Baggas’ Blog

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned on the blog before our plans to return to Africa this year, but things have changed a bit anyway, so I’ll give you the latest.

Watoto are planning another Medical Team mission in October this year and our plan was for me to go on this, Jen and the boys to come over and meet me there half way through, and then to have a holiday afterwards. After being the sole doctor last time I had asked a few Christian doctors I know if they were interested in coming, plus we had a few other miscellaneous people express an interest in possibly joining us. Well for various reasons it has turned out that virtually everyone who has expressed an interest in coming has decided not to, which doesn’t bother me since I am more than happy to be travelling on my own (it’s probably a bit easier that way anyway). It also looks like there will be at least one other doctor on the trip (from Sydney) so that will make the medical mission that much more effective and share the load a bit. Two or three doctors plus a few nurses would be the ideal team make-up. So I’ll be travelling on my own to Uganda in October for 2 weeks to be involved with the medical team - once again the bulk of our work will be medical outreach clinics delivering primary care medicine to impoverished villagers.

Jennifer is planning to once again spend some time working in the Sanyu Babies home in Kampala, and hopefully to also help provide them with some supplies and resources. But what we’ve decided to do, for various reasons, is to switch this over to a separate trip, leaving in early July. Now the cost of taking our family to Uganda and back is not much cheaper than purchasing round-the-world tickets, so around the world we will go! Leaving at the start of the school holidays (to minimise Owen’s time away from school) we’ll be travelling first to Uganda via Johannesburg, where we will spend time in the babies home. From there we will go to London and then Manchester to visit Jennifer’s relatives including her grandfather (who is quite old and not in good health, another reason for going earlier..) From Manchester it’s off to New York, Nashville, Los Angeles, Hawaii, Sydney and then home.

That’s the tentative plan. We’ll be seeing a travel agent in a week to look at booking all the flights, and I’m waiting to hear from the bank about a loan to pay for it all. Also I discovered when I saw my accountant last week that I have not one, but two massive tax bills due in the next 3 months, and I only have enough money to cover one of them. So we’ll probably have to borrow even more money to pay for that but I’m trusting that it will all work out. I’ll keep you posted on what’s happening with all the plans.

I spent some time early this morning thinking about dead bodies. I know, not the most delighful occupation for a Sunday morning, but there’s a point to it I promise. Now I’ve probably seen more than my fair share of dead bodies, a lot more than the average person. And when you’ve seen a few dead bodies you come to appreciate that there’s a certain quality about them - a certain deadness. Whether they’ve been dead a few minutes or hours or longer the combination of a lack of circulation around the body and a lack of neuromuscular activity makes the dead person qualitatively different from the live person they previously were. And when you see a body with this quality of deadness it is strikingly obvious that this is a permanent state from which there ain’t no return. I’ve also seen plenty of people who are just this side of deadness, whose hearts have arrested or some other serious health problem has brought them to the brink of death. Some of them have been brought back from that brink, most have proceeded on to deadness, but even in the nearly dead there is still that qualitative difference, albeit sometimes very minor. You can shock a nearly dead person and get them back, but once someone is truly dead no amount of electricity can help them, as Mark pointed out in his message this morning.

Anyway the point of all these morbid thoughts is that deadness is permanent. We all know it - dead people don’t come back. It’s a basic fact of life that my scientific training and medical experience have illustrated for me vividly many times. Yet today is Easter Sunday, a day on which we celebrate a time in which deadness was cured, the irreversible was reversed - and not only that but a new and improved humanity was revealed. Now some have used the universal truth of nature that deadness is permanent to discredit the resurrection acounts - “we know that dead people don’t come back to life therefore the stories about Jesus cannot be true.” Some have even appealed to science, saying in effect that with all the scientific progress we have made over the past 200 years we have now moved beyond entertaining such absurd primitive mumbo-jumbo such as the resurrection. This argument (as Tom Wright points out many times) is patently stupid - it didn’t take modern science to prove that dead bodies don’t rise - people in the past knew this as fact just as well as we do - in fact maybe more so since they had a more regular and closer exposure to death than most of us do now. I actually came across someone using this line of argument on a webpage or blog a few days ago, along the lines of “we know that the resurrection and other miracles couldn’t have happened therefore the gospels are a complete fiction.” Some people believe such arguments but want to retain a respect for Jesus so end up with a watered-down version of Christianity which removes any hint of the miraculous and finishes up with being simply a bunch of platitudes. Some scholars approach the New Testament with this ’scientific’ view as their basic premise and then spend their lives trying to explain away what is written there. Why not try a different premise - the premise of faith? We all know that dead people don’t rise and miracles don’t happen, but if there is a creator God then by definition he can transcend the facts of usual reality. So the question is not whether or not you believe in miracles (of which the resurrection is the ultimate example) but whether or not you believe in God. If you believe in God then a belief in the resurrection should not be a problem at all. People who say they can’t believe in miracles and therefore cannot believe the gospels have got it all backwards. I cannot fathom a “faith” which claims some sort of belief in God but which denies the possibility of miracles. If you’re not going to believe the miracles why bother believing in God at all?

Anyway enough of my rambling thoughts. The other thought I had whilst pondering cadavers was not how the resurrection is contrary to ’science’ and human experience, but just how amazing it truly is. If you are going to believe in God, why not believe in one who has the power to do this sort of thing, and not only once in the past for Jesus, but also one day in the future for all of us who believe? This is a key hope of Christianity - more than just salvation from the past - the hope of future resurrection (and physical, not just as some sort of vague metaphor). That’s the kind of power my God has. To finish, here’s a verse that Mark mentioned this morning which illustrates that power and that hope perfectly…

“I pray that your hearts will be flooded with light so that you can understand the confident hope he has given to those he called—his holy people who are his rich and glorious inheritance. I also pray that you will understand the incredible greatness of God’s power for us who believe him. This is the same mighty power that raised Christ from the dead and seated him in the place of honor at God’s right hand in the heavenly realms.”  (Eph 1:18-20)