Dr. Paul Brand was an orthopedic surgeon who chose his patients among the untouchable. With his wife, who was also a physician, he spent a lifetime working with the marred and useless limbs of leprosy victims. In fact, he transformed the way in which medicine approached the painful and often exiled world of the leper. Whereas the disfigurements of leprosy were once treated as irreversible consequences of the disease, Dr. Brand brought new hope to sufferers of leprosy by utilizing the body’s capacity to heal. “I have come to realize that every patient of mine, every newborn baby, in every cell of its body, has a basic knowledge of how to survive and how to heal that exceeds anything that I shall ever know,” wrote Brand. “That knowledge is the gift of God, who has made our bodies more perfectly than we could ever have devised.”

Philip Yancey was a young journalist when he first met this dignified British surgeon in an interview. He recalls the teary-eyed Brand speaking of his patients, describing their disease as if first hand—their unremitting suffering, experimental surgeries, and societal rejection. Many memorable conversations later, Yancey would recall the healing presence this physician was to his own crippled and weary belief in God. To Yancey, Brand represented faith and hope in action, in reality, amidst suffering and death; his belief in Christ caused him to live in a very particular way. Thus, Dr. Brand, who worked to restore the image of God in lives marred by disease, helped restore the face of God in the doubt-ridden world of a young author. As Yancey later would write, “You need only meet one saint to believe, to silence the noisy arguments of the world.”(1) Such lives are certain reminders that God is real and worthy to be followed.

Such lives also remind us that one of the key elements in considering the arguments of any truth claim is actually not an argument at all. Rather it is a question of pragmatics. Is this worldview livable? Can this philosophy be carried out? Stories of believers who are broken and persecuted but somehow beautifully alive with the hope of Christ suggest that Christianity is not only a livable worldview, but a worldview that gives meaning to life as it really is and not simply ideal pictures of life. Yet as Ravi Zacharias notes significantly, the Christian hope is not true because it is livable; it is livable because it is true. The message of Christ is a reality that can carry men and women through death and darkness; it is also a truth that compels being carried to the ends of the earth.

In a 1990 sermon titled The Wisdom of the Body, Dr. Paul Brand said, “I pray that when my time comes I may not grumble that my body has worn out too soon, but hold on to gratitude that I have been so long at the helm of the most wonderful creation the world has ever known, and look forward to meeting the designer face to face.” In flesh and blood such as ours, God silences the arguments of a noisy world. Jesus stood before the masses to show the world that our bodies and our hearts were meant to know healing. Perhaps we can be like the one leper of the ten that Jesus healed, the one who recognized the significance of the man behind the miracle. Falling on his face at Jesus’s feet, he saw the Son of God. And Jesus said to him: “Rise and go your way; your faith has made you well.”(2)

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Philip Yancey, “The Leprosy Doctor,” Christianity Today (November 2003), 112.

(2) Luke 17:11-18.