As a new year starts, for many, this is a good time for reflection: Looking back on the previous year, celebrating our successes, or even preparing for the new year ahead with new resolutions.

While it’s important to celebrate our wins, it’s equally important to celebrate our challenges.

Most of us who had encountered challenges in life will agree that our lives have become richer because of them. While there are usually struggles or pain facing challenges, there is often learning and growth as well.

I would like to share three challenges faced by our colleagues and St Luke’s Hospital (SLH), and how overcoming them have inspired personal and spiritual growth, new partnerships and opportunities.

1. Challenge of meaning

Many of us struggle with the big “Why”?

Why must there be Covid? Why must our loved ones or ourselves be afflicted and why must some even succumb or suffer complications due to it?

In late August 2022, one of my colleagues, Sandy, woke up one morning with blurred vision and tingling sensations around her limbs. She had recently recovered from Covid, and also had her 3rd Covid vaccination prior to her infection.

Within a few hours, she was unable to open her left eye. By the next day, she couldn’t open both eyes and had problems swallowing. She thought she was suffering from a stroke and was going to die.

As her condition evolved, it was clear that it was not a stroke but an autoimmune condition affecting her nervous system. She started having fearful thoughts of whether she would be a burden to the family as she had relatives with autoimmune conditions who became dependent on others.

In spite of her challenge, she experienced peace as she was assured that while her kids were young, her family support was strong, and both God and her extended family will help look after them should it be God’s will for her to depart from this world.

After two weeks at St Luke’s Hospital, Sandy made remarkable improvements in her mobility functions and regained independence in feeding, walking and self-care.

Sandy finally returned to work in December 2022, almost three months since her health episode started.

When I asked her about this challenge and her thoughts about it, she was simply grateful for the recovery and restoration to almost full functions of her motor skills and mobility.

She remarked that it was during those challenging moments, when she could not do much, that she had the most time to reflect upon and enjoy God.

This, coupled with the support of family and friends, was most precious and invaluable to her. She felt that her faith in God had also grown as a result of this experience.

“Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.” (James 1:2-4)

I find that the best way of dealing with challenge is to understand the meaning of it through the lens of Christ.

What does the Bible say with regard to this struggle that we are experiencing? Are there similar encounters by biblical characters and what was God saying to them or how was God dealing with them?

At times, there seemed to be no answers to these challenges even on studying the Bible or on asking God for revelation.

This is where, like Sandy, we just need to soak in His presence and allow Him to unfold His divine plans before us, trusting that He knows best, allowing Him to search our hearts to see if there are areas of our life He is wanting to work on.

“And all these, though commended through their faith, did not receive what was promised, since God had provided something better for us, that apart from us they should not be made perfect.” (Hebrews 11:39-40, ESV)

2. Challenge of identity 

“What is a Community Hospital (CH) and what is their role in the healthcare system?”

This question has cropped up many times in the last 26 years of St Luke’s Hospital’s existence.

It took us a great amount of effort to communicate with both healthcare providers and the public on who we are.

We coined the term an “intermediate care facility” that sits between the acute hospital and home. The concept was well-received by the Ministry of Health (MOH). As they saw the benefits of a Community Hospital, they decided to build more CHs to help cope with the rapidly ageing population in Singapore.

Since the opening of public CHs like Jurong and Yishun in 2015 to provide more beds, charity-owned CHs like SLH are challenged to find their place and rethink its relevance in the healthcare system.

We had to ensure that funding for our services and ancillary support like Next Generation Electronic Record (NGEMR) System is continually being subsidised by the government. Multiple conversations had to take place to remind both MOH as well as our partners in National University Health System (NUHS) that we are part of the larger western healthcare system.

This year, we held multiple strategic retreats and conversations with our Board, Senior Management as well as strategic partners to reaffirm who we are and what we will be doing in the coming five to 10 years. We strengthen our calling of seeking to fulfil our twin mission of being a Christian organisation that will live out our C.H.R.I.S.T values and to deliver quality healthcare.

Discovering and being sure of who we are in Christ helps heaps in dealing with the challenge of identity.

As a Christian healthcare organisation, we needed to be first Christian, then a healthcare organisation. We often ask ourselves what that means and how can we reflect that in the work that we do especially in response to challenges we encounter.

Likewise, as individuals, we need to be sure of our identity in Christ and that we are not defined only by what we do at work or the roles we play at home. Discovering our unique identity in Him allows us to be assured of who we are, regardless of the challenges we face in life.

“Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.” (Augustine of Hippo, Confessions)

3. Challenge of relevance 

Since our conception as an organisation, SLH has been challenged with regards to our relevance in the community and the larger healthcare ecosystem.

While the Bukit Batok community was open to the idea of a hospital in their vicinity, they were also concerned about the potential negative trade-offs that a hospital might bring. They did not see a need for a new healthcare institution, which could potentially disturb the peace of the neighbourhood or affect the pricing of their property.

In spite of these challenges, our pioneers met up with the then Member of Parliament as well as Bukit Batok grassroots leaders to share the potential value add SLH could bring to the neighbourhood with its services.

The discussion landed on an agreement for SLH to go ahead, but not to provide palliative care service as having people die in Bukit Batok’s backyard was a tad too morbid for some.

It was some 20 years later when we again mooted the idea of running a palliative service, which the community was now open to, as Bukit Batok’s population ages with an increasing need for palliative care services.

Today, Bukit Batok’s MP, Mr Murali, frequently reaches out to me to thank SLH for providing services that benefits the larger community whenever he encounters a resident that had benefited from our services.

SLH has established ourselves as one of the healthcare facilities @ Bukit Batok and a renowned community hospital especially within the western region of Singapore.

Staying relevant to value add and meet the needs of patients is crucial in transforming care in the healthcare system.

Personally, I constantly ask how I can value add in the projects or committee I get involved in, and when I find my giftings no longer bring added value, I ask God whether it’s time to close that chapter.

Such decisions are not lightly taken but comes with multiple conversations not only with God but trusted friends and family as well.

The courage of inner resolution

Challenges and their learnings can also be relevant to us on a personal front too.

Over the course of my personal journey, I also struggled with the meaning of life and its challenges; the challenge of knowing who I am, who I am meant to be and what I should be doing.

By celebrating challenges and growing from them, it’s much easier for me to face challenges courageously.

I end with a quote from Martin Luther King Jr’s Strength to Love: Sermons from Strength to Love and Other Preachings:

“Courage is an inner resolution to go forward in spite of obstacles and frightening situations; cowardice is a submissive surrender to circumstance. Courage breeds creative self-affirmation; cowardice produces destructive self-abnegation.

“Courage faces fear and thereby masters it; cowardice represses fear and is thereby mastered by it. Courageous men never lose the zest for living even though their life situation is zestless; cowardly men, overwhelmed by the uncertainties of life, lose the will to live. We must constantly build dikes of courage to hold back the flood of fear.”

May we all approach 2023 with courage to face, overcome and celebrate whatever challenges we might face ahead. 

This article has been adapted with permission from a letter by the author to the staff of St Luke’s Hospital (SLH).

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