Joi McClellan is a resident missionary in her first year at Loma Linda University Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery program. She is a native Georgia peach, a four-year pilgrim through the Happy Valley of Collegedale, Tennessee, and most recently a proud Michigan Wolverine. Joi loves to not stay still, actively avoids small talk, and is busy finding and pursuing grace in this more demanding period of her life. 

<p>Joi McClellan is a resident missionary in her first year at Loma Linda University Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery program. She is a native Georgia peach, a four-year pilgrim through the Happy Valley of Collegedale, Tennessee, and most recently a proud Michigan Wolverine. Joi loves to not stay still, actively avoids small talk, and is busy finding and pursuing grace in this more demanding period of her life. </p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Joi McClellan

33 Years and Forever

My name is Joy McClellan, and I am maybe a little bit of a familiar face.

I haven't been here for too long, about 6 months I've been here in Loma Linda.

I'm here to study in the Rowan Maxillofacial Surgery Program.

And for those of you who don't really know what that program is, I'll just kind of maybe connect some dots for you.

I am a leaner build, very fast walking, vegan eating, quite meticulous, fights against naps in church, I'm black, Adventist, dubbed both inside and outside of the program as the new Adrienne Charles Marcel.

For those of you all who know Adrian Genessa, he just completed the program here this June and I came as soon as he left.

This morning I would love to share with you all more about me and my personal journey and testimony of God just working through my life, both personally and professionally, and how he brought me here, but I thought before sharing much about me, I think today we should focus on Christ and the story that we're celebrating this Christmas season.

So we'll dive into the Word and talk about what it means for God to be with us.

Father, we're so grateful to come and worship this Sabbath morning.

We're grateful to be here as believers, celebrating that you are good to us.

Celebrating that no matter what's going on in our lives, in the week, that you're good to us.

We praise you that we have the freedom to be able to celebrate that, to be able to worship you in song, to worship you in prayer, to worship you in community, and now to worship you in the opening of the word of God.

Thank you that the scripture said that you became flesh and you dwelt among us, the word of God.

And so we pray that it would not just slide over the top of our brains, but sink deep into our hearts.

We praise you for hearing us and answering our prayer.

I don't know how many people saw the, I don't know, Instagram or Facebook, a little blurb that Avent Herald posts every week, But for many of you, if you did hear it, I'm sure the sound that started it may have just brought a moment of PTSD to many of you.

Every time I hear that, it gets my fight or flight or sympathetic system going, both in anticipation and terror of what could be coming down the pipeline.

See, I chose this program, Oron Maxillofacial Surgery, Because I wanted to see a lot, I wanted to help a lot, I wanted to work with my hands, and as a follower of Jesus, I wanted to be able to bring into that the teaching and healing ministry of Jesus and come close to our neighbors and their point of suffering.

And in this program, boy do I see suffering.

See, I didn't just come from an Adventist environment before I was here.

I thought I saw a lot of the world when I was in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

My response to the suffering that I feel, however the suffering that I see, fluctuates.

Seeing patients with terminal disease, Seeing family support and stay close to these people.

Seeing people get diagnoses of cancer when they just thought they had an infection.

Tracks of IV drugs in their arms, faces traced with evil.

Literally some demonic expressions on people's faces.

My first month of residency I was a little bit unnerved because I had this patient who had a facial abscess And we were treating the patient over a course of time.

And this patient seemed to be heading in the right direction.

And 1 morning I woke up early, got to the hospital, was chart checking, getting ready to see this patient, and I saw that they had been deceased.

And I thought, this wasn't the direction it was going in.

Later I spoke with the nurses and came to find out that the day before the patient had randomly coded and died, no 1 was expecting that, and when they were removing the person's body, they saw underneath them a makeup bag, and within that bag, it was full of drugs.

She was so chained to evil that it killed her.

On the other hand my heart has gotten harder and I'll tell you what The most ridiculous and ludicrous reasons bring people to the emergency room.

