Tim Leaman

           Tim Leaman was born June 8, 1972 at Northeastern Hospital, which is actually about ten blocks from where he currently works at Esperanza Health Center. This is the story of Tim’s journey to get back to the place he started, the place he was born, and how God worked to give him the experiences and skills he needed to bring healing to his home. Literally healing, since Tim is a doctor.

            Tim was born in Philadelphia, and at the time his father was the pastor at Norris Square Mennonite Church in Kensington, a church community which is no longer there, but replaced by a Spanish-speaking congregation, Arca de Salvacion – the home congregation of Carlos Carmona. Tim spent his toddler years in Kensington, but when he was about pre-school age, his family moved to Virginia.

            It was at that time that Tim first accepted Christ into his life. He was four years old, and remembers praying about it with his mom in the house they were living in at the time. It was a big commitment, but it was by no means the end of Tim’s story. At four, Tim was making a huge decision, but he didn’t necessarily understand all the nuances of what that decision meant. However, he had allowed Christ to enter his life, and so Christ would continue to lead Tim closer to Him in the coming years.

            Tim’s family moved back to Philadelphia when he was five. They moved into the Oxford Circle neighborhood, because Tim’s father was asked to pastor at Oxford Circle Mennonite Church. It was also at that time that Tim started kindergarten at a Christian school called Cedar Grove. It was a K-12 school, so Tim was there until he went to college. He received good spiritual support from his school and church throughout his childhood and adolescence, but school was still a difficult place for him – especially high school.

            Cedar Grove had an independent learning track that Tim went through from fourth to seventh grade, so by the time he would’ve started eighth grade, he’d finished all of the work on his own. So, his parents and teachers decided to let him skip eighth grade, so that he wouldn’t be repeating the same work in a traditional classroom setting. The decision made sense academically, but it made high school more difficult for Tim socially. Cedar Grove was a relatively small school, so everyone in the school knew what was happening. Tim was also leaving behind the friends and peers he’d had since kindergarten, and would have to build friendships in a group that had been together since kindergarten as well, and knew that he was younger than all of them. Because of these social hardships, Tim struggled with a lot of insecurity during his high school years.

            However, even in high school, Tim felt a call to ministry, and by his senior year he saw himself becoming a medical missionary, like one of his uncles. After high school, Tim went to Eastern Mennonite University. College was one of the first times that Tim had close friendships among his peers. In high school, his significant relationships tended to be with teachers and mentors, but in college he finally met people his own age that he connected with deeply.

            Though, college was not an entirely easy time for Tim either. During his second semester of his junior year, Tim had a complicated break up, and his closest friend was unavailable for support because he was spending the year studying in South Africa. Some of Tim’s insecurities resurfaced, and he slid into an emotional and spiritual valley because of this.

            After all of this, during the summer before his senior year, and the fall of his senior year, Tim went on a mission with the YES Program (Youth Evangelism Service,) through Eastern Mennonite Missions. He spent the summer in Philadelphia, training for the program, and then in the fall went to Honduras.

            That summer, Tim says, was the most important, formative time in his relationship with Christ. At that time, Tim was broken in a lot of ways, in relationships and within himself, and he was uncertain about whether or not medicine was what he should pursue. But through prayer, journaling, and times of worship, God moved closer to Tim, giving him security and healing in his brokenness. It was the first time that Tim really felt that he was building a relationship with Christ. And God became his source of identity. Tim didn’t need to feel like his worth was in relationships, or academic achievement, or what people thought of him – he was a child of God, and that was the most important thing. God loved him, and that became a personal reality for Tim that summer.

            Tim also went through a period of questioning his motives for wanting to become a medical missionary. Was he doing it just because it was a “good” thing to do? Because people would look at him and see what he was doing, and think it was great? Because it seemed important and even heroic? Tim felt that he had genuinely been called to medicine during his senior year in high school, but he wondered if he was now being led into it by his pride, rather than by God.

            He also wondered about the practicality of doing medicine overseas. He didn’t know if it made sense to build over $100,000 of debt and then work in an impoverished setting. How could he pay back his loans? And while working in Honduras, Tim realized that the skills he would learn in an American medical school wouldn’t really transfer over to third world settings. The jobs of medical professionals in the kinds of places where he wanted to work were more to train local health workers than to provide Western medicine. As Tim pointed out to me, you can’t order an MRI in a country that doesn’t have MRI machines.

            Tim began to wonder if God was really calling him to work internationally or instead to work in a North American urban setting. During the summers of his sophomore and junior years of college, Tim had worked in New York City with the Young People’s Christian Association. It was then that Tim began to understand his own appreciation of urban settings. He loved the diversity, mix of cultures, different experiences, and perspectives. Those were things he missed, going to school in Harrisonburg, Virginia. And when realizing he may not be called to work in an international setting after all, he thought that God may be leading him to an urban one.

            After Tim graduated with his Bachelor’s, he was invited to lead a YES team to Mexico. He hadn’t applied to any medical schools at that point, because he was so unsure about what he should do. However, during the time he spent training to lead the team, Tim applied to a few schools. Now, it’s recommended that students apply to between fifteen and twenty medical schools. Tim only applied to three: two within Philadelphia, and one outside. After all, Tim didn’t know if he even wanted to go to medical school, and while training for the YES team to head to Mexico, he didn’t have much time for applications and interviews. But, he applied anyway to those three, and asked the Lord to get him into one if that was the Lord’s will.

            Before his interview for Temple, Tim was nervous because he didn’t know how he was going to advocate for himself when he wasn’t sure that he actually wanted to go into medicine. However, the interview was during a week that the leaders for the YES program were spending time fasting and praying. Through that, Tim felt God calling him back to medicine, letting him know that it was what he needed to do. So, when Tim went into the interview for Temple, he was able to do so with confidence.

            Incidentally, on his return from Mexico, Tim was accepted into Temple’s med school, and decided to study there.  Also, by that time, Tim felt a pretty strong call from the Lord to work in Philadelphia. He still was uncertain, however, about how the financial part of medical school would work out. In his last year of med school, though, Tim received a $40,000 scholarship, which removed over a third of his medical school debt. This was a big confirmation for Tim that God would provide for him to practice medicine in an underserved community.

            Also during his last year in medical school, Tim found out about Esperanza Health Center. He met with some of the doctors there, and learned more about their ministry to provide medical care to the Latino community in North Philadelphia, and to other underserved communities in their area. Tim got an opportunity to do a rotation at Esperanza during his residency training at Jefferson, and took it. Tim saw that Esperanza was already doing what he’d felt the Lord calling him to during his whole journey through medical school. At Esperanza, he could work in an urban context, providing healthcare to people who need it most, and incorporating spiritual care with health care.

            However, Time thought that he wouldn’t have an opportunity to work there, because at the time he did his rotation at Esperanza, they were having financial difficulties and were not in a position to hire. But during the half year that Tim was finishing up his medical training, a position at Esperanza opened up. It seemed that that was where God was leading him.

            And if that wasn’t providential enough, Tim was able to get the rest of his loans from medical school paid off through a program called Project MedSend, because of his work with Esperanza.

            Through his life, Tim got to see God take him through insecurity, confusion, and doubt, to greater clarity of his role in God’s kingdom, only ten blocks away from where he was born.