(Transcribed by TurboScribe. Go Unlimited to remove this message.)

When I last checked, there were still some people that I know are coming here that were downstairs picking up pictures of seniors to pray for, so we can accept people as they come in late. But let's pray, and then we'll introduce our faith storytellers this morning. It's been good to be together already, to experience worship together, to know that you are caring for us as we understand better what your will is for faith church.

Thanks for the way you have demonstrated your faithfulness in the past, and all of us can recognize that as we think about people who've shown us compassion, but I pray that we would have that same kind of compassion as we move ahead, and help us to benefit from the stories that Fred and Michelle shared this morning, in Jesus' name. I kind of felt like I could solo it with an introduction, because when I read the introduction, you'll know why. Fred, Michelle, and Squirrel have been married for 40 years, but they've been at faith church longer than that.

Michelle for 48 years, Fred for 45, and I still have the directory at home that shows them as individuals before they got married. They have two sons and four grandchildren. I've seen pictures of those grandchildren several times.

That's good. At faith, Fred's a member of the executive elder board, assists with the kids zone and benevolence program. Michelle volunteers with the toddlers and mentoring program.

They've also been very involved in a Bible study for medical residents. I know they've done that for many years, that followed Charlie and Lorraine Kelly in doing the same thing, so we are beneficiaries of their being here and sharing their story this morning. So Fred and Michelle.

I took one of your mics. Sometimes choosing compassion takes you out of your comfort zone. We were traveling to Nigeria for our first overseas trip as a family.

Fred had already been to Africa a few times. So we landed in Lagos, Nigeria, and we were headed down the jetway when there stood a security officer with a machine gun. And then we walked a few more steps, and there was a sign that says the United States government does not take responsibility for any US citizen landing in Lagos.

And I thought, whoa, whoa, what have we gotten ourself into? But we saw it as an opportunity to continue trusting God because he had directed us. We're going to take a look at Luke 10, verses 25 to 37. On one occasion, an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus.

Teacher, he asked, what must I do to inherit eternal life? What is written in the law, he replied. How do you read it? He answered, love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind. And love your neighbor as yourself.

You have answered correctly, Jesus replied. Do this, and you will live. But he wanted to justify himself.

So he asked Jesus, and who is my neighbor? In reply, Jesus said, a man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho when he was attacked by robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. A priest happened to be going down the same road.

And when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. So too a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was.

And when he saw him, he took pity on him. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, brought him to an inn, and took care of him.

The next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper. Look after him, he said, and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have. Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers? The expert in the law replied, the one who had mercy on him.

Jesus told him, go and do likewise. Simply put, Jesus tells us to love God and love our neighbor. The Samaritan gave of his time, his money, to care for someone he didn't even know.

And that's what we're called to do as well, to choose compassion. For us, loving your neighbor is a choice. And it has sometimes come in surprising fashions.

Our faith in God and Jesus has been central. And with my job as a pediatric surgeon, getting a chance to care for children and our love for the underserved is a way in which we've been able to help others and serve God. The medical needs of children in sub-Saharan Africa have been incredible, particularly when compared to the United States.

So when the opportunity presented itself, it was an easy answer for us to go. So it turned out that a few physicians at Faith Church were coordinating a Christian Medical and Dental Association, a conference for medical missionaries in Africa. And this was to provide continuing medical education, something we all have to do.

And at that time, at least, it was a little bit difficult to do it in Africa. And so this was designed to update them in kind of a very broad base. We kind of ran four simultaneous tracks.

And they asked me to give some lectures. And these are two missionary physicians, one from Cameroon, one from Sierra Leone. And it was an incredible time to meet various missionary healthcare givers.

We gave lectures. Every meal I get to sit with a different missionary and hear their story of how God had provided for them. And it was just incredible.

I've always thought missionaries kind of walk on water and this kind of reinforced that. Just seeing what they gave up to practice in these settings and care for patients and those with medical need. And they were all practicing in settings where the gospel was central.

They were practicing medicine to overall reach people for Jesus. It provided a lot of other things, too. Women working in the fields, picking tea leaves by hand.

And that was their job. This woman carrying a bag of some heavy material across country. I don't know how far she was walking, but transportation, like cars and things, were just not nearly as accessible.

Just life is very hard. The daily tasks of preparing food, caring for your family, just take up so much of their time compared to here in the States. Well, while I was there, I met this guy named Don Meyer.

