The Cast That Held the Healing

When Dr. Sarah Chen sets a broken femur at Massachusetts General Hospital, she doesn't heal the bone — she positions it. She aligns the fractured edges, wraps the limb in plaster, and then does something that surprises her youngest patients: she tells them to wait. The healing, she explains, isn't her work. It belongs to the body itself, to the remarkable biological process God wired into every human cell.

But here's what Dr. Chen knows from thirty years of orthopedic practice: alignment matters more than anything. A bone committed to the cast — held in proper position — knits back stronger than before. A bone left to heal on its own, without that surrender to the cast's rigid hold, grows crooked. It calcifies at wrong angles. It causes pain for years.

Proverbs 16:3 says, "Commit your works to the LORD, and your thoughts will be established." The Hebrew word for "commit" is galal — literally, to roll something over, to transfer its weight onto another. It's the image of placing your fractured plans, your broken ambitions, into the hands of the One who knows exactly how the pieces should align.

You are not asked to heal yourself. You are asked to hold still in the cast — to roll your work, your career, your marriage, your ministry onto the Lord and trust that He is doing the deeper, invisible work of making crooked things straight.