Called to Serve

Written by Maggie Watts with Dr. Bill Herring

Dr. Bill Herring lives a missions-oriented life. From Nepal to the Democratic Republic of Congo, to Haiti, to Peru, to Honduras, to rural Mexico, he longs to reflect the love of Jesus Christ to the nations.

Herring’s life began in eastern Goldsboro, where his mother and grandmother strongly influenced his faith. He recalls his grandmother constantly sitting by the window, reading the Bible.

“The grandmother that lived out in the country was a little, frail lady that constantly read her Bible. I can see her sitting by the window, where she could get the light, in the little rocking chair, reading her Bible. And that Bible was completely worn out,” Herring said. “I can see her to this day sitting there by the window, reading her Bible. That had a powerful influence on me as a youngster growing up.”

His grandmother and mother consistently encouraged Herring to be a part of the local church community and Sunday school. He said he gives these women a lot of credit in regard to his faith journey.

On a youth group retreat in high school, Herring made the choice to live his life for Jesus.

“I remember a time of devotion with a group there... I made a choice that I wanted to do the best I could to live a Christ-like life. So as I think back, that’s perhaps a starting point.”

 After high school, Herring attended the University of South Carolina in Columbia. He quickly got involved with Eastminster Presbyterian Church, where he met his wife, participated in the Westminster Fellowship university group, and was president of the group.

Under the guidance of God’s hand, Herring says he was led to pursue medical school.

“Through God’s guidance I was able to get into medical school, and the rest is history. But I don’t see those things as just happening. There’s no question in my mind, and never has been, that God was leading the way,” he said.

“I always felt that part of my calling to medicine was that in some way above and beyond being able to serve as a physician and care for people and hopefully help people. I wanted to go above and beyond that and be of service to the underserved,” he said.

After moving to Boone in 1972, Herring and his wife joined the First Presbyterian Church of Boone. He immediately knew it was a missions-oriented church, and it appealed to Herring and the calling he felt for his life. Although at the time, he was still deciphering this calling.

“For a number of years I felt a calling, and it was almost like somebody was walking behind me tapping me on the shoulder saying ‘there are other things you can be doing in addition to your work with your family and your work with your practice.’ I frequently would almost look over my shoulder to see who was tapping me on my shoulder. It took me a while to realize that who was tapping me on the shoulder was the Lord, saying that ‘there are other things out there that you could do to serve,” Herring said.

In the 1980s, he answered the call and took a short-term medical mission trip to the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the heart of Africa (then known as Zaïre).

 During his month of caring for patients in a small village hospital, Herring’s life began to take a turn. “Even as a short-term missionary, I realized that that was something I wanted to be a part of for my whole life,” he said.

After this trip, Herring began going on medical mission trips for a month every year.

“I would take a month out of my year and leave my family, leave my practice, leave this community, and go somewhere in the world I felt was underserved. When I say ‘I felt’ it was always a calling. I felt directly pushed in a certain direction by the Lord,” he said. “So through the years, I did short-term work in Zaïre, and Haiti, and Nepal, and Peru, and Honduras, and, for the last 22 years, in southern Mexico. And through those experiences of serving, my faith grew tremendously. I just felt that that was something I was called to do.”

On one mission trip in Kathmandu, Nepal, God opened the door for Herring to speak His Gospel truth to a ward of lost people.

“It’s important to understand with this story that Nepal is a Hindu country... if you proselytize or try to share your faith, other than the Hindu faith, with somebody in Nepal, you can be sent to prison for eight years. So the Christian church in Nepal was an underground church — they called them house churches. And so there was not an open Christian religion.”

“There was a young man who’d had a horrible knee injury and lived in a community way up in the mountains. And he had a fracture around his knee which healed in a way that left his knee bent at 90 degrees and fixed in that position. So he could not walk, and he therefore could not work. The Nepali surgeon that I was working with asked me if I would be willing to try to tackle a surgical procedure to try to straighten his leg, so that he could be upright and be able to walk. And then the surgeon fairly quickly left town on vacation, leaving me with this challenge.”

 “I was talking to this young man about the proposed surgery and what I hoped that it would do for him, and he asked me point blank, ‘Why are you here? Why are you wanting to help me?’ And I thought, here’s an opportunity. If I say too much, I don’t wanna end up in the local jail for eight years. But I thought “This is an opportunity that the Lord has given me while I’m here.”

