Dear Friends,
This is the seventeenth message in a series on the people and events that have been significant in my walk with Christ. It is nearing the end.
From the responses I’ve been receiving, many of you have been stirred to gratitude over Jesus’ grace in your life and to the need to draw closer to him. This makes me happy because my stories only have purpose if they glorify Christ and make him known to you.
Finding our purpose and our power in Christ alone is essential. He calls us to follow, even before we come to belief. Belief apart from him is no more than a dry husk. He breathes life into Scripture and into regenerate hearts. The Apostle Paul says that our bodies are merely “jars of clay” containing the treasure of the life of Jesus manifest in us and through us to the broken people of a dying world (2 Cor 4:7-15). His life is the difference between mortality and eternity.
The attraction of Christ is love, but love to be worthy of the name requires the action that takes dead and dying things and gives them new life. That’s the story of Jesus Christ who is “the resurrection and the life” (John 12:25).
The work of the disciple is to be used by Christ for his redemption of those in bondage to sin and the impoverishment of the human soul that results from sin, and to serve as an instrument of healing for those torn by the jagged edges of this world and afflicted by its diseases and addictions . Men and women who turn to follow Christ out of this mess, he invests with his life and power to help others follow him out too. Those who are invested by God in the salvation of the life of others and to be spent for his purpose. This is what it means to be a missionary.
This week’s message describes a relationship that more than any other has taught me what mission means. May it bless you.
. . .
Dr. Dick Hart, the president of Loma Linda University Health is one of the most original persons I’ve ever met. By “original,” I mean he doesn’t fit the mold of any one else I’ve ever known.
Public health physician, international health expert, preventive medicine specialist, healthcare innovator, teacher, university president, church leader, farmer, pilot, community leader, successful fund-raiser, naturalist, story-teller, adventurer–he approaches all of these roles with seemingly unlimited energy. He is a man of quick intelligence and intellectual curiosity, with a needling wit inadequately disguising a compassionate heart, kind eyes and a big grin, riding on a lean, athletic frame. Those who travel the world with him marvel at his ability to go long stretches without food or rest and then go to sleep in an instant regardless of surroundings that keep others awake in discomfort or fear.
When I was first asked to help him with setting up a unique primary health clinic many years ago, I was advised by a University administrator that Dick Hart was a person of uncommon abilities and ideas. I was also cautioned that he was an activist who “thought outside the box” and was impatient with corporate structure and policies. All of this proved to be true.
I am a business attorney oriented to due diligence, processes, and documentation. But I also am result-oriented and lack patience for bureaucracy. So the buttoned-down corporate attorney and the maverick physician leader were paired up. In the ensuing 30 years as Dr. Hart took on increasing leadership roles and responsibilities at Loma Linda University, I’ve helped him with legal support for the establishment of various clinics and community and international initiatives, projects and relationships, academic centers, agreements, and corporate structures. One of those projects involved the visit to Afghanistan I described in the eighth message of this series.
Differences between our personalities and perspectives have stretched our relationship at times, but the bond between us has always grown stronger in mutual understanding and respect. Dr. Hart has a vision of Christian service expressed in community relationships that promote health, healing, and educational opportunity, in contrast with the short-term mission trips and stadium evangelism that emphasize the spectacular rather than the sustainable. He has sounded the call of mission service to the students in the professional schools of the University and they are responding in increasing numbers.
It was interest in mission service that led Dr. Hart and his wife Judy to invite our family to their home back in 1998. The featured attraction was a video filmed in a remote location in the Ethiopian highlands.
The video recorded the efforts of a group of University faculty, students and friends to replace a ramshackle collection of crumbling colonial buildings and steel freight containers with a modern hospital. This facility represented a rare source of medical care and hope for a teeming group of refugees from the Sudanese civil war, drought victims and rural villagers.
Trucks with flat bed trailers hauled large boulders from a river bed some distance from the hospital. The volunteers moved across the screen pounding on the boulders with a sledge hammers. With great effort they broke off small pieces of rock and pounded it into gravel. The gravel was piled on pieces of corrugated tin hung between two poles like a stretcher. The rock was hauled over to the construction site where it was added to cement and mixed by hand.
Small amounts of the cement mix was poured into forms over and over as a new hospital wing began to take shape. Tears came to my eyes as I watched this arduous labor because with every blow of the hammer on the rock I realized that Christ was not only building a hospital, he was also reshaping me from conservative defender of the status quo into a risk-taker for him. I am only a dime-a dozen lawyer living in the shelter of the American suburbs, but what I do can matter if I release my trickle of effort to flow into the greater stream of God’s grace.
