In the Novotel in Hannover
I am sitting in an empty conference room. In half an hour paediatricians will be sitting on the chairs. The first talk of the conference, which is about a high-tech hospital in Peru, opens a window for the participants to look outside the box. As the organisers have given me total freedom for my talk, I want to let everyone in the room look into my heart. Diospi Suyana is not only a modern hospital with modern infrastructure 45km away from Machu Picchu. Its story deals far more with my desire that the God of the Bible truly hears our prayers and acts in the most amazing ways in the 21st century, that he forgets and misses no one and that there is a hope for each of us that lasts beyond death.
I speak. Attentive silence. The doctors I am speaking to know what it means to have built a state of the art clinic in the Andes. A miracle out of nothing. A work that has either to do with trusting God or is absolutely crazy. After the Q+A session I pack my bags and am about to leave the building to start my five-hour journey through several traffic jams on the German autobahns, when a Jewish doctor approaches me. I will call him David Sternberg. “Your story is fascinating,” he begins and then continues: “I lost my entire family in German concentration camps. Now I work as the head physician of a children’s hospital and, as it were, save the lives of German babies!”
Within a minute we are both talking about the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the supreme authority of our universe. We both believe in him and set all our hopes in the God of the Bible. We speak about Isaiah 53. 800 years before Christ’s birth the prophet spoke of things he himself could not understand.
“He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain. Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held him in low esteem. Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering, yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; he was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth.”
Was Jesus Christ this “man of pain“ the prophet spoke about, who carries the sins of the mankind once and for all? Is he the Messiah the Jews have been waiting for for nearly 3,000 years?
We shake hands and exchange business cards. Now I am on my way to the car park, Wiesbaden, my next appointment. We all, like sheep, have gone astray and have gone our own ways. Will we find peace in him, because he suffered for us? /KDJ
