Photo and Commentary ©2023 by Maylan Schurch
Friday, April 21, 2023
Last Sabbath morning, just as people were about to emerge from our sanctuary into the church foyer to go to their various Sabbath School classes, we noticed this scene you see in the photo above.
The nearest of the two ambulances arrived first, its lights blinking. I figured that it had come to minister to the health of one of our members, so I anxiously hurried out to talk to the driver. He looked up from a clipboard he was writing on, smiled calmly, and said, “No, nothing to do with your group.”
Then the second ambulance arrived, lights blinking just as brightly. I went back inside and reported to the people in the foyer that nobody in our building seemed to have prompted these visits. Then I stood with everybody else and watched while a person in the closest ambulance was taken out on some kind of gurney and transferred to the second vehicle. (As you can see, I’ve deliberately maintained a wide-angle view for patient privacy. I even opened this photo with Microsoft Paint, and made a tiny white splotch over the person’s face, just in case.)
So, what was going on here? As we watched, we could see that the patient was conscious and seemed alert. The two vehicles seemed about the same size, so it wasn’t as though the man was being put into a far more specialized unit, though it’s hard to say. In the better-quality photo I have, I can zoom up the passenger cab door of the furthest vehicle and I can see a Bellevue fire department logo, so these two units are part of the same department.
So the most I can say is that here we had a transfer, and the transfer was happening evidently to make it better for the patient.
“Transfer” is definitely a Bible principle and practice. In Genesis, God transferred a “waste and void” water planet into the Garden of Eden. He transferred a family of 8 from a flooded world to a post-flood mountaintop so the race could have a fresh start. In Exodus He transferred an introvert shepherd into the leader of an enslaved nation.
And on and on throughout the Bible. When you stop and think about it, any Bible character we name our kids after went through a transfer, spiritual or geographical or otherwise. And it’s happening nowadays too. People who’ve attended a church throughout their childhood may realize that its teachings are no longer complete enough to meet their needs, so they transfer to a congregation which seems more Bible-based.
Want to read some more Bible advice about transfer, or change? Click the link just below: