A few months ago I began to meet with a spiritual director who encouraged me to read and refl ect on a book called Ruthless Trust: The Ragamuffin’s Path to God by Brennan Manning.

The book argues that the key to well-being and the walk of discipleship is a ‘second conversion’ of trust and gratefulness. He says, “unwavering trust is a rare and precious thing because it often demands a degree of courage that borders on the heroic.”

His thesis is that followers of Jesus who have not learnt the art of trusting God regardless of circumstances live in a perennial state of spiritual ill-health. He suggests that Christian well-being centres around being able to, “whisper a doxology in darkness.”

With Manning’s book in my backpack and its thoughts filling my mind, in May this year I joined fi ve Nurses, four Doctors, one Orthoptist and a medical student who would be performing life-changing eye surgeries on local Fijians. It was a great lesson in what ‘unwavering trust’ meant as I saw this 11 person team at work.

The team, a joint partnership between St Clair Uniting Church, Westmead, Nepean and Lautoka hospitals, the Methodist Church in Fiji and Rotuma and the Relief and Development Unit of UnitingWorld, has visited Fiji for the last four years to provide much needed surgery. In May 2009, they successfully conducted 94 cataract operations.

When I saw six year old Ramakesh* (name changed for security purposes) arrive in the Lautoka hospital waiting room, I saw a future in the balance.

Ramakesh and his family come from a simple farming community in the hills outside Tavua, east of Nadi. Last year he began to fall behind in his reading at school, and became so frustrated that he ceased attending school altogether. His teacher suspected he had eye problems and wrote to the clinic after hearing of the visiting UnitingWorld team offering eye surgery for those who are poor.

After an examination by Dr Jeremy Smith, Ramakesh was diagnosed with cataracts in both eyes and scheduled for surgery the next day on the more problematic left eye. I was there to shoot a short video on how the team expresses Christ’s compassion among those who cannot see but it was the trust exhibited by the young Indian Fijian boy that spoke most to me.

At every point he trusted the medical team. He trusted the guidance and love of his family and, in a sense, he trusted the goodwill of the Uniting Church in Australia whose generous donors make this team possible.

The day after the surgery, I went to the family home and arrived to a hero’s welcome. A curry par excellence was placed before me and I was treated like royalty. This was in effect gratefulness to the UnitingWorld eye care team and the Uniting Church in Australia.

I walked away refl ecting on how I express gratefulness to those who have contributed to my life but even more on the rich trust of Ramakesh and family in the visiting UnitingWorld team – this was a real glimpse into the kind of trust the love of God in Christ calls me to.