He's on the far right, I'm on the far left. And Don was a missionary surgeon in Nigeria. And he told me that he had three children with a disease called Hirschsprung's disease.

It's gonna get medical. Hirschsprung's is a disease where the nerves that typically would go down to the rectum and the lower part of the colon are absent. They're not there.

And so the children, either as babies or infants or young children, have trouble eliminating stool. And it's like having, getting backed up. And so my job as a pediatric, I'm kind of like a plumber for children's intestines.

You know, you take care of the blockages. And what you can do in this situation is just create a pop-off valve upstream and give them what's called a colostomy. So you take the bowel, bring it to the skin, and everything comes out in a bag.

It's very simple. And then you can fix them later. And we do that sometimes at Riley.

A lot of times we try to fix them right off the bat, but anyway, over there they could do a colostomy. And he said, I've got these three kids. I've done colostomies.

I know what disease they have. He said, I just don't know how to do that operation where you get rid of the lower part and hook it up. And it's just that the way that you get trained to do that operation is generally being a pediatric surgeon, that's what we do.

And so the general surgeons just don't know how to do that, but it's not very hard to teach them. And so Michelle and I thought, you know, I was ideally fitted to do this, and so I should go. He practiced at two hospitals in Nigeria.

One was in Agboma, where he lived. And then he would travel about four and a half hours to another hospital in Eku, which is in Delta State, kind of the oil-rich region of Nigeria. And Charlie Kelly, Charlie and Lorraine, both physicians, attended FAITH for many, many years.

Both passed about a year and a half ago. You know, Charlie and I would meet frequently, and he said, you know, you gotta go. He said, but when you go, try to come alongside them.

Don't try to change what they do. And I think he and Lorraine had probably seen enough young physicians from the United States go over there and try to make some big change at a mission hospital that just was not very well received. And it was just very wise counsel to come alongside, see where they're at, help as they see fit for you to help.

And he also told me to be prepared to get changed. And I think that change in us, you know, from all this is really much more than anything that we've done, and it's really been, I think, getting hearts changed. Well, this is one of the hospitals we went to.

The centrality of the gospel is very evident there. It's very well known that it's a Christian hospital, but anybody can walk in. There's no tests or anything like that.

It doesn't matter if you're Muslim or Christian. It doesn't really matter. You're served, you're cared for.

The gospel is very clear as a central part of the mission of the hospital. Children are all over. These are some school children in their uniforms who ran into me one time.

They don't see Americans very often, so they pose for pictures, and they're very friendly. The hospital's all single-story buildings, multiple buildings. You can see the water tower.

You can see some nurses moving a patient, maybe from the operating area, the operating theater is what they call it, to the ward. There are men's and women's wards and children's wards. And families all over the campus, so to speak, sitting, sometimes waiting for surgery, sometimes waiting for clinic, and they would just kinda come and hang out.

This is Don making morning rounds. He's kind of in the center there, holding that x-ray up to the window, and it was just like in the United States. He's making rounds.

He's teaching medical students in the residence how to become a physician and how to become a surgeon. The gentleman there is in traction from a car accident with a broken neck, something I don't take care of myself, but Don's practice was much broader than mine. He had to take care of all kinds of problems, and just an incredibly talented physician, and I think seeing his love for his patients, his dedication, what he had given up as a surgeon to practice over there full-time was another thing that kinda influenced me to keep going, to do the work, and kind of to help him as best I could.

Here he is giving a lecture in the morning. Again, very typical, just what we do in the States. This is one of these children with Hirschsprung's disease, and you can see in the lower left side of the baby's, the child's abdomen is the bowel.

It's on the outside. All of his stools, so to speak, would come out. If one of us had this in the States, we'd have a nice bag over there.

Maybe twice a day, we'd go into a bathroom and empty it into the toilet, put the clip back on, life would go on. If we had kinda, if I had a shirt like this on, you wouldn't see it, but over there, they don't have bags. They still don't have bags, and they just wrap this with some plastic wrap, and as it would fill up, the mother would take it off and clean the child off, and just the day-to-day of having a colostomy, I'm sure that's really a big deal to have a colostomy.

It is, but it's much more difficult in that setting than it would be for one of us in this setting. This is the two of us operating. I don't know if you can tell it, but I'm sweating through my hat.

