The Body That Refuses to Quit

In 1921, a young surgeon named Frederick Banting walked into a laboratory at the University of Toronto with an idea that most of his colleagues dismissed. At the time, a diagnosis of Type 1 diabetes was a death sentence. Children wasted away in hospital wards while their families watched helplessly. There was nothing medicine could offer but a slow, agonizing decline.

Banting and his assistant Charles Best spent that summer extracting a substance from the pancreases of dogs. They called it isletin. We call it insulin. In January 1922, they injected it into fourteen-year-old Leonard Thompson, who lay dying in Toronto General Hospital. Within hours, his dangerously high blood sugar dropped. Within days, he was sitting up in bed. Within weeks, he walked out of that hospital alive.

The ward where Leonard had been dying held dozens of other children in diabetic comas. One by one, Banting and Best moved from bed to bed, injecting each child. Parents watched their sons and daughters open their eyes and return to life. Witnesses described it as the closest thing to resurrection they had ever seen.

Hope works like that. Not as wishful thinking, but as a living substance injected into our most desperate places. The Apostle Paul wrote that suffering produces perseverance, perseverance produces character, and character produces hope — a hope that does not put us to shame, because God has poured out His love into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.

No matter how terminal your situation feels today, the Great Physician is still making rounds.