“So I was able, through a translator, to tell him that I was there because there was a God who loved me dearly and a God that loved him, and that our God had sent me to be able to try to help him. Well, there was a sudden quiet all around this patient’s bed... and when people realized what I was saying, there was a deathly quiet, and the young man seemed to understand.”

Herring does not know what happened to this young man beyond the medical ward. His operation was successful, and he hopes the man was able to return to his village and work. He said he doesn’t know the final outcome, but he knows he was able to tell this man that God loved him, even though it was illegal to do so.

On another mission trip in a remote mountain village of Chiapas, the southernmost state in Mexico, Herring was working at a church-run medical clinic. God provided in a mysterious, miraculous way.

“Late one afternoon some people came up from a village down below where we were working and said that there was an elderly man who was very sick, and could we please come down and see him?”

“So at the end of our clinic, we went down, wound our way back through a number of little huts, into a very simple little hut with this very, very thin elderly male lying on a straw mat on the floor. All the family and community gathered around in this hut or around the door.”

 “The language of these people is called Zeltall. It’s one of the Mayan dialects. So we had translators from Spanish to Zeltall. But an interesting feature was this man was deaf and had to be communicated with through sign language. So we had to go from English to Spanish, from Spanish to Zelltall, from Zelltall to sign language to communicate.”

“We determined that this man probably had typhoid fever. So we said we would go back up to where our clinic was and see what we had that we could treat him with. I knew we didn’t have the best medicine for typhoid, but we went back up to the clinic into our little pharmacy that had been set up, and we found IV fluids that we could administer. We had other medicines that could be used for typhoid, but the one medicine that was best for typhoid was a medicine called Rotosephin, which I knew we didn’t have.”

“But as I was going back through the pharmacy and looking through the shelves and trying to determine what we had that we could use to offer him any help, I looked on the shelf and there was Rotosephin. And it was not something that we had known that we had, it was not something that we consciously had taken. But somehow there was the medicine that this elderly man needed for his typhoid. I’ve said over the years that it was a God thing. I don’t know where it came from or how it got on the pharmacy shelf. We were able to treat him, and by the time we left about a week later, he was doing much better. It was one of those things where we had the means both to communicate with him from English to Spanish to Zelltall to sign language, and then subsequently we had the medication that he needed, and where it came from I don’t know.”

 “There are many, many times through the years, working in a remote village or in the clinic that was subsequently built, where the only explanation I have for being able to treat and cure people was through God’s intervention,” Herring said.

“Over the last 22 years, I’ve led usually two medical trips a year to Chiapas, the southernmost state of Mexico. In the early years it was to remote villages providing medical care for people, many of whom had never seen a doctor. In more recent years it’s been a clinic that we built in a town in the highlands of Chiapas.”

“What I share with people that I lead on these trips is that I think we are called to serve as Christians. To me that means to be more Christ-like. If you asked me what my favorite verse is in the Bible, I would quickly tell you the verses from Matthew 25, the final judgment, when Jesus is seated on the throne lining up the sheep and the goats. The sheep go to one side and the goats go to the other side, and the goats go to eternal hell in a burning fire. And in that scene, the people that end up with the sheep, that end up going to heaven, are those who gave drink to the thirsty and gave food to the hungry and gave clothes to the naked and visited people in prison, that whole routine. Those are the people that ended up on the right side of judgment. Those who didn’t serve the least of these are the ones who ended up with the goats.”

“We need to recognize that we are called to serve. I think that there are many, many folks today, religious folks, Christian folks, that say that all we need to do is profess that Jesus is our Lord and Savior. But I think that it goes well beyond that, in that, we need to back that up with our deeds. I realize that we’re not saved by our deeds, but I think that when we profess to be Christians, a big part of that needs to carry over into living a Christ-like life, living that spirit of Jesus, that spirit of love.”

“In chapter two of James we’re told that faith without deeds is pretty much dead. And that’s the way that I try hard to live my life. I try to reflect the love that Jesus has shown by coming to die for our sins, and I try to be able to reflect that love by the way that I treat people, with justice and with love and to reach out.”