Healing
I've been thinking about healing. When I was in Germany a couple of weeks back we watched a live feed from two operating theatres; one for a knee replacement and one for an endovascular stent graft. The knee especially got me thinking. First of all, it was so barbaric (sorry, no photos for this one!) - this guy banging away with a big hammer, then chopping bits of bone out with a rotary saw, and every time you thought they were joking they pulled out a bigger spiky tool ... (endovascular surgery is just so much more elegant). Anyway, the delicate bits the surgeon did carefully with a scalpel, and we watched as he scraped away tiny bits of old tissue and left only what was healthy and would heal. And this second bit is where my train of thought really started. We rely on healing. We absolutely take it as given that if we cut flesh, then hold it together, it will - all by itself - merge once more into a whole. No kind of surgical intervention can work without that presumption.
Healing could be classified as one of those processes that 'just happens' when the conditions are right; but it's one thing to begin to understand and endeavour to provide those conditions, and quite another to say that we, humans, are the ones doing the healing. Healing happens because we're built that way - we are built to be alive, and a characterisic of living things is their ability to regenerate, repair, renew. It's some kind of pride in us humans that puts expected 'natural' (ie: automatic) healing, the intervention of medicine and surgery, and God's unexpected healing into three different boxes, as if they were distinct and exclusive. But we would not heal at all if healing were not a part of our design. Give credit where it's due - to the architect! So this is just a general heads up to notice what goes on around you. Call it by its proper name, and see where you stand in the great big whole. Just a thought, K.
- Posted by flyingkiwi on 23/08/2006.
- flyingkiwi's site
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