The Body That Fights Its Own Rescue

In 1954, Dr. Joseph Murray performed the first successful kidney transplant at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston. It was a medical miracle — a dying man received a healthy organ that could save his life. But surgeons had already learned a painful lesson from earlier attempts: the human body rejects transplanted organs. The immune system identifies the new kidney as foreign, as something that does not belong, and attacks it with the same ferocity it would direct at a virus.

Think about that. The very thing designed to save your life, your body tries to destroy.

This is what grace looks like when it first arrives. Something in us resists it. We hear that God's love is free, unearned, unconditional — and everything in our spiritual immune system flares up. It cannot be that simple. I need to do more. I have not suffered enough to deserve this. We attack the gift because it feels foreign to a heart trained on earning and striving.

Dr. Murray discovered that patients needed immunosuppressive therapy — medicine that quieted the body's defenses just enough to let the transplant take hold. In the spiritual life, that medicine is surrender. We have to lay down our compulsion to earn what has already been given.

Grace will save you. But first, you have to stop fighting it. You have to let the gift settle in and do what it was always meant to do — give you a life you could never produce on your own.