Recently, a prayer by Julian Urban, a 38-year-old doctor from Lombardy, Italy, went viral on the internet: LIGHT IN A DOCTOR’S DARKEST NIGHTMARE.
He began: “Never in my darkest nightmares did I imagine that I would see and experience what has been going on in Italy in our hospital this past three weeks.” Feeling helpless and overwhelmed by the unimaginable death toll surrounding him, he exclaims: “Now, we are no longer doctors, only sorters who decide who should live and who should be sent home to die.”
Watching his patients die one by one around him, he cried out to God: “We have reached our limits. We can do no more. People are dying every day. We are exhausted.”
“We suddenly realized that we needed to start asking God for help! We began to pray. We do this when we have a few free minutes. Until two weeks ago, my colleagues and I were fierce atheists. It was normal because we were doctors. We learned that science excludes the presence of God. I laughed at my parents going to church. Now we pray every day for God’s peace and strength to keep us going and take good care of our patients.”
He added: “I see myself in the world like a speck of dust. I want to use my last breath to help others. I am happy to have returned to God while I am surrounded by the suffering and death of my fellow man.”
The doctor pleads: Please pray for Italy
Italy is the Western country worst hit by the CCP coronavirus pandemic. On March 21, 793 people died in Italy from the outbreak — one every two minutes. The death toll was so high that troops had to be used to transport the bodies, and the chapels were filled with bodies waiting to be cremated.
Mario Vargas Llosa, a Peruvian writer and poet who won the 2010 Nobel Prize for Literature, published an article titled “Back to the Middle Ages.” He said that human fears would not go away because science alone could not resolve them.
In the Middle Ages, he writes, the ancients locked themselves away behind towering walls and protected themselves with moats and suspension bridges, but they could not stop the plague, which was a masterpiece of the devil and a punishment from God. In his view, in the face of the plague, people have no choice but to pray, confess, and repent.
Translated by Yi Ming and edited by Michael Segarty
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