Literally at all hours of the day and night people come with just things that they didn't need to show up with at 3 o'clock in the morning.

Or for example 1 Sabbath I was on 10 o'clock in the morning I thought, oh I don't have a page, maybe I can go to church.

But no, this young person shows up with a mass on their head that's been growing there for 3 months.

They couldn't get their hat on, it's caked with hair, caked with blood, smells bad, and I'm like, how did you not know you had this and why are you coming here at 10 o'clock on a Sabbath morning.

I'm also quite tired of seeing the red-faced man well past his dignity, thick of speech and thin of wit, just disposing another health, another life, due to drunkenness.

A patient I had recently, this 1 was crazy, had a lot of bleeding coming from their nose.

The emergency room called us, gave me a page, and I answered.

They need help because this person is just bleeding uncontrollably, rush to the emergency room, start doing the process of helping to pack their nose.

This was a very difficult process because they were still bleeding and bleeding, but after a little while the patient starts physically fighting me.

I'm like, I'm trying to keep you from bleeding to death right now.

And to make matters worse, we were able to stop the bleeding.

A few days later, I go to and I'm talking with them and they want to take these tamponades out of their nose, but we say, not yet.

So even though I love what I do, and despite the dramatic oscillations between empathy and pure exasperation, when the clock hits 7 a.m.

Or whenever I finish that last page I want to go home and sleep.

And not just sleep, I want to take off my shoes that have blood on them, remove from my body all the clothes, the sputum on the sleeves of my nice Patagonia jacket, remove every trace of my asthma and blood in the washing machine in which I add Clorox.

I think it's an antibacterial for like bathrooms, but I add it to my washing machine load so I can get all of that disease off of me.

And retire, exhale for a second in my neatly vacuumed cozy room.

Far, far, far from the chaos, the grime, and the disease.

But even in my neat little room, the contact to misery and suffering is still inescapable.

I mean, just open your phone for reprieve to scroll in.

You see that your friends all matter had a shooting this week.

Check on a friend and hear that someone in their community had their house shot into in Redlands this week.

Just quietly fight back the tears of your own personal suffering.

The world, humanity, I think we're 1 massive emergency room.

Michael's favorite song has a line that says, long lay the world in sin and error pining.

At the time when Jesus was ready to come to the world, it says that the world was at its peak of grotesqueness.

Desire of Ages, a book about the life of Christ, tells the story here.

It says, the Son of God, looking upon the world, beheld suffering and misery.

With pity, he saw how men had become victims of satanic cruelty.

He looked with compassion upon those who were being corrupted, murdered, and lost.

They had chosen a ruler who chained them to his car as captives.

Bewildered and deceived, as we see today, they were moving in a gloomy procession toward eternal ruin.

To death in which no hope of life, toward night to which comes no morning.

Satanic agencies were incorporated with men.

The bodies of human beings made for the dwelling place of God had become the habitation of demons.

The very stamp of demons was impressed upon the countenances of men.

Such was a prospect that the world's Redeemer looked.

When I think of the heart of God looking at us as an emergency room And I think of the heart of joy, wanting to get out of the emergency room.

See, because God's heart, he opens it up to us.

I know the thoughts that I think toward you, thoughts of peace and not of evil.

He wasn't thinking, these stupid people, how do I get myself unentangled from them?

No, he thought, how do I entangle myself with them?

He wasn't outwardly responding to consults or our prayers.

I'd be happy to help, well, inwardly, wishing he could just have a vacay by the sea of glass.

We'll be jumping through a lot of random passages throughout the scripture all talking about Christ.

But Isaiah 59, and move quickly because I'll be moving quickly please, Isaiah 59 verses 16 and 17.

Isaiah 59, 16 and 17, and it says, and he saw that there was no man, and wondered that there was no intercessor.

Therefore, his arm brought salvation unto him, and his righteousness, it sustained him.

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33 Years and Forever

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