MTM - Happy 250th Birthday America

A patient looks you in the eye and says her last meal was roots she dug from the ground, boiled in water, and shared just to make it through the week. That single sentence can wreck your categories for poverty, health, and gratitude, and it becomes the doorway to a bigger July 4th reflection from me, a country doctor who has seen both mission-field scarcity and American abundance.

I tell stories from Haiti that still stick with me: barefoot patients with infections, women going days without food, and a Bible conference where people sit on concrete blocks in 95 degree heat for eight hours a day just to hear Scripture taught. I ask what that kind of hunger reveals about our own spiritual appetite, and I connect it to the biblical warning about a famine of hearing God’s word. Along the way, I share my parents’ early marriage, empty cupboards, and the long grind through college and medical school as a reminder that America can still be the land of opportunity.

Then we pivot to civic responsibility and religious freedom. I compare our First Amendment rights with what believers face in places like India, where Christians may have to worship and baptise in secret, and I talk plainly about voting, apathy, and why a representative government ends up resembling the governed. If faith matters, freedom matters, and your neighbour matters, then showing up is not optional.

Subscribe for more biblical insights and real-world stories, share this with a friend who needs the perspective, and leave a review so more people can find the show.

Transcript

Welcome And July Fourth Theme

SPEAKER_01 0:04

More than that. Where Jesus is more than enough for the illness. So listen up because the doctor is dead.

SPEAKER_02 0:21

Welcome to More Than Medicine. I'm your host, Dr. Robert Jackson, bringing to you biblical insights and stories from the country doctor's rusty, dusty scrapbook. Well, this is our July the 4th edition, and Happy Birthday, America. Happy 250th birthday.

SPEAKER_03 0:45

God bless the USA.

Haiti Patients And Real Hunger

SPEAKER_02 0:54

I would like to tell you a little bit about some of my patients that I took care of when I was in Haiti. Some of you know that I took multiple mission trips to Haiti, and when I was there, one of the things that I noticed was that all of my patients there were quite skinny. Most of them did not wear shoes, and most of them had, I hate to say it this way, but they had fungus on their bare feet because they walked everywhere they went, or either they rode bicycles. And one of the questions that I had to ask almost all of my female patients was, When did you last eat? And it was not uncommon for single women who had no husband to say to me that their last meal was two or even three days ago. And they would say to me that their last meal was roots. Turned out that they often had to dig in the ground to find roots that they would boil in water and then eat the roots. Unfortunately, there was no nutritional value in the roots that they were eating. You see, there was no social security for widows or the elderly or the sickly or even orphaned children. Now I want to compare that to my patients here in the United States. My poor patients, my impoverished patients in the United States often weigh in at 250 to 300 pounds. And on their intake forms, they will claim that they have food insecurity. What they mean by that is their Medicaid or food stamp cards had been cut by $10 this year compared to last year. My overweight, impoverished patients here in this country often drive very fancy cars, and they have iPhones and they wear high dollar tennis shoes. That's very, very different from the patients that I took care of in Haiti.

SPEAKER_03 3:19

God bless the USA.

Bible Conference That Cost Everything

SPEAKER_02 3:24

Now, let me tell you another story of what happened on another trip that I took to Haiti when I was with another pastor friend of mine who was also on this same mission trip. And we were there for seven days, and actually, five days of this trip was a Bible conference, and our assignment was to teach for eight hours a day for five days at a Bible conference. And we were teaching about, I don't know, there were sixty, maybe seventy Haitians that were attending the Bible conference, and they sat on concrete blocks and they took notes feverishly. The temperature by mid-morning was 95 degrees, and all of these Haitians were smiling broadly. And by 10 o'clock in the morning they were all pouring sweat. One of the men who attended was a deacon in a local church. He only had one leg, and I found out later that he walked five miles every day to attend this conference on crutches. There were 12 people who attended who rode four hours every morning on the side of a dump truck, clinging for dear life to the sides of the dump truck just so they could attend the Bible conference. And then every evening they rode back four hours to where they lived higher up in the mountain. I asked them, why do you do this? Why don't you just stay here? And they said, Oh no, we can't do that. Our neighbors will steal us blind if we don't go home in the evenings. There were three who rode on a little 50 CC motorcycle, all three with their legs stuck out to the sides as they rode on narrow mountain pathways. It took them an hour and a half every day to ride to the Bible conference. Now let me ask you, would Christians in America sit on concrete blocks at 95 degree temperatures for eight hours a day to attend a Bible conference? Ha ha, I don't think so. They probably wouldn't do that for one hour. But you see, the Bible tells us that God would send a famine in the land. Now he was talking about the nation of Israel, and he was talking about a famine of knowing and hearing God's word. And I'm afraid that in America today, people don't have any hunger for God's word, like these Haitians did. They were hungry. They were hungry for God's word. You see, there's a difference in many countries of the world where people are hungry for God's word, but here in America, not so much. God bless the USA.

