The Surgery That Needed Every Hand

In 2017, a team at Johns Hopkins Hospital performed a groundbreaking face transplant on Katie Stubblefield, a young woman from Mississippi. The operation lasted thirty-one hours and required over one hundred medical professionals working in careful coordination.

Surgeons reconnected delicate facial nerves. Anesthesiologists monitored her vitals through the night. Nurses prepared instrument after instrument, anticipating needs before they were spoken. A social worker stood ready to support the family. Somewhere down the hall, a lab technician processed tissue samples that guided real-time decisions. A janitor kept the corridor sterile. A chaplain prayed with Katie's parents in the waiting room.

No single person could have performed that transplant. And here is what strikes me — if even one of those roles had been vacant, the outcome would have been different. Not just the lead surgeon's hands mattered. The technician running labs at three in the morning mattered. The nurse who noticed a slight change in blood pressure mattered. Every person in that building was the operation.

Paul tells the Corinthians that the eye cannot say to the hand, "I don't need you." The head cannot say to the feet, "I don't need you." In fact, he insists, the parts that seem weakest are indispensable.

The church is not a collection of spectators watching a few gifted people perform. It is a living body — and every member, seen or unseen, keeps it breathing.