Dr. Hart had a vision to restore mission hospitals throughout the majority world where the ravages of corruption, political instability, poverty, and neglect have left the facilities in shambles. He believed there were funds available from North America and Europe to repair and re-equip these hospitals if somehow they could achieve stable governance and accounting to insure the resources are properly utilized.
The pressing concern was Gimbe Hospital out in Western Ethiopia. It was originally established by the Italian colonial government. After the Italians were ousted in World War II, the Ethiopian government gave the hospital to the church. Decades later famine and civil war had so reduced its support and services that the Ethiopian government was going to shut it down in December of 1997. Yet, it was the only hospital for hundreds of thousands of square miles of drought-stricken, war-blighted territory.
Dr. Hart came to me with his idea to put an organization together to harness management expertise and surplus equipment from Loma Linda University Medical Center and sister hospitals in the U.S. to support mission hospitals in Africa and Central America. The Holy Spirit convicted me to say, “Yes,” without question when he asked me to help.
We made some preliminary plans for an organizational structure and were discussing them with a variety of experts. Then in October of 1997, I received an urgent call from Dr. Hart who was at a church council back east. He was returning to California in three days and bringing with him two church leaders with oversight or the area where Gimbe Hospital is located. “Can you have documents ready by then,” he asked.
It was short notice and I had no idea what incorporation papers in Ethiopia looked like. I did some quick research and prepared a checklist and template.
On the following Friday morning I attended a meeting in Dr. Hart’s office at the School of Public Health where he then served as Dean. Present were the leaders from Africa, international health experts from the University, and representatives of a faith-based, non-government relief agency. Dr. Hart introduced me and I began to discuss the proposed corporate structure. The senior African leader interrupted me. “Won’t this create liability for the University and the church?” he asked me.
“No,” I said. “We anticipate a properly formed and managed nonprofit corporation. I have cleared the details with the legal counsel for the church. No nonprofit corporation in the history of the United States has ever been held liable for the debts and actions of its properly incorporated subsidiary. The insurers and risk management departments of the church and the University are willing to insure the corporation for its activities. I do not see a problem.”
I went back to my presentation, but the leader interrupted me again with his concern that this corporation would cause “ascending liability” for the church. His manner of speaking and persistence made it clear that he opposed the creation of the new organization for reasons that seemed to me to be more bureaucratic and turf-protective than anything else.
With painstaking detail, I went over the history and law of corporate alter-ego or “ascending” liability that occurs when a corporation exists or is used by another party to defraud creditors, or when a corporation’s affairs are really controlled and manipulated by another party for its own interests. I explained the steps we were proposing for the appropriate legal relationships and protections of church assets.
“Now, sir,” I said as he motioned to interrupt me again. I stood up and pointed out the window. We have Loma Linda University Medical Center here with nearly a billion dollars per year in gross revenues and this University with a net worth in the hundreds of millions. And we have Gimbe Hospital struggling in your part of the world to serve a starving, impoverished population with almost no resources. I want to ask you two questions. The first one is this: Is this a church that you and I are part of or is it nothing more than an alliance of corporations protecting their own turf? If you believe it’s nothing more than a corporate enterprise, I can see where you are going with this. But if it’s a church that we belong to and serve, can’t this part of the church at Loma Linda share some of our blessings with our brothers and sisters in Ethiopia? What do we have a corporate enterprise or a church?
He glared at this intense American lawyer. I was controlled by a powerful passion for Jesus in that moment, but had I thought about it, I knew that leaders of this stature weren’t asked questions like this.
After a moment, he said, “Of course, we have a church.”
“My second question is this: Do you believe in the second coming of Jesus Christ or don’t you?”
He looked shocked and visibly angered. “I do,” he said emphatically.
“Well, I have to ask then, if we believe in the second coming of Jesus Christ, why are we hanging on to all this stuff? Why aren’t we using it to preach the gospel and heal people and give them hope? Why don’t we trust the provision of God? When Jesus returns is he going to ask us, ‘Where’s my stuff? Have you kept it safe and sound in warehouses and banks for me?’Or is he going to ask of us, “Did you use my stuff to take care of my children who were suffering and in need?’I think Jesus wants us to use his stuff to help his children and trust him for more where that came from?”