That never happens here. You know, over there, no air conditioning. Here, you know, we have a climate-controlled OR.

You know, just, it's a very easy setting to do surgery here. It's not that hard. After surgery, this is one of the children being cared for by his mother.

You can see there's another crib right behind them. There's really no privacy. If you've been in a hospital here, hospitalized, you'll notice that when you're in a hospital bed, you're pretty much always on a monitor where they keep track of your heart rate, maybe your oxygen saturation.

No monitors over there. This little youngster's being watched by his brothers. His mother's probably out preparing the food, and the mothers would prepare the food out on a fire outside.

There'd be little areas where they'd build fires, and they would be preparing their own food. If their child was eating, they'd have to prepare the food for their child. The hospital did not provide food.

And children playing all over. This was kind of the sight I'd encounter when we'd walk from our hospital setting back to the guest house where we would stay, and they would line up to get their photo taken whenever they'd see you. There were a lot of things I never had seen before in my life.

This, I was in the clinic one afternoon. This guy came in. He said he had a high fever about three weeks ago.

I told you it would get medical. Yeah, very. And you can see how thin his legs are.

There's really no muscle there. And he couldn't walk. He just couldn't walk.

And I didn't know what he had. But Don walked in a few minutes later, and he said, oh, he's got polio. And I had never seen polio in my life.

But unfortunately, in Nigeria, there are pockets where polio exists. So we did these three children with Hirschsprung's disease. We did one Monday morning, one Monday afternoon.

We did another Tuesday morning. And after doing that same operation three times and kind of showing Don how to do it, then he would do it. We kind of worked together as a team.

And it's the same way I work at Riley. It's the same thing you do. You work together.

He could do it independently. He's a smart guy. He didn't need me anymore.

And he could then go on and keep doing that operation. And so I think kind of, I guess, after I figured this out, my feeling was that if I could just help him have a little bigger armamentarian of procedures, it would help them serve the children in that area a little better. And that's what he wanted, so that's what we did.

But our fourth child showed up with the same disease, but had not had a colostomy, but she was clearly backed up. And we didn't know what to do, but we decided to do this big operation right off the bat. And she did great.

I saw her for a few days, and she was doing very well in bed. Her mother was taking care of her. And then we took off to the other hospital.

And I'd never forget this. On the weekend, we heard that she had gotten high fever. And they started a malaria treatment, because that's very common there.

But the next day, they found her dead in bed. And I was devastated. I was just, I couldn't believe it.

You know, it's like I thought, you know, we didn't know if it was malaria, but generally, if somebody dies after surgery, it's pretty much the surgery's the problem, until proven otherwise. You don't always know, but you gotta think. There could have been something that went wrong technically with the operation.

And I just, I was just devastated. But my buddy, Don, was clearly not too phased by this. And I, after a while, I said to him, I said, you know, that was really tragic.

And he said, you know, we do what we do and trust God. And I realized that's all, that's what he had to do. You know, I've got the opportunity to trust myself, my colleagues, the monitors, the nurses.

And for the most part, a lot of these kids, if they got sick, they would be kind of what we call rescued by the medical system. But it's kind of, I realized there was kind of a false premise I had in my mind where I was trusting myself, when really, my faith and trust should be completely in God. And every so often, even in right here, a child dies unexpectedly, and you're kind of brought back to that realization of how God is really in control of the whole situation.

But I think in American medicine, it's sometimes so easy to trust ourselves. Well, this is Don on the left, I'm on the right. And these are two Nigerian surgeons that he had poured five years of his life into training.

Worked with them every day, trained them just like we train a resident here. They were fully trained surgeons, both Christians, at this mission hospital. And that's where they still are, working away.

Well, the one guy, SKN Corp, had an interest in pediatric surgery. So he asked me to come over and help him. So the next year, I went over to help him.

And we took care of kind of rectal problems that children have. And we did a lot of other stuff, too. We did a lot of other surgery.

We were in clinic together. We had dinner together. And it was just great fun working with him.

Here we are operating. Here we are, sorry. Just one day after lunch, just talking.

And it was just, you know, he's a little more by himself than I am. I have like nine partners. If I have a difficult case, I can talk to somebody else about it.

We have conferences where we, but he's more just him and this other guy. And it's a much more isolated system. This is us in clinic.

