The Courage to Wash Your Hands

In 1847, a young Hungarian physician named Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis made a discovery that should have changed medicine overnight. Working in Vienna General Hospital's maternity ward, he noticed that women delivered by doctors died at five times the rate of those delivered by midwives. The difference? Doctors went straight from performing autopsies to delivering babies without washing their hands.

Semmelweis implemented a simple protocol: wash with chlorinated lime before touching a patient. The death rate plummeted from eighteen percent to under two percent.

And the medical establishment destroyed him for it.

Colleagues called him foolish. Prominent doctors ridiculed his findings publicly. He lost his position. The man whose obedience to truth saved countless lives was committed to an asylum, where he died at forty-seven — from an infection.

Sometimes courage doesn't look like charging into battle. Sometimes it looks like washing your hands when everyone insists they're already clean — standing by what you know is true when every authority tells you you're wrong.

The apostle Paul knew this courage. So did Jesus, who told truths that led to a cross.

The question for us isn't whether faithfulness will cost us something. It will. The question is whether we love the people the truth will save more than we fear the ones it will offend.