Concerning the book, 'Ten Fingers for God', about Dr. Paul Brand, there is much to learn. We as human beings naturally have a bad view of pain. We avoid it. We take medicine to relieve it. But those who are lepers, pain is something they wish they had back. It is a friend and not an enemy. The absence of pain is their enemy. God wanted Dr. Paul Brand to know this fully.
Here are a few quotes depicting a most horrific time in Dr. Brands life while in S. Africa on furlough.
"When he arrived in his room in Nethania, he sank gratefully into a chair and pulled off his shoes. Then suddenly it came, without warning, perhaps the blackest moment of his whole life. For as he leaned over and pulled off his sock, he made a discovery. There was no feeling in his heel. "
"He rose mechanically, found a pin, sat down again, and pricked the small area below his ankle. He felt no pain. He thrust the pin deeper, until a speck of blood showed. Still he felt nothing.....Then he got up and flung himself on the bed. "
"So--it had come. He supposed, like other workers with leprosy, he had always half expected it."
"...clicking heels and laughing children, were as remote as planets in outer space. He would never be a part of them again. Ostracized, taboo, 'outside the pale,' leper!
"What should he do now with his life?...He must not live intimately with his family again. Should he go back to India....what a blow to leprosy work! Here he had been telling his team it wasn't contagious! Few of them would ever dare engage in such work again."
"It would be easier just to disappear....cold reason shocked him into sanity. 'Coward!...And you're the one who has been telling everybody that leprosy is curable.!"
"With clinical objectivity he found another pin...bared the skin below his ankle, jabbed in the point--and yelled. The relief of the blessed pain was staggering. His first reaction was to fall on his knees and thank God. The next was to fling open a window and breathe deeply of the warm April air,....The third was to berate himself for being a stupid fool. The explanation of his mistake was simple enough. Sitting in the train all the way from the coast, still too weak from the flu for normal restless motion, he had numbed a nerve."
"...hereafter his sympathy for his patients would become empathy. He would know exactly how they felt at that first most shattering stage of their sickness. And as time passed the episode was to spark an awareness which became the basis of profound religious experience. What an absolutely glorious sensation it had been to feel that sharp painful thrust of the pin!...Thank God for pain!"
(Ten Fingers For God, Dorothy Clarke Wilson, MC Graw-Hill, 1965, p. 142-145)
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