You can see the scars on the mother and the child's face. Those are tribal markings that sort of identify them as part of a certain tribe. A young boy with his father waiting outside the clinic, they would come in and wait for hours to be seen in clinic, traveling long distances, sometimes by buses, sometimes walking.

But again, just accessing healthcare is so much more difficult over there than it is here in the States. So here are the boys when they were six and nine in front of the hospital grounds. They enjoyed playing soccer with the Nigerian kids.

And the one thing they noticed is the Nigerians were barefoot and they had these great tennis shoes on. You know, it was our hope to expose them to people of another country and let them see and experience those needs of the others that have. And then here we are in a nursery, just I wanted to show them the children that were being cared for.

Well, unrest in Nigeria and kind of the medical need or surgical need kind of changed. And so I think as a surgeon, once you start doing this, people kind of hear that you're willing to go. And so a request came from Kenya.

This is a hospital called Tenwick. I kind of refer to it as the Mayo Clinic of Africa. It's like very well funded.

Right now they're doing cardiac surgery there. It's just really top level. When you drive up to Tenwick, there's a big sign that says we treat, Jesus heals.

And the centrality of the gospel is so clear there. Anybody can come. It doesn't matter what faith you have when you walk in.

You'll get cared for and you get excellent care. But again, it was a situation where we're kind of helping some surgeons work on children. Despite it being a very fancy hospital for Africa, it was still very crowded.

The mothers did almost all of the newborn care for their children. They would line up outside the nursery every three hours and come in and feed their children. It's just the way it was over there.

It was crowded. These are three children in the same warmer. They're not related.

They're just three children that, they only had one warmer, so they're all in it. And that would, this would never happen in the States. They would all have individual warmers that'd be separate.

But that's just the way it is. And they take great care. There are a lot of other things that, I'd never seen before.

This gentleman came in jaundiced. So he was yellow because his liver wasn't working. And he'd gone to see the medicine man first.

And the medicine man could feel his liver too. He could tell where the liver was enlarged. And he made all these little marks that you see on there, which are scars that he made with a knife.

And he marked out the liver very well. But, and he charged the man a lot of money, telling him that it would heal him. But when he didn't get better, he finally came to the hospital.

And many, many, even children that I'd saw had various marks on them from seeing the medicine man first. Again, African dress is always fun to see. Mom and dad with their young child coming to clinic.

I think I might have gone back, yeah. The wards were very crowded. This is an adult ward with probably 20 beds in it.

You can see the mosquito nets hanging from the top that they would put down when there was a risk of malaria to keep them from the mosquito bites. But a very crowded ward. Again, this guy.

This is the pediatric ward. You can see all the small cribs that they have crammed into this room, just one after another. Very crowded settings compared to what we have in the States.

And there's always fun things that you see. This is us walking from the hospital to the place where we were staying. You'd encounter all kinds of things that you typically wouldn't see in the States, but it was kind of fun.

Young children by themselves all over the place, but very friendly and just a joy to see. Again, things that we don't see here. This young child was brought in by her mom and dad to be seen in clinic.

And her dad, you can see, is sitting on the floor. And so I saw the child talk to them, and towards the end, I just kind of talked to the dad, like, you know, what's up? And he sort of said he had polio when he was younger. And he came in, and he's walking on his hands.

That's how he gets around. He just walks on his hands. No wheelchair, no other way to get around.

And didn't seem very bothered by it. It was just kind of a matter of fact that that's how he gets around. But it's, again, kind of an example of the needs that you see that you just would not see here.

And I think it's pretty hard, at least it was hard for us, not to be moved to continue to do what we could, which is not a lot, but to help out. Boys are in middle school here when we were in Kenya, and they had asked us to count malaria pills and package them for the pharmacy. So every morning, we got to do that in the pharmacy.

And it was just good to be able to help serve in a small way. Grant was a chemistry major at IU, a chemistry teacher. And at IU, you have a choice of 14 countries that you can do your student teaching in.

So Grant chose to go to Kenya. He was placed in a boys boarding school. That's how most of the high schools are in Kenya, are boarding schools.

And the school was so excited that they had a lab for chemistry. So they showed Grant the room, and it was an empty room. But they could bill it as they had a lab for chemistry.

And it did not have one piece of equipment for him to do any experiments with the students, but there was a lab. He also had a chance to coach volleyball. He played volleyball at IU, so that was especially fun for him to coach.

