I am often perplexed by the ironies of life. We recently moved house, in large part to give our growing family more room. My wife and I reasoned that a bigger home would give us all more space, and the process of moving would enable us to clear out all the old junk that cluttered up our old house. It proved to be a vain hope - the irony being that the new house was soon over full of stuff that we had been given to furnish it by well meaning relatives who had noticed how little furniture we had of our own! It seems that we can easily be made discontent and unhappy by having too much as well as by having too little.
Medicine and healthcare have their ironies too. A recent report predicts that the increasing life expectancy of the populations of Western nations means that in the next few decades we may be reaching a crisis point in providing health, pensions and social care for an increasing elderly population and that to control this retirement ages should be raised to as much as seventy years. It is an irony that improved healthcare and living conditions in the West are creating a crisis. In most other parts of the world life expectancies are, if anything going down (AIDS alone is creating a dramatic decrease in the life expectancy of people in sub-Saharan Africa).
While we in the West want medicine to cure all of our ills (even death), for many in the developing world the hope that medicine might just solve some problems is too faint to countenance. If you cannot pay for treatment, then you may as well go home to suffer or die quietly. We fear death so much in the West that such an idea sounds like admitting defeat. We may have forgotten in twenty-first century Britain that there is such a thing as a good death. But for two thirds of the world a good death is not an option either – people often die alone, in squalor and without the comforts of palliative medicine.
Helping the vulnerable and the poor to live and die well have been Christian ministries since the time of Jesus Himself. The challenge for us today is to confront the West's obsession with health and denial of death by proclaiming the message of the Great Healer who conquered death by His own death and resurrection.
We can also see how people have confronted the suffering of people in developing countries in the name of Jesus by developing community based AIDS care and prevention programmes, caring for disabled children in the hope of giving them a life and a future where they had none before, and in the myriad other examples of Christians, past and present who have gone in the Name of the One who is above all other names, to minister to those who are suffering. Each example says something that runs as a counter current to the World’s attitudes to life, death and disability and each instead reveals something of the image of God.
Life does have its little ironies, but out of them we can also see a greater hope and purpose.
Medicine and healthcare have their ironies too. A recent report predicts that the increasing life expectancy of the populations of Western nations means that in the next few decades we may be reaching a crisis point in providing health, pensions and social care for an increasing elderly population and that to control this retirement ages should be raised to as much as seventy years. It is an irony that improved healthcare and living conditions in the West are creating a crisis. In most other parts of the world life expectancies are, if anything going down (AIDS alone is creating a dramatic decrease in the life expectancy of people in sub-Saharan Africa).
While we in the West want medicine to cure all of our ills (even death), for many in the developing world the hope that medicine might just solve some problems is too faint to countenance. If you cannot pay for treatment, then you may as well go home to suffer or die quietly. We fear death so much in the West that such an idea sounds like admitting defeat. We may have forgotten in twenty-first century Britain that there is such a thing as a good death. But for two thirds of the world a good death is not an option either – people often die alone, in squalor and without the comforts of palliative medicine.
Helping the vulnerable and the poor to live and die well have been Christian ministries since the time of Jesus Himself. The challenge for us today is to confront the West's obsession with health and denial of death by proclaiming the message of the Great Healer who conquered death by His own death and resurrection.
We can also see how people have confronted the suffering of people in developing countries in the name of Jesus by developing community based AIDS care and prevention programmes, caring for disabled children in the hope of giving them a life and a future where they had none before, and in the myriad other examples of Christians, past and present who have gone in the Name of the One who is above all other names, to minister to those who are suffering. Each example says something that runs as a counter current to the World’s attitudes to life, death and disability and each instead reveals something of the image of God.
Life does have its little ironies, but out of them we can also see a greater hope and purpose.