Parents’ Hard Road To Opportunity

SPEAKER_02 6:54

Now let me tell you a story about my parents growing up. Now I lived this story side by side with my mom and dad. They both ran away to get married when my dad was 17 and my mom was 16. And I was born about a year later, so I can tell you that I I lived this story with my parents. And they didn't have any money. In fact, after they were married, my dad took my mom back to her parents' home and dropped her off. They didn't have a house to live in. And the first year of their marriage, my dad went off to college, and my mom lived with her parents. And it wasn't until they'd been married for a year that he was able to take her off to college with him. And he worked three jobs, and my mom worked a job, and they just really worked hard in order to make ends meet. After three years of college, my dad went to medical school in Charleston, and uh while they were in in Charleston, South Carolina, they actually ran out of uh money for groceries, and my mom told me on one occasion that their housekeeper actually brought them groceries for two weeks in a row. And she really liked my mom and dad and and she said, Miss Jackson, you're good people and I really want to see you make it. And her husband had a good job and she brought them groceries for two weeks in a row. My dad used to sell blood at the blood bank every other week just to help buy groceries. But eventually they made it. He graduated from medical school and started a medical practice in his own hometown and they began to prosper. And you see, America is still the land of opportunity. And a lot of my dad's medical school compatriots had similar stories. They started off impoverished, they started off with next to nothing, and they worked their way through college, they made worked their way through medical school, and uh they knew the meaning of a dollar. And then they became professional people, and they began to make their way through life. America is still the land of opportunity. God bless the USA.

What’s Broken Yet Still Worth Defending

SPEAKER_02 9:29

Now there are a lot of things that you and I perceive to be wrong with America, and justifiably so, like Medicaid fraud that we hear about in the news almost every day, or illegal immigration, or voter fraud, or excessive taxation, or just this last few weeks birthright citizenship that the Supreme Court has approved of, much to our chagrin, or abortion on demand, and on and on it goes. You and I have a responsibility to diligently labor as citizens in the electoral process to elect legislators that are sensitive to our concerns and just as determined as we are to change these destructive uh issues before they actually destroy our nation. But but listen to me I can still worship God at the church of my choice any Sunday and I can talk to people about Jesus pretty much anywhere I want to in the good old USA without going to jail. However, just this last week I have been praying for a pastor friend that I know in India who has been working with a missionary from Brazil who was arrested and put in prison in India and he and his family have had to go into hiding there in India. And he's desperate that he and his family might end up in prison. And yet in the country of India Christians have to worship in secret. They have to baptize in secret for fear of their government. That's not true here in America. We can still worship God freely and we

Religious Freedom Compared To India

SPEAKER_02 12:02

can still share the gospel freely. And I'm just grateful that we still live in a country where our First Amendment rights are still protected. More than that, I can still buy and sell firearms and I can shoot them to my heart's content down by the river behind my house without any government interference. Oftentimes early in the morning or late in the afternoon, I'll hear the sound of gunfire down at the firing range below my house. My wife will look at me and she'll say, Who is that shooting down by the river? And I'll say, I don't know. That's probably son of some of our son's friends. And I'll look at her and I'll say, Darling, that is the sound of freedom. Whenever we hear gunfire down at the shooting range below my house, I will say to her, That is the sound of freedom. More than that, you and I can assemble all of our friends at a moment's notice for any matter that rouse us up, organizing them and petition our local government regarding that issue with all of our friends in attendance. And we can have freedom of assembly. In fact, next Saturday, July the eleventh, I'm going to gather with hundreds of like-minded pro-life friends to pray

Rights We Forget And The Sound Of Freedom

SPEAKER_02 14:00

at an abortion clinic. I don't have any fear of going to prison because of that. I realize that there are many nations around the world where that would be forbidden. I'm not afraid of the loss of my life or my liberty or my property in America without due process of law. Well, now that the COVID pandemic is passed, that's simply not true in many countries of this world where Gestapo like government police can swoop in and take you away for any infraction of the law.

SPEAKER_03 14:54

God bless the USA.

Voting Apathy And Civic Responsibility

SPEAKER_02 15:04

Do you remember Afghanistan after American troops ousted the Taliban and people got to vote? An overwhelming majority of the people in Afghanistan voted. Do you remember the purple dyed thumbs? Even the women voted for the first time ever. But then the American military left and the Taliban returned to power and the people lost their privilege. They lost the power to vote. In America, since the Revolutionary War, we've always had the privilege to vote. Yet in primary elections, less than thirteen percent of people vote. In presidential elections, approximately forty to fifty percent of people vote. How can this be? How can there be such apathy? Remember, in a representative form of government, the government always resembles the governed. The government resembles the people. And if you don't vote, you always get what you don't vote for. If you don't vote, don't complain because you're part of the problem. Don't be an ostrich. Get your head out of the sand, be informed, and vote every chance you get and be a part of the solution. There may be a lot of things we need to work on in America, but there's also a lot of things that we do better than any other country. Just ask all the soccer fans from all over the world that have just visited America, they are enthralled with the United States of America, and so should we be.

Why The World Still Wants America

SPEAKER_02 17:33

When I worked in the Gaza Baptist Hospital for four months during my senior year of medical school, every Arab and Greek Orthodox nursing student in the nursing school that I met had one thing in common. They all wanted to come to America. They might all join hands and jump up and down and shout death to America if provoked by the local imam. But in private conversations they all confided to me that they really wanted to come to America to work and get ahead financially. Why? Because America is the land of opportunity, the home of the brave, and the land of the free.

Tell Your Friends And Closing Blessing

SPEAKER_02 18:57

Tell your friends about it. We'll be back again next week, and until then, may the Lord bless you. Real good.

SPEAKER_00 19:08

Thank you for listening to this listening for more than medicine.