The memories of a summer afternoon at a hospital are fresh in my mind. I visited 15 year-old Anhur whose expressive eyes articulated words his tired lips couldn’t speak. He had been pondered for days the existential question: “Why did I get cancer if health is all I have left?” The disease attacked his tibia and doctors were close to cutting his leg off, uncertain about stopping the spread. A last moment expert intervention averted the worst, a bone graft from his hip saved the leg, ensuring Anhur would have a normal life … yet there’s nothing normal. What is unique is not his battle against cancer, but the fact his father escaped deadly persecution in Egypt, to survive in a refugee shelter with him and a younger sister. The boy’s eyes expressed agony while nurses bandaged the fresh wound in a tight cast – to protect his leg like Hong Kong was now protecting his family. Tears welled up in his father’s eyes as he pondered this misfortune against the long-term hardship his children will endure, uprooted from everything familiar. Situations like this make me wonder: “Why does so much goes wrong for people you would think can’t take any more?”
When the government informs there are 6,500 asylum-seekers and refugees in Hong Kong (Jan 2010), we are reminded what little meaning faceless statistics carry. The rounded figure fails to convey the deep suffering each person experienced fleeing their homeland and again struggling to make ends meet abroad. More than their words, it is the look on their faces which accentuate the horrors they survived, atrocities we find hard to believe, though the terrible truth is Man will inflict anything upon his enemy – when reason is abandoned. Walking back to the MTR, I thought of Anhur and sought answers to enduring questions: Why do people suffer so much through no fault of their own? Why is life hell for some and so much easier for others? To put it bluntly: why do so many, suffer so much, for so long, when others enjoy life’s comforts? I don’t have the answers, but I recognize that suffering is the anvil on which the Hammer of Hardship forges the best wisdom. Paradoxically, my commitment increases the more misery I encounter. My clients’ distress heightens my compassion and strengthens my desire to champion their cause, to stand by their side, shoulder to shoulder. The cornerstone of my mission is to uplift the vulnerable wherever I encounter them. I pour my energy and talents into their broken lives – sharing their suffering so they might share my hope. Would Anhur’s hip-bone ever protest to his tibia: “That’s none of my business?” Then how can we say to others: “That’s your problem!”?
The Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador left these inspiring words before he was martyred for his service:
"The Kingdom is not only beyond our efforts, it is beyond our vision. We accomplish in our lifetime only a fraction of the magnificent enterprise that is God's work. Nothing we do is complete for the kingdom always lies beyond us. No statement says all that could be said. No prayer fully expresses our faith. No program accomplishes the Church's mission. This is what we are about. We plant the seeds that one day will grow. We water the seeds already planted knowing that they hold future promise. We lay foundations that will need further development. We cannot do everything and this enables us to do something, and to do it very well. It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, an opportunity for the Lord's grace to enter and do the rest. We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker. We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs. We are prophets of a future not our own."
