The First Remission

In 1947, Dr. Sidney Farber administered a drug called aminopterin to children dying of leukemia at Boston Children's Hospital. At the time, the diagnosis was a death sentence — no child had ever survived it. The medical establishment considered his efforts futile, even cruel.

Then something unprecedented happened. The cancer retreated. Not in every child, and not permanently — but for the first time in medical history, leukemia loosened its grip. Farber had achieved what doctors call a remission — a word that comes from the Latin for "to send back."

Those early remissions were brief. But they proved something that changed medicine forever: the disease could be fought. Where there had been absolute certainty of death, now there was a crack of light. Today, childhood leukemia has a cure rate above ninety percent — all because one physician refused to accept that hope was foolish.

The apostle Paul knew something about hope in impossible circumstances. "We were under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired of life itself. But this happened that we might not rely on ourselves but on God, who raises the dead" (2 Corinthians 1:8-9).

Hope does not require certainty. It requires only a crack — one small sign that death does not have the final word. In Christ, we have far more than a crack. We have a resurrection.