherever they went. Grateful to have been allowed to witness some of those miracles alongside them, I have never seen the world in the same way since. I now believe with them, “we must do the thing we cannot do,” with God’s help.

Cathie Dodson