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On Sunday, TGCA published a post from Mark Powell on medical staff (and ministers!) rediscovering prayer in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis. Here, as a follow-up piece, is a specific example taken from a recent public-radio interview.


National Public Radio recently aired a fascinating interview with Dr David Nott. Dr Nott served as a trauma surgeon in some of the world’s most dangerous places, such as: Syria, Afghanistan, Congo, Iraq, Yemen and Sarajevo for nearly two decades. Late last year he also wrote a personal memoir, War Doctor: Surgery on the Front Line (Picador, 2019) outlining his experiences.

From War-Zones to the ‘Disaster Zone’ of COVID-19

While Dr Nott has spent most of his surgical career treating people who have suffered horrific injuries in war-torn countries, he is now part of a team caring for those with COVID-19. An international crisis which Nott refers to as a ‘disaster zone’. As Dr. Nott explains:

When you’re in a war zone and you’re operating on somebody—any moment the hospital could get blown up or people could come into the operating theatre with guns and hold you ransom … It’s very similar, really, with the virus, because you have to appreciate that it is an invisible enemy—and you have to make sure that the invisible enemy doesn’t get you.

He then goes on to soberly predict:

You will see things that you have never seen before…You will have to make very difficult decisions—which are those difficult decisions you actually make in war zones—about saving somebody’s life.

From Humanitarianism to Transcendence

Nott is a well-known humanitarian—dedicating himself to helping people of all backgrounds, cultures and religious faith. But he offers an especially intriguing answer to enquiries about his own religious convictions:

I don’t pray every day. I’m not particularly religious. I don’t go to church as often as I probably should … but it’s interesting when you’re in such a dreadful situation and when you realize that your life may be coming to an end very rapidly, and the situation is such that the stress is so much that you need to turn to somebody. … And, of course, you haven’t got your parents there. You haven’t got your loved ones there, and there’s nobody there. So, who do you turn to?

And it’s quite funny that there is no doubt in my mind that there is a higher being there. There’s no doubt—because on occasions where my life has been almost on the line; where I felt that within a split second, I’m going to die here … something happens in my head and I start to pray and I feel like I have a frequency-band on the radio in my head that I turn on to. And I do go on to that frequency and I feel that I am able to talk to God.

And I do feel that he is listening to me and he’s listening to my severe anxieties at the time. And it gives me enormous comfort to realise that I am talking to him and that he is giving me some strength back. It’s surprising how you feel this—almost, strength—come back into your body. A couple of times I felt [this]: Once, there was a priest in Aleppo who put his hand on my head, and again, the same thing happened to me. I thought I was going to die there, and he put his hand on my head and I could feel the radiation going through my body. It was a very odd experience—but that’s getting close to God.

From Despair to Hope

Dr. Nott’s experience is a timely reminder that God has set eternity in our hearts (Ecc. 3:11) and that as the apostle Paul says, His providential ordering of our lives leads us to reach out to Him (Acts 17:26-28).  For ultimately, as Augustine famously so says in his, Confessions: “Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.”

If you are a Christian reader, why not spend a moment thanking God for medical professionals such as Dr Nott. Pray that God would hear their prayers and, above all, that he would bring them to know Jesus, who makes prayer possible and shows us the true face of the Higher Being.

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