When I was five years old, my dad closed his booming practice as a private physician in Akron, Ohio to become a missionary doctor in the jungles of Ecuador, taking along our family and poodle Mimi.

He paid his own way for the venture even though it was through the international non-denominational outfit HCJB (our little hospital/airport/radio compound was, in fact, a focus of the 2005 mainstream major motion picture, The End of the Spear, about martyred missionary pilot Nate Saint).

If you ask me, my dad, who died suddenly in 2001 only a month after 9/11, had one of those great old-fashioned American success stories.

His parents came over from Norway to Ellis Island and settled smack-dab on Lake Superior in Superior, Wis. My dad, the youngest of three children, was only three years old when his father died suddenly of a burst appendix.

His mother, only able to speak Norwegian and without any formal education, earned money for her three young children by working in a laundry. Their family was so poor that at Thanksgiving, they were given one of three food baskets for needy families donated by the local Lutheran church they attended.

In high school, my dad studied hard and was so serious about his education that he didn’t even date anyone! He earned a scholarship to help pay tuition at the University of Michigan.

At the same time, he traveled door-to-door as a Fuller Brush Man and would even hitchhike to Chicago on weekends to sell his wares. His winning salesmanship—which partially consisted of him making Norwegian vs. Swedish/Finnish jokes in a thick Norwegian accent—once earned him a regional sales award from the Fuller Company.

To make it into medical school, my dad took a nationwide government-sponsored test in which only the top three percentile were awarded full scholarships. The payback requirement was service in the military and my dad was sent to Emory University where he took an accelerated program, earning his degree in three years.

He went on to serve as a surgeon during the Korean War at the Air Force base in Fairbanks, Alaska. I remember after his death finding a letter he had written his mother from the base in which he talked of having very little money and being happy to have a 10-cent can of Campbell’s soup for dinner.

His first job out of the military was as company doctor for Firestone Tire & Rubber in Akron. Shortly thereafter, he started his own practice in the Firestone Park neighborhood of the city.

My mom, fresh out of college with a degree in fine arts, responded to an ad my dad placed in the newspaper for a receptionist. He was so immediately smitten with her that when he got up to shake her hand at the end of her job interview he knocked over the trash can next to his desk. Needless to say, she was hired immediately. A year later, they married.

After coming back from Ecuador in 1973, my dad started a new private practice in a small farming town in north central Ohio, not far from Amish country and certainly having its share of poor people.

His generosity toward financially-strapped patients was unheard of and he quickly became known within a 60-mile radius for being the doc who would cut you a big break if you didn’t have the money.

He even had clients do things for him in lieu of payments, such as fixing his office roof and plumbing. One guy built him a grandfather clock. Another gave him a bunch of Amway products. In the end, my dad had all kinds of “deadbeat” patients who never did pay off their debts to him.

*****

Lately, I’ve been realizing more than ever how spoiled I am and that this isn’t at all how my parents raised me. A lot of my anxiety lately has had to do with being concerned with impending economic hardship.

I am running out of money to keep working from home and as the bills mount, my stress mounts. I want a job desperately (because of the loneliness) and yet the jobs in my field have dried up and the ones I think about that might be available seem so distasteful to me, especially after being away from the corporate office structure now for four years. There’s just so much phoniness I can’t conceive of going back to.

*****

I was driving the other day, listening to a bible study on the Messianic psalms by Jordan on my car’s CD player, when I came across this great insight: “I’m convinced that most Americans live with almost a panic-driven fear of poverty and of not having things. This has been a curse of Western civilization for centuries, and so you’re driven to have and to have.”

This reminded me of his old study on the book of Luke that I’ve been writing about lately. Here’s the passage from it:

“But to me, the most touching thing is to watch the Lord, in just His human sympathies—

He understood what poverty was. He understood the poor, and Luke constantly points to that. When He was born, there was no room for Him in the inn. If He had had an Am Ex Gold Card He probably could have gotten in, but He didn’t. He had a manger for a crib.

“In chapter 2, when His parents went to the temple when He was 8 days old, it says they offered a pair of turtle doves and two young pigeons. You know what that was? That was the poor man’s offering. That wasn’t the first offering; they didn’t have the money to offer the lamb.

“He was raised in a humble home; not a home of tremendous wealth and splendor. But He was raised in a home that knew what poverty was. His parables—the Good Samaritan, the prodigal son. Those are the parables in Luke.

“It’s in Luke 5:27 that you find the publican named Levi. Levi made Him a great feast in his own house. And there was a great company of publicans and of others who sat down with them.

“A preacher once preached a message called ‘The Table Talks of Jesus.’ He went over to chapter 10 where you’re at Mary and Martha’s house and then over to chapter 7 and that woman; he said she was a sinner but she was the woman who anointed His feet with oil and washed His feet with her own hair—the one who had nothing to pay yet He forgave all.

“Then you see Him sit at the table with them. You go through Luke and there are five or six places where you come into the meal and you see the Lord sitting in somebody else’s house. Somebody else has set the meal and yet He comes and sits with them as the Great Teacher.”