He Knows Your Name
Chaplain Sheri Ray never expected to be ministering in Africa.
"I had gone on missions trips to Asia," she says. "But I knew Africa would be a far more rigorous ministry experience."
The opportunity for the St. John's Hospital chaplain from Springfield, Mo., to connect with hundreds of women at two East African conferences came unexpectedly. Ray had called the Assemblies of God Southern Missouri District to ask about the trip for a friend, and ended up being recruited to the team.
The 14-member group flew to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, Jan. 24 and traveled 14 hours from the coast to the city of Mbeya near the Zambian border. There, some 1,200 women had paid the equivalent of a day's wages to attend the first seminar. This was no Western-style gathering held at some plush conference center. Women slept on the concrete floor of the host Assemblies of God church, and even outdoors.
But the atmosphere during the two days of teaching and worship services was electric.
"It was amazing to watch these women worship, many coming from homes where their husbands were not believers," Ray says.
A second conference in Morogoro, about three-fourths of the way back to Dar es Salaam, attracted several hundred women for a condensed one-day schedule.
"We needed interpreters," Ray says of the English/Swahili sessions. "A beautiful, poised young woman was asked to translate, and she almost refused. I heard her say under her breath, ‘I've never done this before.' But she did a fantastic job. When she finished, she sat down next to me. And I felt prompted to speak a simple word of encouragement. ‘There is excellence in you,' I said to her. And she received that."
Another personal connection materialized when Ray and her team members enjoyed two rest days in Ruaha National Park, Tanzania's largest and home to some 10,000 elephants.
Traveling in the tour jeep, Ray shouted out a question to the driver, calling him by name.
"His name was Yonah, a form of Jonah, and it startled him that I knew him by name," Ray says. "But that moment illustrates a key truth of my ministry. Whether I'm in the hospital, whether I am in a surgery waiting room with a family, whether I'm with a cancer patient or addressing 1,200 women in Africa, God knows their names and He is calling all our names."
And God's love, Ray insists, will also place the needs of those nameless to us on our hearts.
"We were traveling in Tanzania," she remembers, "and I saw a young man, perhaps 15, standing by the road. I'll never know his name, but his face so clearly carried the cares and burdens of life. I'll pray for him the rest of my life. Seeing him, I believe, was as much a divine appointment as the people we spoke to and laid hands on and prayed for."
Ray's journey into chaplaincy ministry began on one of the saddest days of her life. She was 5 years old when her first memory of a chaplain etched itself into her mind. It was January 1970. The man was visiting to inform Lillian May and her three children that Staff Sgt. Raymond Allen May, husband and father, had been killed in Vietnam.
"There was such a positive pastoral presence that the chaplains provided all through that experience for us," Ray remembers. "I experienced their presence as a very calming influence throughout that time."
At St. John's Hospital, she is now the one to offer comfort during severe illness or injury and at the loss of a loved one.
"Sometimes when I'm in a hospital room praying for someone to be healed-often with family crowded around the hospital bed-God says to me, The way I'm going to heal them is to take them home."
At other times, a miraculous recovery takes place this side of heaven.
Chaplain Ray will always remember one little girl brought in as a drowning victim.
"No one expected her to live," she remembers. "I went into her room in the children's ICU. I laid my hands on her little feet and on her head and prayed out loud. She was unresponsive, on a ventilator. The two nurses in the room stopped what they were doing and stood at the foot of the bed while I prayed."
Nothing seemed to happen at first. But when Ray went back an hour later, one of the nurses grabbed her in the hall and said, "You're not going to believe this!"
The once-comatose little girl was sitting up in bed, fully alert.
In every case Ray handles, regardless of the surface outcome, she witnesses the hand of God. That theme of divine love and providential influence has echoed in her own life since a military ministry team comforted her at the news of her father's death. She sensed that truth being amplified during 12 days in East Africa.
Returning to Missouri Feb. 5, Ray quickly re-established her ministry cadence at St. John's.
"To all of the women at the Tanzanian conferences, I had come to say, ‘God sees you and calls your name,'" Chaplain Ray says. "And when God calls our name we're so surprised He knows or remembers us. But He is the God who sees us, and He responds.
"I carried that theme back into the hospital," Chaplain Ray says. "I realize I have such a limited window of time with these patients and families. I'll never know much more about them. But I am here to say, ‘God knows your name, and He will respond to you and meet you at your point of need.'"