But again, most of the boys playing were barefoot, and they played on a dirt court. And then Andrew chose to go to Kenya for his January term when he was a student at Calvin College, and he went with Fred. And Andrew was able to do some research and data collection for a missionary that was doing a research project.

So we were just excited that the boys thought outside the box for some of their choices and looked to see how they could encourage people overseas. And then as our sons grew and got older and got married, Andrew and Laura are in the bottom. That's their home in Ghana.

They're both environmental engineers, and they went to Ghana with the mission board Reach Beyond. And they worked in Ghana, Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, and Benin doing water and sanitation projects. So they were there a little bit over two years.

And then Grant and Heather are both teachers, and they chose to go to Morocco to teach at an international school there. So we had hoped that our earlier trips would impact our boys, and I think they did. Another way that we've chosen to show compassion is by being involved at Good News Ministry.

Good News is a faith church ministry partner. I'm gonna read their mission. To supply hope through Christ to homeless neighbors, underprivileged youth, and the medically underserved in Indianapolis.

By creating environments of love and structure that produce a lasting difference, they nourish the body, feed the soul, and change the life through a men's shelter, a youth center, a boys' home, and a health clinic. Good News shelter is the one that, the men's shelter is how we have gotten involved, and it's unique to the city because there is no time limit on the stay for the men. They receive counseling, they get involved in a Bible study, but they're also required to find employment.

Now, Good News helps them in many ways to find that employment. And then after a while, their wages are garnished, so they learn what it means to budget and how to manage and live responsibly. Faith church has been involved, we think.

Shirley Miller and I have tried to figure out how long we've been involved. We think it's been at least for 35 years at the men's shelter. We took the opportunity to get our boys involved when they were in preschool and early elementary, and their job was to hand out one of those little fun candy bars, chocolate bars.

They had to hand one out to each man before they could have ice cream. So, and then in high school, Grant and Jenny Swim, some of you know the Swims, played a duet on their French horn. So, you know, I think as parents, we can teach and model choosing compassion.

Faith church right now has been hosting the second Thursday of the month chapel for the men's shelter. We provide music and worship, and Erin Costler plays the piano, and her fiance, Evan, has been leading worship. We also provide after worship as a devotional time, and this is Tim Pecklow.

We have several men that are willing to do the devotional time. And then the men get dessert, and that's how they know us and love us, is the dessert. We serve the same thing we've served for 30 years.

We serve ice cream, brownies, and cookies. And during the dessert time, the men are seated at tables, and the men from faith church sit and interact with the men. You know, last month, a young man came to me as I was helping to serve dessert, and his comment was just, wow, it's really cool in here.

It had been one of those strings of very hot days in the 90s, and I said, oh, does it feel good? And he goes, yes, I've been living in my car. This is my first day here. And you guys, he looked to be 18 or 19.

So the age range there is from young adult to elderly. In the summer and warm months, we have about 70 men that attend there, but come the cold winter months, it can get up to 125 men. Thank you.

So this is Julius. Julius is in his 70s. He's retired.

He worked in a transmission factory up in the northern part of our state for about 20 plus years. When he retired, he went back to Indianapolis where he'd grown up and kind of fell into some hard times, ended up homeless, and went to Good News. And he's been there about 12 years.

Julius is a solid Christian. He renewed his faith in Christ at the mission, and he feels, he was sort of challenged by a friend of his that his calling could be to serve the men at Good News, even though he still lives there. He lives there, but he could serve those men.

He's a driver, and basically, he drives the men to the hospital if they need it. If they have to go to a clinic appointment, he takes them to the clinic appointment. He might wait or go back and pick them up later.

He drives them to the pharmacy to get their medications. And he just sort of feels that that's his calling. He's very interested.

He takes notes at most of the chapels, and afterwards, he might ask me or somebody else a clarifying question about a scripture. He's got this big pack of sermon notes that are underneath his shirt. Julius has two children.

His daughter lives up near the church with her two children, and he gets to see them maybe once a month or so. His son was killed in a shooting in Indianapolis when he was 20 years old. Julius didn't hear about it for a couple months, but then he ran into the child.

(This file is longer than 30 minutes. Go Unlimited at https://turboscribe.ai/ to transcribe files up to 10 hours long.)