Someone Else's Strength

In 1956, Dr. E. Donnall Thomas performed what many considered impossible — the first successful bone marrow transplant. His patient's own marrow had turned against her, producing diseased blood cells instead of healthy ones. No medicine could fix what was broken at the source.

So Thomas tried something radical. He took healthy marrow from a donor and infused it into the patient's bloodstream. Those transplanted cells — someone else's cells — traveled through her body, found their way into the hollow of her bones, and began doing what her own marrow could not. They engrafted. They took root. And slowly, steadily, they started producing healthy blood.

The medical community was stunned. Thomas would go on to win the Nobel Prize for this work, but the theology was there long before the science.

Hope, in its deepest biblical sense, works the same way. There comes a point when we recognize that what is broken in us cannot be healed by us. Our own resources are exhausted. And into that honest desperation, God does something radical — He gives us what we cannot manufacture for ourselves. His Spirit takes root in the deepest marrow of who we are and begins producing something we could never produce on our own.

As Paul wrote, "It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me." That is not poetry. That is a transplant.