Well, I haven’t done a summary in a while (sorry mom), but I decided to get back into it. I’ve been reading the book “Fearfully and Wonderfully Made” by Phillip Yancey and Paul Brand, and it’s very intriguing. I’m going to summarize the ideas that chapter 11 in the section “Bones” presents. The narrator of the chapter, Dr. Paul Brand, is a doctor who, for the most part of this book, helps patients in India.
This is where this chapter takes place, and he starts off explaining how legs in India are extremely vital to work. He tells the story of a missionary patient he had who had a broken leg. Dr Brand discovered that the woman had had a tumor in her thigh that a doctor had used radiation to kill. It killed the tumor, but it also killed all the bone cells in that leg, which meant her bones couldn’t grow back together. Brand, using two bone grafts from the woman’s tibia and pelvis, surrounded the broken area in the extra bone grafts. After the operation, the woman made an almost full recovery, and even though her leg bones couldn’t grow any more, her leg was completely stable to walk on.
Watching the bone grafts grow onto his patients bones, he is reminded of a newborn baby, who starts out life with 350 soft, pliable bones, which fuse together to form just over 200 hard bones. He compares this to his faith. Christian faith starts out soft and pliable, like a baby’s bones, but with knowledge and learning, your faith is strengthened.