The doors whooshed open as the ambulance crew wheeled in a patient. Sitting up in a gurney, a gentleman held his hands in his lap, one wrapped with a mass of bloody gauze while the other held something smaller. The emergency room staff assessed the situation. A half-hour before, the man cut his finger off in an accident at work. Now the rush was on to reattach and save the finger.

After stabilizing the patient and starting an IV, we wheeled him to a suite where a surgeon took over. The surgeon indeed sewed the finger back on, but I never found out if the finger stayed healthy, or if infection set in and he eventually lost it.

I thought of this incident from my summers working in an emergency room when reading Paul’s encouragement to the church at Corinth: Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it. A line before he wrote: If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.

The severed finger in the emergency room could not live on its own. From the moment the ambulance call went out, professionals rushed to reattach the finger—the only way to keep it alive. The patient desperately wanted his body made whole, because who wants to go through life missing a finger?

So it works with our Christian faith. I cannot cut myself off and live as a follower of Jesus. I cannot ignore the life that flows from time spent with fellow believers. Sometimes it’s a hassle, and sometimes these folks annoy me (as I’m sure I annoy them). But I need them and they need me.

A severed finger quickly turns rancid. A severed life, over time, tends to do the same.

I Corinthians 12 in reading the Bible cover to cover in 2022

Photo by camilo jimenez