God-centered resources from the ministry of John Piper

This is a guest post from a friend of ours who is a missionary doctor working with Muslims. It is a part of his guest series, "Day-to-day Observations from Asia."

*          *          *

The other day, I stopped by the house of one of my Muslim friends. He informed me that his 19-year-old nephew was in the hospital and he asked me to come and look him over.

No problem. I’m a Physician. I get this a lot.

The nephew had gotten pretty banged up when he fell from a three-story building, hitting a few things on the way down. Most of the injuries were not alarming and already taken care of—scrapes, cuts, bruises. He had also broken his heel, which will probably take a couple of months in a cast to heal up.

But the main thing was a broken jawbone. The x-ray was impressive, with several breaks. The answer seemed obvious to me: he needed an operation to get his jaw wired shut.

Enter the negotiations.

As it turns out, the accident happened eight days ago. The family had already been told to get his jaw wired shut, but they were refusing to have the operation because they couldn't afford it.

In this country, you pay for your medical care with cash up front or else the doctor won't do it. Makes sense, otherwise nobody would get paid. So the family and the surgeon had been negotiating for eight days while the patient survived on sugar water in an IV drip.

Well, that's no good.

As I looked him over, he just seemed a little odd. He couldn't speak because of his injury, but he followed commands fine. Even so, he was not interacting normally. He didn’t look at me or his parents or his uncle; he mostly stared off into space. He didn’t even look at the pretty nurse who stopped by…. Now that is odd in a teenage boy. 

The next 30 minutes were taken up in an animated discussion of operations and costs and second opinions and so on. I finally left because it was time for me to get on to my next appointment.

I saw my friend the next day in his office and I mentioned that his nephew seemed a little odd. I asked whether his brain might have gotten hurt in the accident? My friend replied, "No, that is the way he has been since he was 12 years old, let me tell you a story..."

But then a customer came in and my friend discontinued the conversation about his nephew.

When I finally got him alone for a bit he told me that his nephew—when he was 12 years old—had been in the countryside, and had walked into a field to empty his bladder. He unknowingly voided on a Djinn, a Muslim spirit being. (They are different than angels, usually viewed as bad, but sometimes neutral or even good.) Therefore the Djinn had cursed him.

The curse was thus: once or twice a month, for 2 or 3 days at a time, the boy would stop functioning. He would just sit and stare straight ahead without speaking. He could eat and drink during these times, but otherwise would just sit for hours and stare.

Various doctors they had consulted had not helped, but the boy's mother (my friend’s sister) had a special Koranic prayer book she would chant a prayer from, and then blow them (literally) over her son. This usually worked.

In between the spells he seemed normal, finishing high school and now doing computer-based cloth design.

My secular friend asked me: "Do you believe in Djinn?"

I love this job. We talked awhile.

The next day, my friend asked me to see his nephew in his home.  (They had refused to have the operation, and the patient had been transferred home, complete with a massive round-the-head bandage to supposedly hold his jawbone in place while it healed.) He asked me if I could help with the spells.

But when we arrived, there was a crowd in the house, and my non-religious friend did not want me to talk about the ailment at that time.

Based on what Jesus said about the expelled evil spirit who wanders about and then returns to the house to find it empty and moves back in with seven of his friends, I was not sure that an exorcism would do any good yet. It seemed that this young man had a pretty empty house. Filling it with righteousness would be a first step, so that when the Djinn eventually gets expelled, it can't come back in.

After tea, we talked and prayed for healing, and I left them a copy of Psalm 1, and Psalm 42/43 (Hope in God!). I suggested that the boy meditate on this for awhile. I also recommended that the patriarch of the family approve of it before they started reading.

He said OK, with only a brief scanning. They were all gathered around reading aloud when I left.

So anyway, that's what I've done during my lunchtimes the last couple days. How about you?