Hope’s Hands

Lydia headed into the dining room which easily seated the three hundred to four hundred crew members. A slight smile graced her face as she listened to the low hum of the breakfast audience. Every once in a while, the hum would be punctuated by a boisterous laugh from the Chief Engineer. “Our four hundred seventy crew are the heart and soul of Mercy Ships!” Chief Tom pounded his fist on the table with enthusiasm. Without missing a beat, Lydia could join him in his speech that he gave to every new person who sat down at his table. “Our surgeons couldn’t help the people of Africa without the dedicated engineers keeping the lights on. The dear nurses couldn’t speak comfort to a scared baby with the cleft lip if it wasn’t for our faithful dining room stewards keeping the dining room clean and serving us food. Yet more importantly, Mercy Ships would only be another organization stitching people up if it wasn’t for the crew’s whole hearted commitment to LOVING GOD!” No need to look, Lydia raised her right fist into the air shadowing Chief Tom’s motions. “LOVING AND SERVING OTHERS, being people of integrity in all we say and do, and being people of excellence!” Since Lydia worked in the dining room, she had heard the loud spoken chief engineer give that speech countless times while making coffee, sweeping floors, or wiping down counters.

“Uhhh...” a small nervous cry escaped her lips when she glanced at the clock mounted on the glass wall that divided the dining room into halves. She could sense the second-hand ticking. She scurried over to the food and drink lines. The way the lines were set up created a horse shoe in the front of the dining room. She quickly made herself a peanut butter sandwich and sat at one of the front tables to scarf it down. She had the sandwich finished in a surprising amount of time for such a sticky substance.

She walked in behind the horse shoe and into the dish room where she found one of her teammates stacking the plates in the shallow, pronged crate. “Mar-ty!!!” Lydia sang in a goofy voice. She set down her breakfast plate on the stainless-steel counter trying her best not to reveal her jittery hands.

“Morning Lydia, how are you?” The bald chaplain from San Fransisco asked as he hosed down the dirty plates.

“Scared and overwhelmed by the prospect of going to screening today,” she finally admitted. There was no use denying it. She was in desperate need of prayer. The small, Minnesota, country girl inside her desperately wanted to run back to her cabin.

“Oh,” Marty stated in an understanding tone.

Lydia had been with Mercy Ships for almost two years, and had yet to be at a screening day. Screening Day...Lydia was thrown into thoughts that she wasn’t quite sure how to put into words…A day that for many had been long awaited. It was a day that had been advertised for weeks. It was a day that could very well launch a person into a new beginning, one that would be of living and not just surviving. Children who couldn’t walk to school because of painful club feet and had to forlornly watch from the sidelines as their friends played games that they couldn’t join because their clubbed feet prevented them from running. For some, even, it was a matter of life or death, a matter of being given a better life, or dying a slow, excruciating death of starvation, suffocation, and rejection. Men, women, and children suffered rejection because others thought they were cursed or possessed with a demon because of facial tumors that made it impossible to eat or breath.