Local doctor shares faith on Good Friday

DAVE MOSIER/independent editor

Local physician Jeff Easley talked about his spiritual experiences from three perspectives: as a medical student, as a father, and as a physician, during the YMCA’s Good Friday Breakfast.

“I think my message today is: We think about the ultimate sacrifice He (Jesus Christ) made for us; what have we done for Him?” Dr. Easley told a near-capacity crowd at Willow Bend Country Club.

Using gentle humor, as well as an obvious deep passion for his religion, the local physician talked about stepping up a number of times to do things his felt his faith required him to do.

The first experience was in 1982, when Dr. Easley, then a pre-med student at what was Manchester College (now Manchester University), traveled to Panama as part of a medical mission.

The mission flew into a remote area of Panama on a dilapidated Douglas DC-3 that the local physician described as “something out of an Indiana Jones movie: it had the chickens in the crates up front … and the pilot comes on, and he had stains on his shirt.”

After reaching the mission site in dugout canoes, Dr. Easley and his fellow mission members were impressed with the welcome they received from the destitute natives they were there to help. “I think the biggest experience I had in this was really getting to understand just how generous people can be when they have nothing,” he said. “These people had nothing – I mean nothing – but they gave us everything.”

Dr. Easley said that, when members of the mission worshipped with the natives in their thatched church, he was struck by how similar the worship service was to the one he experienced back in the small church where he worshipped in his hometown in Indiana.

“We’re thousands of miles apart but we were worshipping the same God,” he said, noting that the experience in Panama further strengthened his resolve to become a doctor and repeat the missionary experience again.

Dr. Easley’s second spiritual experience was when he and his wife, Michelle, decided to adopt a child from Cambodia. Although the Easleys had four children of their own by then, adopting a child was something they had talked about since before they were married.

The Easleys were ready to travel to the Cambodian capital of Phenom Penh to receive their son, Sam, in October 2001 when two things happened: The terrorist attacks on 9/11 in the United States and a scandal related to adoptions in Cambodia involving the American ambassador.

With the combination of air travel being shut down in the U.S. and the deterioration of relations between American and Cambodia, it appeared as if the couple’s dream of adopting a child was being threatened. By January 2002, the kids in Cambodia had been shunted into a private orphanage, but money was running out and the children and orphanage staff were getting sick because of the lack of money for medical supplies.

“We’re praying for a miracle, and instead of a miracle, Michelle and I talked about it and we felt like we needed to do something,” Dr. Easley said. “And maybe that’s the story, instead of a miracle we need to do something sometimes.”

The local physician then took off for Cambodia and took with him “a bag of medicine and a bag of money” and provided medical treatment to both the children and the staff while waiting for Cambodian officials to make a decision on whether he could take Same home with him.

Fortunately, for the Easleys, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) wanted the medical reports Dr. Easley had put together on the Cambodian orphans, and the local physician also threatened to go to the media with what he found in Cambodia at the orphanage.

His cooperation with the INS helped pave the way for the Easleys’ adoption of their son, Sam, but not until they made a second trip to Cambodia and basically bribed an official there to allow them to take Sam home.

Although the local physician said he loved his patients here in Van Wert, Dr. Easley said he was also looking for a chance to give back to others.

Dr. Easley’s third experience came in 2013, when he was asked to join pre-med students from Manchester University on a medical mission to Nicaragua. Again, he said he was struck by the generosity and hospitality of the poor people he met in Nicaragua.

“It was such an amazing experience once again,” he said of the mission.

It was in a poor village in that country treating poor natives, though, the local physician said he had a religious experience that also reinforced his belief that God expects people to step up on their own to minister to others.

Dr. Easley was treating an extremely sick young boy who was infested with parasites, pneumonia and also had other medical problems that made the local physician fearful the boy would not survive.

While treating the boy, Dr. Easley was praying over the boy, asking God to be with the boy and his mother, when he said he heard a whisper in his ear: “That’s why I sent you.”

The local physician ended his talk with two portions of scripture from Psalm 95 and I Corinthians that he said meant a lot to him and summarized the way he felt people should be in doing missionary work.

“God wants us all to be missionaries in one way or another, some place, some time,” Dr. Easley said. “Pray about it and go find your mission.”