The contact came about via three corners
“That’s stupid, who still believes in God. You can all laugh at him now!” Werner Wigger, ten years old, had to stand in front of the class and his classmates now made dirty jokes about him with the teacher’s permission. This is what religious freedom looked like in the GDR. The foolish man who still believed in God became the founder of the German Missionary Medical Team, which has provided medical assistance to thousands and thousands of sick people in Africa.
And it was precisely this story that I wanted to tell absolutely correctly in my sermon in Leidringen on January 6. So I called the Wiggers the day before and spoke to his wife Irmela. She had all the details in stock and our phone call quickly came to an end. “By the way,” I said casually, “we’re still looking for gynecologists for our hospital in the short and long term!” Dr. Irmela Wigger immediately had two names in mind: “The Dres. Schanz, Mr. and Mrs. – both are gynecologists”.
I then had two conversations with the Schanz. You yourself were not available for personal reasons, but last Sunday in Marburg you had spoken to a young doctor who knew Diospi Suyana well. And that Dr. Christian Wagner immediately remembered a former head of gynaecology.
Following these winding paths, I ended up last Monday evening in Breitscheid with Dr. Gilbert, former head of gynaecology at a large hospital in Giessen. To make a long story short. He comes to Peru for a quarter of a year and helps us out.
What did Dr. Werner Wigger, Dr. Irmela Wigger, Drs. Schanz, Dr. Christian Wagner, Dr. Peter Gilbert and the missionary doctors John have in common? They are all “stupid” people who still believe in God and use this power to change the world for the better.
Years ago, I gave a lecture at the city hospital in Neubrandenburg. My audience was purely secular. After my presentation, a man spoke up and said: “I was responsible for development aid in the GDR at the time. When you told me about Diospi Suyana, it sent shivers down my spine. I can’t make sense of it all!”
It is this real and yet so inexplicable power of God that performs miracles and builds hospitals out of nothing. She motivates people to overcome their selfishness and mysteriously makes the right contacts in just a few hours.
