Cedarville Magazine, Fall 2020

After she graduated from Cedarville and before starting at Inova, Walker served with a missionary couple in Impfondo, a tiny remote village in the northeast Republic of the Congo. The couple operated a 70-bed hospital with the help of less than a dozen Congolese nurses. Walker was tasked with running the emergency room (ER) with one Congolese nurse. In the ER, Walker mainly saw patients struggling with the aftermath of Ebola and malaria, which kills almost half of the children under 5 years old in the village every year. Shortly after arriving, the missionary doctor left to seek treatment for an ongoing medical condition. Walker became the only native English speaker in the hospital. A local translator helped her communicate with other staff members. “There were so many people dying, and it was horrifying to me,” she explained. “The goodness of God I saw my whole life felt so out of touch with my reality, which allowed me to honestly wrestle through my faith.” One especially hard case was a 6-year-old girl named Lili. Walker fought for Lili’s life for 12 hours straight, but in the end, Walker listened through a stethoscope as Lili’s heart beat for the last time. “This pain hurts the Father so much that He was willing to come down to take that pain on Himself,” she related. “This is where God’s glory is seen. Not in thanking God for death and sickness, but in thanking the Lord for what He has done in light of His promise that one day this pain will end.” As COVID-19 began to increase in the states, Walker found the entire nation asking the same questions she had asked four months earlier in the Congo. Through the coronavirus pandemic, Walker has seen the hearts of her co-workers soften toward the Gospel, and the Lord has provided numerous opportunities to share the love of Jesus with her patients. But Walker has also seen a connection between the virus and her faith. “The Lord entered the world and took on every pain, endured it, died for it, and defeated it so that all this pain, sickness, and death will one day end!” she said. “That is worthy of praise.” DEPLOYED IN DETROIT On March 24, Gabe Woodruff, M.S.N. ’21 was working diligently toward completing his Master of Science in Nursing – Family Nurse Practitioner (M.S.N.-FNP) degree at Cedarville. Two days later, he had joined his U.S. Army Reserve unit suddenly being deployed to Detroit, a hotspot for COVID-19. Woodruff and his unit cared for hundreds of overflow patients from Detroit hospitals at a 1,600-bed unit set up by the Army Corps of Engineers at the TCF Center, a convention facility downtown. The work was tiring, and the hours long, but he kept himself centered by staying in the Bible and prayer and with regular phone calls to his wife, Kayla. Although Woodruff’s original orders had him on deployment for 400 days, or roughly 13 months, his unit The Lord entered the world and took on every pain, endured it, died for it, and defeated it so that all this pain, sickness, and death will one day end! Virginia Walker ’19 14 | Cedarville Magazine