The Nurse Who Kept the Night Watch
In 2014, when Ebola swept through Liberia and the world recoiled in fear, a Liberian nurse named Salome Karwah did something remarkably simple. She held people's hands.
While international headlines screamed panic and airports installed thermal scanners, Salome — herself an Ebola survivor — returned to the treatment units in Monrovia. She had watched both her parents die from the virus. She knew exactly what the dying faced: not just the disease, but the terrifying isolation of it. Patients lay behind plastic sheeting, untouched, sometimes unnamed.
Salome moved between cots in her protective suit, speaking names, squeezing gloved fingers, telling patients they were not forgotten. She did not deliver grand speeches. She did not rally crowds. She simply showed up, shift after shift, for people the rest of the world had quarantined out of sight.
TIME Magazine named her a 2014 Person of the Year. But the award missed the deeper truth. Salome's power was not celebrity — it was presence. She refused to let the bruised be discarded or the flickering be snuffed out.
This is the portrait Isaiah paints of God's chosen Servant. Not one who shouts in the streets or overpowers the broken, but one who draws near to the dimming wick and cups His hands around it. Justice, in God's economy, arrives not with a crushing fist but with a steady, faithful nearness — until even the coastlands dare to hope.
Scripture References
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