I stopped and sat down. I picked up my draft documents and finished my explanation of them to a quiet room.
The participants agreed to an expedited review process and I left to return to my office 25 miles away.
On the way, I called Patricia on the cell phone and told her what had happened. I was shaken, but energized by the experience. “All my career” I told her, “I’ve been an establishment guy. I have defended the establishment and its prerogatives. It is hard to believe that I just said those things. But you know what–for the last seven years I’ve read the Gospels over and over again and it has changed me. When you’ve soaked in the Gospels long enough you realize that Jesus never called us to conserve and protect of our lives and property. He calls us to be obedient, moral, ethical, yes, but not self-preserving and self-serving.”
I said, “Sweetheart, it moves me that the woman at the well left her water jar behind when she went back to town to tell her friends about Jesus. She didn’t have to conserve water anymore now that she had the living water to share (John 4). It is like that for us. We are called to trust Christ unconditionally after we encounter him and to be generous and liberal with the blessings he lavishes on us” (John 4).
Dr. Hart persisted in advocacy for his hospital support concept through the councils, committees, and health systems of the church for two more years. I supported him with prayer, legal arguments and documents. Today, the organization is well-established and supporting hospitals on four continents. Gimbe Hospital was expanded and refurbished for service as I witnessed on the video.
The gospel is concerned with life, not money and material goods. Jesus did not die on the cross and rise from the grave to establish endowments and build portfolios. He said, “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly” (John 10:10). He also said: “…Whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45).
Jesus’ valuation of his life and the life that he gives you and me is that it is a ransom. A ransom is something worth exchanging. We, and all we possess, are the currency of God. We are his to invest and spend. Why are we trying to save and preserve our own lives? We were not meant to be banked and held in reserve. We are meant to be spent by God for love’s sake in his great cause of eternal salvation .
The Christian statesman Dag Hammarskjold wrote this in his journal in 1957: ” You will know Life and be acknowledged by it according to your degree of transparency, your capacity, that is, to vanish as an end, and remain purely as a means….’The best and most wonderful thing that can happen to you in this life is that you should be silent and let God work and speak.’ Long ago, you gripped me, Slinger. Now into the storm. Now towards your target. (Markings [New York: Alfred Knopf, 1964], pp. 134-135).
When I came to this understanding that I am currency in the hand of God, I was so overwhelmed that I wrote a song about it. I only played and sang it once for two friends and their reaction was that the demand of the lyrics terrified them. They felt so strongly about it that I never brought it out again, but I often sing and pray these words when I am alone. They express the understanding of my heart about God’s will for my life as a disciple.
As water in a thirsty desert,
As coins in a beggar’s hand,
As a candle in the darkness,
As salt poured on the bland,
Lord, spend me.
.
Spend me lavishly,
Use me recklessly,
To love extravagantly,
Lord, spend me.
.
As fresh bread for the hungry ,
As vision for the blind,
Whatever, Lord, your purpose,
Take my body, soul and mind,
and spend me.
.
Spend me lavishly,
Use me recklessly,
To love extravagantly,
Lord, spend me.
(Kent Hansen, copyright, 1994)
May the Lord bless your life in his service with the power of his grace and the purpose of his love.
“O, taste and see that the Lord is good. Happy are those who take refuge in him” (Psalm 34:8). Under Christ’s Mercy,
Kent
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Please note that the content and viewpoints of Mr. Hansen are his own and are not necessarily those of the C.S. Lewis Foundation. We have not edited his writing in any substantial way and have permission from him to post his content.
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Kent Hansen is a Christian attorney, author and speaker. He practices corporate law and is the managing attorney of the firm of Clayson, Mann, Yaeger & Hansen in Corona, California. Kent also serves as the general counsel of Loma Linda University and Medical Center in Loma Linda, California.
Finding God’s grace revealed in the ordinary experiences of life, spiritual renewal in Christ and prayer are Kent’s passions. He has written two books, Grace at 30,000 Feet and Other Unexpected Places published by Review & Herald in 2002 and Cleansing Fire, Healing Streams: Experiencing God’s Love Through Prayer, published by Pacific Press in spring 2007. Many of his stories and essays about God’s encompassing love have been published in magazines and journals. Kent is often found on the hiking trails of the southern California mountains, following major league baseball, playing the piano or writing his weekly email devotional, “A Word of Grace for Your Monday” that is read by men and women from Alaska to Zimbabwe.