Testimony of faith. Christ was there

I became a doctor imagining that I could save the world, like Christ. From my second year of study, I understood that I would not save anything at all. At the hospital, I noticed that doctors often only relieved suffering. It is impossible to reconcile this way of doing things with the conviction that the sick person is a person who must above all be supported. It’s also impossible to find a place for my faith. At home, I had always heard that medicine was an evangelical profession, because Christ is particularly present in those who suffer. But through so many disappointments, I ended up telling myself that I had to give up my idealism. I continued my studies without developing myself, looking at my patients as a medical problem to be solved.

And then, during a 5th year internship, I had to take care of a patient with Parkinson’s disease at a very advanced stage and suffering from a skin condition that made him particularly repulsive. He asked me for water and, while serving him, a light suddenly appeared: Christ was there. Incarnated in the destitution of this person who appeared to me so ugly, useless. Something incomprehensible, and yet dazzling. I prayed for a long time to find this lightning bolt. And, a few months ago, quite simply, I began to see God in my
patients. It is indeed a patient with his damaged body that I meet, but it is also Christ, mysteriously hidden. One evening, I said to the Lord, as usual: “I come to pray to you to spend time with you. » Immediately I thought: “But I have already spent my whole day seeing you in my patients. Now I come to meet you in another way. » This made me deeply happy. This spiritual truth had become a lived reality.

I began to love what I was doing, work and faith finally reconciling. To the point that when I took a six-month break to study theology, I felt real sadness at no longer seeing my patients, and therefore Christ. It is only he who saves, he has already saved, and I understood that it was the accompaniment of the sick, through this particular mediation offered by the body, that appealed to me. The grace to live this experience so intensely may not always be given to me, but then faith will take over.