There is no such thing as a perfectly healthy doctor. Yes, even the masters of medicine have their diseases and broken bones, just like us.
I saw a movie recently called Awakenings featuring Robin Williams as Dr. Sayer, a doctor newly hired by a psychiatric hospital in the Bronx. Dr. Sayer has been hired to care for some particularly hopeless patients despite the fact that he is not at all a “people person” and desires minimal human contact. The patients he is assigned are essentially catatonic; they are in a state only slightly better than a coma. They shut their eyes to go to sleep and open them when they are awake, but other than that it seems they have no actual brain activity. They don’t walk, talk, eat or anything until Dr. Sayer begins performing some tests to see if these patients have active brains. He begins by throwing balls at them and seeing if they will catch them, and they do! He then begins various other tests in order to see what other stimuli his patients might respond to and finds a number of other things that will stimulate his patients’ minds, like playing Jimi Hendrix music to see if they will dance. After awhile, he begins to hope that his patients aren’t simply brain dead and that they due in fact have active brains that simply need something new, an awakening so to speak.
Prior to Dr. Sayer’s arrival the other doctors had given up all hope for these patients and had basically decided that these patients would be doomed to float around the hospital until they died. As Dr. Sayer became more and more involved with his patients he finally was able to find a medicine, which he believed would “bring them back” from their perpetual coma, or whatever it was they were in. The first subject he tried the medicine on was a character named Leonard Lowe, played by Robert De Niro. Initially there was no response to the medicine from Leonard, but one night Sayer decided to give him a little extra medicine and that night he “woke up” as it were and began talking and drawing and all the other things he had been doing at nine years old, prior to entering his catatonic state.
After “awakening” all of his patients, Dr. Sayer takes them dancing and out and about to do things and tries to help them have lives all over again, unfortunately it is not long before (spoiler alert) Leonard and the others begin to regress and lose their minds all over again. At one point as Leonard is fading back into a catatonic state he begins to twitch, talk funny and have a number of other issues and in a private conversation with Dr. Sayer he says, “Look at me! I’m grotesque!”
We are all patients and we should all be doctors as well. Just like Leonard, most Christians “wake up” to find that they were missing a lot in their lives. I don’t mean this in the sense that, they needed something that wasn’t there before, I mean this in the sense that they realize that a spectacular thing called life with God was waiting right in front of them. They just couldn’t reach it because too many people gave up on them and wouldn’t give them what they needed. For most people, this is just a matter of a little more love, a little more patience, a little more understanding than what the average person will give them. In my own life a significant part of what brought me back to God was a few good people showing me love when most people like them had only judged me. I see people like me all the time that simply need a little more love and when we “the church” don’t provide it (though we’re commanded to) they seek it everywhere else. All it takes is one person, like Dr. Sayer, to give them that little extra medicine even though it costs a little more and is a little less convenient. And when that little extra is given, people can start to see what Jesus was to the world and what we are asked to be.
Unfortunately, even when we give that extra medicine people will still regress. My six-year addiction didn’t die when I “found God” and when we “wake up” we sometimes feel grotesque because we know there is something better but we feel that we just can’t hold on to it because our old lives don’t just disappear when we find something better. This is when we must recall that Jesus didn’t come to heal the healthy because the sick need a doctor. This statement is I feel is two fold because I feel he not only meant that he came for those who didn’t know him but also that he came to help us with our problems not to make us perfect.
Life with God is always right in front of us but I, like most people, know how easy it is to allow ourselves to fall asleep rather than to wake up and embrace the truth. I have had people confess their sins to me and often with that confession comes the declaration that they feel they will never be good enough for God. They say “Look at me I am a terrible person, liar, slut, etc! I am not good enough for God!” Congratulations, none of us are, nor will we ever be. The beauty of salvation is that there is no such thing as good enough; there is simply the decision, followed by the awakening. Regress is inevitable, but God will always be right there in front of you. Our imperfection will always be there, but God doesn’t care about that.
I know it’s sad
That the gift we have
We keep it for ourselves
Most of the time
The world is looking
For a love that’s locked up
Inside these four walls
Break the door down and shine
We need to wake up, wake up
Live like God
Pour out love
-Leeland "Wake Up"
