The Man They Stopped Recognizing

In 2014, a photograph circulated online of a homeless man named Patrick Hardison from Senatobia, Mississippi. Burns had destroyed his face years earlier while he was fighting a house fire as a volunteer firefighter. He lived in hiding — wearing hats, prosthetics, avoiding mirrors, terrified of how strangers recoiled at his appearance. He described himself as a man trapped inside his own disfigurement.

Then a surgical team at NYU Langone Medical Center gave Patrick the most extensive face transplant ever performed. The procedure lasted twenty-six hours. When the bandages came off, even his children didn't recognize him. His neighbors stood speechless on the sidewalk. Patrick Hardison walked into a grocery store without a single person flinching, and he wept right there in the cereal aisle.

Some people in his town didn't know what to make of it. A few admitted the new Patrick unsettled them more than the old one. They had grown comfortable with the man behind the mask.

That is Luke 8. The Gerasene demoniac lived among the tombs, shackled and screaming, so disfigured by darkness that his community had given up on him. Then Jesus spoke, and the man was found sitting clothed and in his right mind. And the townspeople? They were afraid. Not of the demons — of the healing.

The Almighty doesn't just manage our brokenness. He gives us back our face.