Can It Be Me?
by Marjory Foyle
Marjory Foyle has finally written her autobiography, which is great news to those of us who consider ourselves humbled to be her legacy of open and honest struggles and caregiving.
Christian Medical Fellowship, Partnership House, 157 Waterloo Road, London SE1 8XN, United Kingdom, 2006, 166 pages, £8.00.
—Reviewed by Brent Lindquist, president, Link Care Center, Fresno, California.
Marjory Foyle has finally written her autobiography, which is great news to those of us who consider ourselves humbled to be her legacy of open and honest struggles and caregiving.
Marjory was born into a dysfunctional family and raised by a single mother. As a youth, she was painfully shy, and has struggled with a difficult stutter all her life. Yet through all of this turmoil, she completed medical school and served as a physician in India and Nepal, learning to communicate in four languages. Following an unexpected and unwelcome reassignment, she struggled and succumbed to bitterness and anger, and was treated for depression at the famous Nur Mancil clinic in India. It was there she understood the toxic problem of harboring negative emotions. She also understood the importance of loving others as we love ourselves. This meant she had to love herself as God’s new creation, with respect. God made her, and he wanted to use her “however brilliant or slow we are, and however much we are battered about or handicapped at any stage of our development” (p. 68). The result of that insight and healing allowed her to complete a residency in psychiatry and to serve effectively until the end of her career. After her retirement, she did not stop. Instead, she began a second career and visited many missionary sites, teaching pathology and growth in many cultural contexts. For her third career she completed another doctorate in expatriate mental health.
Marjory tears down the walls that say a professional should remain distant and aloof. She comes to us as a co-laborer on our journey, and offers us wonderful insights which have also helped her.
Still going strong in her 80s, she has drawn in her travels to the London transit system where she creates little bits of brightness each day. I hope to run into her there someday soon. Can It Be Me? creates an expectation that, yes, it is me. I have been chosen. I am like Marjory, “a troubled child whom God met, who usually, but not always, cooperated with the growth patterns God had in mind, who failed many times but was picked up and happily re-employed in God’s kingdom” (p. 152). Yes, Marjory, it was, and is, you…and not only you. We cannot read your book without asking, “Can it be me, too?”
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