May 21, 2025
Good afternoon,
” For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who does it, but it is sin living in me that does it. Romans 7:19-20
I was given a book to read by a friend. The title is ” The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks “. Tissue was taken from Henrietta’s body in 1951. She died of cervical cancer soon after. Scientists had been trying to grow cells outside the body for years, and when they tried to grow Henrietta’s, the cells kept growing and growing. They have been used ever since, in all kinds of medical tests and treatments. There are billions of her cells all over the world. They are known as HeLa cells. The first doctors never got consent from her family to harvest the tissue from her body. The Lacks family was African-American, and never compensated. Racism was part of the story. There were good people acting badly all over the story.
In the book, there is this story told. Dr. Alexis Carrel invented the heart bypass surgical technique ( I was saved by this in 2007 ). He won the Nobel Prize for this work in 1912 . He was the first to suture together a piece of human tissue and a chicken heart. People thought that this would lead to immortality for all people. But Carrel did not want immortality for everyone. He wanted… ” to preserve what he saw as the superior white race , which he saw as being polluted by less intelligent and inferior stock, namely the poor, the uneducated and non-white… He would later praise Hitler for his energetic measures he took in that direction.” ( page 59 )
I think we are all infected with this thing called sin. We want to do good, but sometimes we just can’t stop ourselves from doing bad things. The sin of the brokennes gets in the way. Sometimes we say, ” the devil made me do it “, but I believe that is a sinful attitude in itself. We could go down the rabbit hole of theological conspiracy, and try to find where sin entered the world and our lives. Paul is being so honest here about his own shortcomings or sin. We need to believe in the graciousness of God, so our sin will be smashed to smithereens, and we can get on with changing the world for the better.
GAZA.
Fred
black and white shadows
crush humanity’s freedom
am I complicit ?
MPL 2025
Ponder Anew 