The Surgeon Who Traded the Scalpel for a Mop

In 2015, Dr. Hawa Abdi — one of Somalia's first female surgeons and a Nobel Peace Prize nominee — ran a sprawling camp outside Mogadishu sheltering 90,000 displaced people. She could have practiced anywhere in the world. European hospitals courted her. Instead, she chose a compound with no reliable electricity, where she performed surgeries by flashlight and, when the need arose, cleaned latrines alongside her patients.

Reporters once asked why she stayed. She said simply, "They are my people."

She didn't cling to the prestige she had earned. She emptied herself of every advantage a physician of her caliber could claim — the salary, the sterile operating theaters, the professional recognition — and made herself nothing. She knelt beside people the world had forgotten, bandaging wounds in the dust, sharing the same scarcity her patients endured.

This is the downward trajectory Paul describes in Philippians 2. Christ Jesus, in very nature God, did not consider equality with the Almighty something to be used for His own advantage. He emptied Himself. He took the form of a servant. He descended — not just to human skin, but all the way to a criminal's cross.

And here is the gospel's breathtaking reversal: the One who went lowest was lifted highest. Every knee will bow. Every tongue will confess. The path to exaltation runs straight through surrender.