Kayleen Lundstrom: Doing Unto Others

It’s human nature to try to avoid pain and sadness in life, yet despite our best efforts our days are filled with ebbs and flows of happy and sad. In hindsight, we often see that these tides were turning points in our lives. Some are big, some are little, but all are points that hone us, forcing us to grow, change, and, hopefully, move towards God.

In many ways, that’s Kayleen Lundstrom’s experience. Kayleen was only 21 years old when she experienced two massive turning points in her young life and though she recognized the scale of them at the time she didn’t understand the impact the experiences ultimately would have. They have shaped her, however, and have been a type of guiding beacon since then.

She was living and working in her hometown of Bristol, Connecticut, when her close family friend (and sister of her husband Gary) Jane died in a car accident at the age of 20. It was a devastating blow to the Lundstrom family and it caused Kayleen to question her faith in ways she hadn’t before in an effort to determine where she stood in her beliefs.

“It was a major turning point in my life,” Kayleen recalls, her expressive blue eyes divulging the pain she still feels at the memories. “Jane was an example to me. Here was this beautiful person who wasn’t afraid to share her faith, who was going on a mission’s trip that summer, and who just radiated. She wasn’t afraid to share her faith; why would the Lord take someone who was so willing to share and to serve Him? It pushed me that much more in my own faith, looking at where I stood and what I represented.”

When Kayleen’s father died a month after Jane following a prolonged illness, her questioning reached an all-time high. But, the Lord welcomes questions and uses turning points in our lives for good. “I watched the strength of the Lundstroms and how they showed a love for others even in their own grief. Here, they had lost someone so precious to them, yet through all of their pain they were able to reach out and meet me. It helped me know I wanted to do something of service that would represent the Lord.”

These are words spoken in hindsight, remember, when it’s possible to get a glimpse of how the Lord may have been working. At the time, the dayto-day clarity wasn’t necessarily so evident, but she and Gary, having dated for a while and having been friends even longer, did have enough insight at the time to marry each other the following year, 1983.

During the early years of their marriage, Kayleen, Gary, and, eventually, daughter Eliza moved frequently following Gary’s ministry-centered jobs. As anyone in ministry can attest, it can be lonely to be married to someone working in a ministerial career. While Kayleen experienced that, it drove her to harness her passion to serve people into a career that goes hand-in-hand with that desire.

“I was always intrigued by doing something in the medical field,” Kayleen explains. “I started out working in a dental office and then became an at home mom doing volunteer work. When our daughter Eliza got to be in 5th grade and with Gary traveling as much as he did, I really needed to find myself, so I went to the Cambridge College Technical Institute where we lived at the time in Colorado and became a Surgical Technician.”

Kayleen has worked at Watauga Medical Center for almost 17 years and has really loved it. “Honestly, I think it’s more than just serving the patients. I like to think of myself as a team player and to help my co-workers as much as I help the doctor and patients. It’s a bigger picture than just collecting a paycheck. I think of it as a ministry, not just a job.”

While Kayleen also has served on many medical missions’ trips, she recently spent three

weeks on the most emotionally challenging one for her to date when she traveled with Samaritan’s Purse to Mosul in Northern Iraq. Not only did Kayleen, a group of doctors, nurses, and other surgical staff spend three weeks near the front lines of war, but they were at times attending to the wounds of political and ideological “enemies”. It was definitely an emotional experience for them all.

“Each trip has been so different,” Kayleen says. “We were bringing healing to children in the Children’s Heart Project. In South Sudan, we walked away and a child had a new smile. These are rewarding missions [to repair] birth defects. Mosul was different. It was people who were maimed and lives that were destroyed by another person’s hand. It’s unbelievable that someone can do that to someone else. It was terribly heartbreaking.”

The team was housed in buildings similar to shipping containers, each with two windows, a door, bunks, and heat and air conditioning, in a compound surrounded by a tall, concrete wall beyond which only a distant mountain and the sun and moon risings could be seen. Bombs landing nearby rattled the buildings, making it hard to sleep even when on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week, ready to work in the compound’s operating room at a moment’s notice.

“We were serving soldiers, but not only Iraqi soldiers, ISIS ones, too,” Kayleen remembers. “It played on your emotions. We were there to help the country and you had to come to grips with the fact you’re serving the enemy. You always wonder how you will handle this when you face it and I think for all of us, we were there to help people. It’s not our job to bring judgment; it’s to bring healing and show love. And sometimes showing love isn’t the easiest thing to do. It’s a supernatural thing.”

At one point the team treated a man who, with the signature beard, was definitely a member of ISIS. “He was scared just like anybody else, you know? And he was at our mercy,” Kayleen recalls. “My job was to stand by his side and hold him forward. At that point, he’s a man, a human being just like everyone else. He was kissing my hand and then kissing his own hand and placing it on my forehead as a way of saying thank you and, of course, recognizing he was at our mercy and trying to atone for some of the functions he had committed.

“I remember whispering into his ear, ‘It’s going Christmas At Mount Vernon Baptist to be okay’. I don’t know if he could understand me and at that time I thought it would be okay but I didn’t know what would happen to him after they released him to the hands of the Iraqi forces. At that moment, however, you realize that God is bigger than all of that. He could intervene and change these folk’s lives and it was a chance to show this man some love that I’m not even capable of offering,” she says emphatically.

Kayleen’s eyes sparkle when she talks about the medical missions trips she loves to take and they darken when she speaks of the sadness she has witnessed. She knows as much as anyone that God can harvest beautiful fruit from the darkest moments as well as the darkest lives.

“Ultimately,” she says, “everybody matters. Everybody has a soul. These folks have been brainwashed, you know? Some of them were taken as children and fed and clothed by ISIS and given a gun and told this is what you do. That’s all they know. Here you have these young men who have been so deceived and doing only what they know. But we’re a team serving people’s needs. Even if we reached only a handful of people, we planted the seed.”

There’s no doubt that had any one of those ISIS soldiers met the team members, especially the women, under different circumstances the ISIS members would have tortured and/or killed the team in a heartbeat. Instead, the men were shown love that likely surpassed their understanding.

It often seems God’s command to “do unto others” is like the chicken and the egg conundrum. We are called to treat others the way we wish to be treated, but if they are treating us poorly, could that be the way they wish to be treated? Certainly, that’s not what God has in mind, and the equal treatment of Kayleen’s team towards ISIS soldiers is a testament to the love He wants us to share.