What Love Costs the Healthy

On December 23, 1954, Ronald Herrick did something no healthy person had ever done before. He lay down on an operating table at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston and let Dr. Joseph Murray cut into his perfectly healthy body — not to fix anything wrong with him, but to save his identical twin brother Richard, who was dying of chronic kidney disease.

Ronald had nothing to gain from that surgery. Every risk belonged to him. The scalpel, the anesthesia, the weeks of recovery — all of it was the cost of loving his brother. When surgeons removed Ronald's kidney and transplanted it into Richard's body, they performed the first successful organ transplant in human history. Richard, who had been near death, lived another eight years. Ronald lived to be seventy-nine.

What strikes me about Ronald Herrick is not just his courage but his willingness. No one forced him onto that table. He chose to offer his healthy body so that someone he loved could live.

Paul writes in Romans 12:1, "Offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God — this is your true and proper worship." Notice Paul does not ask for a dead sacrifice. He asks for a living one — a body still breathing, still feeling, still bearing the cost. Ronald walked out of that hospital with one kidney and a scar, and he carried both for the rest of his life.