The Awakening at Beth Abraham

In 1969, neurologist Oliver Sacks began administering a new drug called L-DOPA to patients at Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx. These men and women had been imprisoned inside their own bodies for decades — survivors of the encephalitis lethargica epidemic that swept the world in the 1920s. They had gradually become frozen, unable to move, speak, or respond to the world around them. Some had not uttered a word in over thirty years.

Then the medication took hold. Patients who had sat motionless for decades stood, walked, spoke, laughed. They recognized family members. They recalled songs from their youth. Sacks later described these moments in his book Awakenings — and awakening is exactly the right word for what he witnessed.

What struck Sacks most was this: the disease had not destroyed who these people were. Beneath decades of frozen silence, their personalities, memories, and longings remained fully intact — waiting to be released.

Paul writes, "It is for freedom that Christ has set us free" (Galatians 5:1). Sin does not destroy the person God created you to be. It imprisons that person — encasing your true self beneath layers of shame, habit, bitterness, and fear until you can barely remember who you were meant to become.

But when Christ speaks your name, the real you walks free. You are not ruined. You are awaiting your awakening.