Todd Guthrie, MD, PC
Making Sense
I entered the next exam room; waiting for me was an older couple who presented a communication challenge: my patient (the husband) was nearly deaf, and his wife suffered from Alzheimer’s dementia.
“Hello,” I shouted in his ear. “I’m Dr. Guthrie. How can I help you?”
He had tenosynovitis of the wrist, which is fairly easy to diagnosis and treat. However, treatment proved more challenging than usual as his wife, though pleasant enough, provided some distraction with her Alzheimer’s dementia. She kept trying to get him to roll up his sleeve over the area I needed to examine so I couldn’t even see it, much less access it. Nevertheless, through loud talking, gesturing, and persistence, I explained the issue and was able to give him an injection.
Recent research indicates that one of the first signs of Alzheimer’s dementia is loss of the ability to smell; it first affects the left side of the brain. This made me think more deeply about how important our senses are, and how communication and cognition are integral to proper functioning of these channels.
As we try to communicate the love of God in a way that will win the hearts of our patients, I wonder if our own clarity of thought about His love and our ability to truly hear His voice might also need His healing touch. Every day I spend with patients, I sense that I fall short in communicating God’s love.
I often wonder, “Does what I share even make sense to them?”
It was in the region of Decapolis, where the former demoniac had been evangelizing, that the new believers brought to Jesus “one who was deaf and had an impediment in his speech, and they begged Him to put His hand on him. And He took him aside from the multitude, and put His fingers in his ears, and He spat and touched his tongue. Then, looking up to heaven, He sighed, and said to him, ‘Ephphatha,’, that is, ‘Be opened.’ Immediately his ears were opened, and the impediment of his tongue was loosed, and he spoke plainly….And they were astonished beyond measure, saying, ‘He has done all things well. He makes both the deaf to hear and the mute to speak.” Mark 7:32-37, NKJV.
The deaf often have a hard time speaking properly because they have not heard normal elocution and volume. I suspect that Jesus was sighing because of sorrow for the spiritual deafness and speech impediments of His hearers. Revelation 3 reveals that His response to our Laodicean state is even more visceral.
What, then, is the solution to our cognitive and sensory deficits? According to this story in Mark, both the word of Jesus and His personal touch will open our understanding and give power to our ministry as we speak His words to others.
Incline your ear and hear the words of the wise, And apply your heart to my knowledge; For it is a pleasant thing if you keep them within you; Let them all be fixed upon your lips, So that your trust may be in the LORD; I have instructed you today, even you. Have I not written to you excellent things Of counsels and knowledge, That I may make you know the certainty of the words of truth, That you may answer words of truth To those who send to you? – Proverbs 22:17-22, NKJV.
This is not to be a one-time healing affair, but an ongoing treatment plan for which we are completely dependent on the Great Physician:
Man’s great danger is in being self-deceived, indulging self-sufficiency, and thus separating from God, the source of his strength. Our natural tendencies, unless corrected by the Holy Spirit of God, have in them the seeds of moral death. Unless we become vitally connected with God, we cannot resist the unhallowed effects of self-indulgence, self-love, and temptation to sin. In order to receive help from Christ, we must realize our need. We must have a true knowledge of ourselves. It is only he who knows himself to be a sinner that Christ can save. Only as we see our utter helplessness and renounce all self-trust, shall we lay hold on divine power. It is not only at the beginning of the Christian life that this renunciation of self is to be made. At every advance step heavenward it is to be renewed. All our good works are dependent on a power outside of ourselves; therefore there needs to be a continual reaching out of the heart after God, a constant, earnest confession of sin and humbling of the soul before Him. Perils surround us; and we are safe only as we feel our weakness and cling with the grasp of faith to our mighty Deliverer. MH 455.
My prayer is that we will sense our great need of the One who “does all things well,” so that we can exercise the “faith of Jesus” as He dwells in us and speaks to us through His word. Then our efforts to share Him with others will begin making more sense, even to the deaf, spiritually or otherwise.
<< | Table of Contents | >>