The Surgeon's Graft

In the burn unit at Galveston's Shriners Hospital, surgeons perform a procedure that puzzles anyone seeing it for the first time. To heal a child's devastated skin, the surgeon takes a blade to healthy flesh. A donor site — often the patient's own thigh or back — is carefully wounded, its living skin harvested in paper-thin sheets and laid over the burned tissue. Healthy skin must be cut open so that destroyed skin can be made whole.

The donor site bleeds. It throbs for weeks. Nurses describe it as sometimes more painful than the original burn. Yet without that deliberate wounding of what is healthy, the damaged tissue would never heal. It would scar over hard and tight, leaving the patient unable to move freely. The graft alone restores suppleness, sensation, and life to what fire had ruined.

Isaiah saw this same exchange centuries before any surgical theater existed. "By His wounds we are healed." The prophet understood a mystery that still staggers us — that the wholeness we desperately needed could only come through the breaking of One who was perfectly whole. Christ, the only unblemished life ever lived, was laid open so that His vitality could cover our ruin.

We were the burned and scarred, unable to restore ourselves. He was the living skin, willingly cut so that everything dead in us could live again. His wound became our healing. His stripes became our freedom.