What is Important?
What if you were asked to choose the most important thing in your daily life. I am talking about a physical item, the thing or device that you cannot live without. It is the most used and your top necessity. You might call it a priority. Maybe someone would say, “My iPhone is my top necessity. I cannot live without it.” If you go out and about nowadays, you’ll see people are all looking down at their phones. We could be called the down-looker culture. I will date myself, but I remember when the length of your phone cord determined how “mobile” your phone was. In college, one of our dorm mates had a 50-foot cord for his phone. We all thought it was rocket science and the coolest to have that much range. Today, that is not even a thought. You can be driving on a highway and FaceTime your friends or family.
Others might say the most important thing to me is a cup of coffee. I totally understand those people. I am not a FaceBook person, but I think some might say that they have to get up to see if anyone sent them a message or want to see what was happening in friends’ lives. Then the very spiritual might say, “I need to pray and read the Bible.” We all have a value scale that indicates what is important to us. Sometimes we can confuse what is a necessity with what is a luxury. You might agree with me that people all around the world would answer this question vastly differently. A man likely would answer it differently than a woman. A senior would answer it differently than a teenager. I remember as a teenager counting the days until I got my driver’s license, and now I do not mind letting others drive me around. You get my point.
Let me tell you what my friend, Hendrik, says was the most important thing for him. Hendrik said it was having shoes. You see, Hendrik is a leper. He has no toes or fingers and lives at the Hohidiai/IFC base in Indonesia. He is 64 years old. Hendrik lived like a dog in the jungle for 20 years and was taken to our medical base where his leprosy was treated, and all of his wounds were cleaned and treated every day. He is now no longer contagious and lives in the long-term housing at the base. He is truly a friend of mine, and I am so blessed to spend time with him.
His feet are grotesque and way out of normal proportion. There are no shoe shops where you could buy him a shoe. He had a shoe that was a little piece of canvas glued onto the foam edges of a flip-flop. It had Velcro on the strap. We were not sure who made it, but it was old and falling apart. It was the only pair of shoes he had. We tried a number of ways to get him a new shoe. We put his foot in a foam pattern to properly fit him a shoe, but that did not produce a comfortable shoe for him. His feet are really bad, and the shoes he had were torn and repaired but they were at the end of their usage.
It became a campaign to get Hendrik some comfortable shoes. We got a little band together who wanted to help and started the process. I think we would have paid any amount for some shoes for him. You can see in the photo how broken and trashed his shoes were. I have to credit Cameron Rogers with finding someone in a remote city on the island who would make Hendrik some shoes. Cameron never told the shoemaker that they were for a leper, or he could have refused to make them. This was just a custom shoe and a payment for him.
For $30 USD, Hendrik got the most important thing for him – shoes. When he came to the clinic at the base in 2007, he could not walk, and he was suffering from infected sores all over his feet and legs. He now can walk and is mobile in the morning.
Maybe a different view from a broken man on a remote corner of the world can change how we look at what is important. Honestly, we can live well without most of what we think are necessities. Could it be that helping a man who lived in the jungle for 20 years while suffering rejection and the physical effects of his disease is an important pursuit? Carl Cady