I was in a meeting recently where someone said, “It’s not about percentages, it’s about dollars”. I couldn’t disagree more but I guess it depends on what you value.
When I was leaving the center in Tuscon it had been a long couple of days. What I had hoped for wasn’t materializing and in fact it was a little of the opposite. I was hoping for understanding, help and healing and instead it was none of that. As I was packing, someone paid me a visit…
History….I remember when my pacemaker fell. 1991. Yes, fell. It was implanted in my abdomen and then a few months later a baseball hit me in the stomach and it shot the pacemaker through my abdomen like one of those silver balls on strings on desks where you hit one ball at one end and it knocks the ball on the other end outward. The pacemaker shot through my stomach and other organs and landed on my colon. I didn’t know this at the time of course. I just thought, “Wow, you suck at shortstop Chuck, you should have used your glove. You deserve that pain in your gut”.
However, that pain in my gut was way more than from a baseball. Over the next 5 weeks I met with doctor after doctor who had various theories and tried various things. I was bleeding like crazy and couldn’t eat and I lost nearly 30 pounds. After a colonoscopy and seeing the “bloody clump” in my colon, they determined I had colon cancer.
They decided I needed surgery for the cancer but the next day before I could have surgery for the “cancer” I was bleeding like crazy and a had a bad fever. A friend called an ambulance and this particular ambulance must have been on sale because it didn’t know where to take me. (typical buddy to call http://www.twoguysandanambulance.com). After 2 hours in the ambulance I was finally dropped at a hospital about an hour and half from my home. Never been there before in my life. Couldn’t find it today if my life depended on it.
The ER surgeon said that I was dying so they needed to cut me open to see what it could be. He asked who we should call, I said no one. I wrote a letter to my parents and off we went to surgery. That was the first of two times I wrote a letter saying goodbye before I went into surgery.
Low and behold, I had a baby pacemaker! They took it out of my colon, cleaned it up and reinserted it so it would keep working.
Hang with me, I’m bringing it home.
During that hospital stay I had a nasty infection. Peritonitis. Took me about 10 days to kick it. While there I couldn’t eat or drink anything or get out of bed. I was fed by a tube and my only relief was lemon swabs. It was miserable. But….there was a friend…two friends actually. One was an older man who was so kind and he ended up paying the deductible for my stay. The other was a younger man who had no money but he would come down around 8pm and stay the night and when I would finally fall asleep he would stand outside the door and keep people from coming in to wake me to give me a sleeping pill. Nearly every night he did this. And today, he’s the CEO of a hospital.
So…who gave me more? The answer is neither. Both are valuable. For sure. And the woman in Mark 12 who gave just a few cents in the offering plate in the temple…she gave both “dollars” and percentages but Jesus praised….the percentage.
The key was that she gave out of nothing, the others gave out of abundance. Much like the newspaper vendor in the Bill Gates story.
At the very end of my stay in Tuscon when I finally had all my stuff and I was packing, a nurse who I had to have a lot of interactions with came in and gave me a ziploc bag. In it were two clorox wipes and 3 pairs of surgical gloves. She thanked me for being so kind when it was not exactly a great situation.
I asked what this was for and she said that she wanted me to be safe as I traveled home.
Why is this a big deal? Because EVERYWHERE you looked at this center there were signs talking about the shortage of clorox wipes and only nurses were allowed to have them etc.
She asked me to hide what she had given me and I did. She didn’t have much to give me but she gave me ALL she could.
Oh it’s definitely about percentages….
Brint's Blog 