Mountains Beyond Mountains
- Salvatore Santaniello
- Jun 4
- 4 min read
Updated: Jun 10
What Dr. Paul Farmer Taught Me About Following Christ
There is an old Haitian proverb: Beyond mountains, there are mountains.
It became the title of Tracy Kidder’s book about Dr. Paul Farmer, the physician who spent his life carrying medicine, hope, and human dignity into places most of the world had already decided were too poor, too broken, or too far away to matter.
Dr. Farmer helped begin Partners In Health in Haiti. He became a Harvard physician and a respected leader in global health. He could have lived a comfortable, celebrated life almost anywhere.
Instead, he kept going back to the sick.
He kept going back to the poor.
He kept going back over the mountain.
What moves me most is not simply that he treated disease. It is that he refused to believe a person should receive lesser care because they were poor, remote, forgotten, or inconvenient. He seemed to understand that a sick child in Haiti was not a smaller child of God than a sick child in Boston.
That kind of life makes me stop and examine my own.
Because discipleship is easy to talk about when the mountain is still in the distance. It is easy to say we love our neighbor when love is a thought, a post, a testimony, or a good intention.
It becomes different when love has a name. When it needs time. When it costs money. When it interrupts our schedule. When the person is hurting, complicated, angry, poor, sick, lonely, or not especially grateful.
That is where the mountain begins.
President Howard W. Hunter once taught that Jesus Christ “ministered to the poor, the hungry, the deprived, the sick.” The Savior did not simply speak beautifully about suffering. He walked toward it. He touched lepers. He stopped for blind men. He fed hungry people. He wept with the grieving. He noticed the person everyone else was passing by.
Christ did not save the world from a safe distance.
And maybe that is what makes Dr. Farmer’s life so powerful to me. He did not cure every illness. He did not fix every broken system. He did not reach every person in need. But he rejected the excuse that because he could not help everyone, he was therefore excused from helping the one in front of him.
I need that reminder.
Sometimes we look at the size of the suffering in the world and become numb. There are too many hungry people. Too many broken families. Too many lonely hearts. Too many people grieving. Too many people who need help we cannot fully give.
So we shrink our responsibility down to almost nothing.
But the Savior never asked me to heal the whole world. He asked me to follow Him.
He asked me to mourn with those who mourn.
He asked me to lift the hands that hang down.
He asked me to feed His sheep.
He asked me to remember that when I serve “the least of these,” I am serving Him.
There are mountains in every life.
Some people are climbing poverty.
Some are climbing addiction, sickness, depression, loneliness, divorce, regret, or grief.
Some are simply trying to get through another day without anyone noticing how exhausted they really are.
And the hardest truth may be this: when we help someone over one mountain, there may be another waiting behind it.
The meal does not fix the whole life.
The phone call does not remove the grief.
The blessing does not always bring the miracle we wanted.
The money does not solve every need.
The apology does not erase every scar.
Beyond mountains, there are mountains.
But that is not a reason to quit. That is the reason we need Jesus Christ.
President Hunter called the Savior’s way “a more excellent way.” Not an easier way. Not a cleaner way. Not a way where every good act receives applause or every prayer ends exactly as we hoped.
A more excellent way is the way of Christ: seeing people as sacred, serving when it is inconvenient, giving what we can, and trusting the Lord with the mountains we cannot move alone.
Dr. Paul Farmer died in Rwanda in 2022, still doing the work he had given his life to: healing people, teaching others, and insisting that the poor deserved more than our sympathy. They deserved our presence.
I believe there is something deeply Christlike in that.
Not because any man is perfect. Not because service replaces the need for the Savior. But because whenever someone walks toward the suffering instead of around it, I think we catch a glimpse of the heart of Jesus Christ.
Most of us will never build a hospital in Haiti. Most of us will never carry medicine across a mountain to reach a forgotten village.
But every one of us will meet someone whose burden is heavier than it appears.
Someone who needs patience.
Someone who needs food.
Someone who needs forgiveness.
Someone who needs a ride, a prayer, a friend, a second chance, or simply proof that they have not become invisible.
The question is not whether I can move every mountain.
The question is whether I will keep walking when I discover there is another one ahead.
Dr. Farmer did.
More importantly, Jesus Christ did.
And because He did, no mountain is wasted, no act of love is small, and no suffering soul is ever beneath the reach of God.
May we follow that more excellent way.
May we stop measuring whether people are worth the trouble.
May we become the kind of disciples who keep walking toward the wounded.
Because beyond mountains, there are mountains.
And on the road between them, we may just find the Savior already there.
I leave this with you in the name of Jesus Christ.
Farmer grounding:** Farmer co-founded Partners In Health, devoted decades to care for poor and marginalized patients beginning in Haiti, and spent his final days teaching and treating patients in Rwanda before his death in 2022. The title Mountains Beyond Mountains comes from the Haitian proverb, “Beyond mountains there are mountains.”
Conference talk woven through the piece: President Howard W. Hunter, “A More Excellent Way,” April 1992 General Conference. President Hunter taught that Jesus Christ ministered personally to the poor, hungry, deprived, and sick.
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