This is a first-hand account from Justin Miller, a missionary with the Church of the Nazarene in Papua New Guinea. He discusses his first-hand experience with the work being done at the Nazarene General Hospital.

I want to talk to you just a little bit about heroes. I get to work with mine every day. I serve as a missionary in the highlands of Papua New Guinea with the Church of the Nazarene, and we’ve run a mission hospital here for the past 53 years. It was about a month ago that I was invited to observe a C-section.

This is a common procedure that happens around the world, and here we do almost 400 of them a year. But I’m not a medical person, and I’ve never seen any surgery and all the things that come with it. I’m also an adoptive dad, so I’ve never actually seen a baby being born. So I was really nervous. I thought I might pass out if I saw the blood or the bodily things that happened during surgery, but it turned out to be an amazing experience. I got to witness a new life come into this world. But I realized in the moment that this “shouldn’t” be happening here.

We are in a remote part of the country, in a country with 60-80% unemployment with a major lack of healthcare. We have about 40 to 50,000 citizens for every single doctor serving in this part of the country. And so I got to see that without our presence there, without our amazing staff, without the donated supplies and medicines and tools, and without the doctor that has given up her life to use her skills to love these people, the baby and the mother probably wouldn’t have made it.

That’s why they’re my heroes, too—to know that if they hadn’t done this radical thing of coming to the middle of the jungle, in a developing country, that people would lose their life, and this baby wouldn’t be here.

Papua New Guinea’s Nazarene General Hospital is running drastically short on doctors and is requesting help for an urgent need. If you are a doctor and you feel like God is calling you to the mission field, click here  to see how you can get involved. You can also send an email to sendme@nazarene.org.

This piece was originally published in Nazarene News.