Laughing Last And Best

Laughing Last And Best

When Jesus arrived at the official’s home, he saw the noisy crowd and heard the funeral music. “Get out!” he told them. “The girl isn’t dead; she’s only asleep.” But the crowd laughed at him. Matthew 9:23-24

Some medical discoveries, when first introduced, were thought to be crazy and downright laughable.

When I began my clinicals at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, my first attending physician was Dr. Basil Hirschowitz, a prominent gastroenterologist who, along with two colleagues, invented the first fully flexible fiber-optic endoscope.

Who would have imagined that a flexible tube could be passed into the intestines and be used to diagnose disease? I’m sure that many people laughed at Dr. Hirschowitz as he worked out the details of his invention. Yet even today, all these years later, it is still the gold standard in diagnostic treatment. We would be hard-pressed to make some diagnoses without it.

More recently, two men went to extraordinary lengths to prove their theory that peptic ulcer disease was caused by bacteria—rather than by too much stomach acid, as the medical community had believed for hundreds of years. In the early 1980s, two men working in Australia hypothesized that these ulcers were instead caused by the helicobacter pylori bacterium. They did several studies and tried to get their results published, but the medical establishment only laughed at them.

On June 12, 1984, one of the researchers, Barry Marshall, purposely consumed the bacterium and became ill. He then took an antibiotic, and it relieved his symptoms. This discovery saved countless lives that otherwise would have been lost to bleeding ulcers or stomach cancer. But it took Marshall’s bold step of testing his theory on himself to stop the laughter.

When Jesus came to the house of a girl who had recently died and told the crowd that the girl wasn’t dead, they laughed at him. But Jesus had the last laugh when he took the girl by the hand and she stood up. If people weren’t talking about Jesus before this, they certainly were afterward!

If someone tells you that your faith doesn’t change things or that praying for healing is a waste of time, don’t stop believing or praying. It won’t be the first time doubters laughed and were proved wrong.

TODAY’S RX

Put your faith in the God who can raise someone from the dead.

Jesus, your miracles are evident to this day. Nothing surprises you, and nothing is beyond you. Thank you for providing healing through the medical advancements we have today.