Sickness is hard anywhere. In a brick-kiln family’s home, it carries an extra weight that is difficult to explain until you sit with it for a while. If the person who works falls ill, the work does not pause kindly. If medicine is needed, the money for it has to come from somewhere — and there is rarely somewhere spare for it to come from. A fever is never only a fever when a family is already living close to the edge, and carrying a debt on top of it.
That is one of the quieter parts of Rising Stone Mission’s work in Kasur. We are known, rightly, for standing with kiln families, for prayer, for Sunday worship and Sunday school, for sharing food, for encouraging children into education, and for working, as far as possible, toward freedom from debt bondage — the kind of freedom one family found when their Rs 300,000 kiln debt was cleared and their children could go to school. But on ordinary weekdays, care often looks much smaller and much more personal: visiting a sick person, praying at their bedside, and arranging medicines as far as we can.
The psalm gives us a picture we hold onto: “The Lord sustains them on their sickbed and restores them from their bed of illness.” — Psalm 41:3
Sustains. That word has stayed with us. God does not only meet people at the moment of complete healing. He sustains them in the middle of being unwell — in the waiting, in the weakness, in the night when a parent is watching a child and hoping the fever breaks. Our part in that, as a mission, is modest. We pray. We visit. We help with medicines when we are able. And we are honest that “when we are able” is a real limit.
Here is that honesty, plainly: this part of our work is small today because our funds are small. We arrange medicines as far as our means allow, and sometimes that means allow for less than we wish we could do. We will not dress that up. This is the work we are doing, at the scale we can do it today, and this is the work we long to grow. Every partner who joins this mission helps that small, bedside kind of care reach one more home — not in theory, but in an actual packet of medicine, an actual visit, an actual prayer spoken out loud where it is needed.
Pastor Nemat leads this work on the ground, and much of it will never be photographed or counted. That is fine. Some of the most faithful ministry happens in a quiet room, with no audience, for one sick person who needs to know they have not been forgotten.
Would you pray with us for that part of the work this week? Pray for sick parents and children in kiln families — for strength, for recovery, and for the simple means to get care. Pray that our small provision for medicines would grow, honestly and steadily, through friends who give with joy. And if you feel led to give, please know where it goes: toward people, by name and by need, in homes where a little help on a hard day means a very great deal.