Medical Mondays: What If Losing a Leg Brought You to Jesus?

One of the countries I lived in had a high rate of amputees. They were not the result of land mines or war. Rather, they often were the result of scores of men sitting on top of crowded to overflowing buses when those buses got in an accident.

A very common sight.

For people in a country where the average person makes around a dollar per day, and there is no such thing as disability or insurance money for rehab, losing a leg is devastating. They cannot support their families. They cannot farm. Many are reduced to begging.

However, in this same country is a limb and brace ministry run by believers. They create prosthetic limbs that give amputees back their livelihood and in essence their lives.

The people in this ministry sometimes go do free clinics in outlying villages, villages full of people who belong to another religion, one not based on compassion for the weak or help for the hurting.

When the limb and brace group arrives, offering to give free help, people want to know why they came. Why are you doing this? What is it you really want? Why would anyone give something for free?

The questions turn to joy when broken men, women and children walk again. When people go from hopeless to hopeful. And through this active visual of how much an act of grace can change a life, an opening is made. The clinic workers share why they do this, why they give for strangers, why they love.

Jesus.

By showing people God's love in tangible ways, it opens the door for them to believe the intangible. People have been saved through this beautiful ministry of restoration--of restoration not just physically but spiritually.

If you lived in one of those villages and this clinic brought you hope, not just hope for this life but also the next, would you become thankful for your accident, thankful for your suffering, because that is what brought Jesus to your people? Would you "glory in your infirmities" like Paul did, because they brought you and others to Christ?

It is hard not to become bitter over life's sufferings. It is hard not to complain, not to find someone to blame for our pain, not to want to lash out and ask God why.

But, like those amputees, God has purpose in our pain as well. In everything, yes everything, He is working for good, the good purpose of conforming us into His image.

What if we could not project His image were we fully healthy, living the lives we wanted to live? What if our sickness keeps us clinging to Him? What if it the avenue for another to find Jesus Christ?

If it took an amputated leg for you to find Jesus, would you not give thanks for the loss? In the same way, we can trust that God has equal purpose in our own sicknesses and sufferings. Nothing is wasted with Him. If we let Him, He will use our trials for good. He can turn even tragedy into triumph.

He is the One who made the lame walk, after all. So if He keeps us "lame," there's a good reason for it. We can trust Him.


I pleaded with the Lord three times that it might depart from me. And He said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for My strength is made perfect in weakness.” ...Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities...for Christ’s sake. For when I am weak, then I am strong. 2 Corinthians 12:8-10

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What about you? What has illness taken from you that you miss most? Have you seen any way that God has used that loss for good? Comment below!


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