Turning to Stone
Ξ April 6th, 2006 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Theology, That's Life |
I happened across a television show entitled, The Girl Who Turned To Stone. I was intrigued. What I learned about was a very sad disease called Fibrodysplasia Ossificans Progressiva or FOP.
This has got to be one of the most cruel diseases that our natural world has come up with. It is a disorder where normal bumps and bruises trigger an abnormal response. It is a genetic disorder that causes muscle and tendon to turn into bone. Gradually, bit by bit, as the sufferer gets older, their bodies become locked. They become fused and literally encased in bone just under their skin. The disfiguration is severe. The discomfort must be excruciating. Whats probably worse is that the brain and the sufferers consciousness is left unaffected. They are totally aware of what they can’t do and what everyone else can do. It would be one thing to be born all locked up and never knowing the fluidity of regular human motion, but to know what motion was like and then to have it slowly robbed from you is simply horrific.
I tried to find some good video to try and illustrate this disease more effectively and the only thing I could find was this link that is to a non-english video. It’s a long video, but early on in the video, there is footage of what this disease looks like. Lord have mercy on these people.
http://www.fop.pcp.pl/film.html
This whole thing raises for me a discussion that I had with my dad during our last visit to Medicine Hat to visit him and my mother. Someone posted on his blog about suffering and how God could allow it. There are a few good responses there now, but this is one of those cases that kind of clouds the issue - or perhaps it doesn’t.
FOP is a genetic problem. That is, we can’t develop it by eating wrong or whatever. The question is what ultimately started the mutation that causes it? Was is a freak mixture of genes over centuries of breeding? Was it some environmental factor that eventually found it’s way into the human gene pool thus creating this defect every once in a while? It’s hard to know. I suppose one day they will have answers for us, but for now there is no way to know.
So what is God’s role in this? Even if the disease came from bad choices that were made by mankind generations ago, this means that there is a way to combine the things in our physical world in such a way that it generates such a horrible disease. Why would go allow THAT? No one generation is fully responsible. The people who pay for it could not have prevented it and neither could their parents. Why have a world where things can combine in such a way to produce something so agonizing?
I don’t have the answer. I can only speculate that there must be some reason and I know that His ways are not my ways. His ways are mysterious and He need not make everything understandable to me. Perhaps people suffer so that there are people for us to learn to love for other-than-superficial reasons.
All I can say for now is, Lord have mercy on those poor folks who have to suffer from such unavoidable afflictions. All victims of disabling genetic mutations deserve a kings portion of mercy, in my opinion.