The Ward That Woke Up

In January 1922, fourteen-year-old Leonard Thompson lay dying in Toronto General Hospital. He weighed just sixty-five pounds. Type 1 diabetes was consuming him from the inside, and there was nothing anyone could do. In that era, the only treatment was a starvation diet that bought a few miserable months at best. The diagnosis was a death sentence, and everyone knew it.

Then Frederick Banting and Charles Best arrived with a crude extract they had drawn from the pancreas of a dog. They injected Leonard. Within days, his blood sugar dropped. Color returned to his face. He began to eat again.

What happened next became one of the most breathtaking scenes in medical history. Banting and Best moved through an entire hospital ward filled with children in diabetic comas — skeletal, barely breathing, their parents keeping vigil beside them. One by one, they administered the insulin. And one by one, those children opened their eyes. Parents wept as kids who had been given weeks to live sat up and asked for food.

The substance that set them free had been inside the human body all along. Their own bodies had simply lost the ability to produce it.

Paul writes in Galatians 5:1, "It is for freedom that Christ has set us free." We were wasting away under the weight of sin — a diagnosis none of us could reverse on our own. But God injected grace directly into our desperate condition. The life we could never manufacture for ourselves was freely given. And like those children in Toronto, we woke up.