In one email to her friends she wrote “Either three oncologists….are crazy and imagining things, or GOD HEALS! I know what my answer is because I saw and felt the blue-black things, and then watched them shrink away with no treatment…”

 

“Grasping Heaven” tells Tami’s story, her trust in God, her journey of healing, from asking “Why me” to “why not me?” From her childhood, Tami had pursued her dream of being a doctor. She graduated summa cum laude, worked as a doctor in the US, gained more experience in Africa, China. She went to India to learn more about community health practice. Melanoma did not stop her from conducting medical research on AIDS and SARS and their cure.  By 2002, she was back in Asia! This time she was the visiting scientist for the International Emerging Infectious Diseases Program at the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention in Thailand.

 

“Grasping Heaven” also gives us a glimpse of being a language student in China, sharing a dorm room with a Mongolian student, working closely with Chinese authorities on medical programs, working in hospitals in Sichuan in urban and rural settings. The photographs of her time in China give us a better idea of life in the countryside and the Yi villagers that she served.

 

May I close with a quote from Joan Wales (a nurse who had lived amongst the Yi about 60 years ago) when she shared with Tami her view: “Our only task is to let God do His work through us, at any age.”

 

In sickness and in health, whatever our age, resting on God’s promises, may we share the Good News.