Day 220
Faith in the Midst of a Pandemic
A series of daily reflections for people of faith
by Rev. Robert Bayley, Interim Pastor
Patuxent Presbyterian Church, California, Maryland
pastorrobert@paxpres.org
Week Thirty-two Tuesday 20 October 2020
Covid Will Not Win:
Meet the People Powering a Hospital in Brooklyn
The Brooklyn Hospital Center, Brooklyn, New York
Dr. Vasantha Kondamudi, Executive Vice President, Chief Medical Officer
“You’re right in the middle of the storm and you don’t know if you’ll get to the other side. It was a very intense moment for me. You couldn’t stop people from dying. Everything we were before is one story: Covid taught us. It taught me how to be a vulnerable leader and resilient. When the peak came, I had to reassure my front line, I had to deal with them in the tent, in the emergency department, in the intensive care unit, talking to the nurses, talking to the doctors, making rounds when we don’t have enough PPE. We had to be very innovative. For a week we all had to wear garbage bags. The guidance changed every week. This pandemic, nobody knows anything. It’s brand new for everybody, for the entire world. Today is good for me. I can look back and say, ‘Really, did we go through that?’ But in that time when that happened you needed to have a lot of strength and courage and hope and faith that you would get out of it.” *From a special three-page article by the same name in a national newspaper.
What can we learn from Dr. Vasantha Kondamudi? First, COVID “taught me how to be a vulnerable leader.” This is the kind of person you want to follow who, like Jesus, wears vulnerability as a badge of strength, producing resilience rather than weakness.
Second, she knows the importance of the past: “Really, did we go through that?” enables her to respond with a knowledge that having gone through it once she can go through it again.
Third, she has a grasp on critical unseen resources “… strength … courage … hope … faith …” These are best accessed over time but when sought in crises are available from the God who made us to both recognize these needful resources and to activate an inner desire to seek them.
Reflective questions: Vasantha – Sanskrit for ‘Spring’ – as Spring is the season for new life, will you pray for Vasantha that she will be given opportunities to see her life being used to bring new life to the desperately sick, and that the strength, courage, hope and faith she asks for will be hers from the Lord in special ways specific to her life and work at this time? Which of the three lessons she has for us speaks most to you? Why?
Reflective Scripture: Hosea 6:3 – “Let us acknowledge the Lord; let us press on to acknowledge him. As surely as the sun rises, he will appear; he will come to us like the winter rains, like the spring rains that water the earth.”
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