The Skin Graft

In 1970, a three-year-old boy named Glen Cork fell into a campfire at a family gathering in rural Kentucky. Third-degree burns covered forty percent of his body. Doctors at the University of Kentucky Medical Center told his parents the boy would die without skin grafts — and in those days, the best donor match was a parent.

His father, Harold, lay on the operating table in the adjacent room. Surgeons removed strips of skin from his back, his thighs, his arms — layer after painful layer. Harold refused general anesthesia after the first procedure because he wanted to stay alert enough to pray for his son. Over three successive surgeries, doctors harvested enough tissue to cover Glen's wounds. The boy healed. The father carried the scars for the rest of his life.

What strikes me about skin grafting is the brutal arithmetic of it. Healing requires a transfer. Healthy flesh must be wounded so that damaged flesh can be restored. There is no shortcut, no synthetic substitute that works as well as living tissue freely given.

Isaiah 53:5 describes exactly this exchange: "By His wounds we are healed." The prophet saw, seven centuries before Calvary, the sacred arithmetic of redemption — that our restoration would cost someone else His wholeness. Christ's body was broken so that ours could be made new. Every scar He bears is a wound we no longer carry.