Posts by Danielle Ellis, MD, MTS

When Hagar flees after Abram and Sarai, wary of God’s unrealized promise to make their descendants as numerous as the stars (Genesis 15:5), take matters of procreation into their own hands and take advantage of her in the process, she finds herself in both a literal and physical desert.

“I looked for someone among them who would build up the wall and stand before me in the gap on behalf of the land so I would not have to destroy it, but I found no one” (Ezekiel 22:30, NIV).

Navigating the moral challenges that accompany a pandemic requires more than just knowledge; it requires wisdom. For Christians, Scripture describes a kind of wisdom that is both practical and gospel-centered, one that entails humility and a posture of listening to God.

Evans had contracted COVID-19 in early February 2021. He was 53 years old and, generally speaking, pretty healthy save for being somewhat overweight. He’d gotten progressively worse, then been placed on a ventilator, then developed numerous particularly devastating complications. I met him about a month after he first came to the hospital after getting a “STAT” page from the ICU doctors that Evans was suddenly doing even worse. When I walked into his room, it was clear his life hung in the balance, thinly suspended by mechanized life support and the bit of will he had left.