I watched an incredible movie a few months ago called “Something the Lord made.” It’s based on a true story about these two men that research and create the surgery that now saves thousands of children’s lives every year. Basically, there are a lot of things that can go wrong with a babies heart as it is formed. Any holes or deformations in certain places can actually lead to the child not being oxygenated well because blood flow isn’t happening correctly- causing blue baby syndrome. Obviously, it is very difficult to perform surgery on a beating heart, so it was initially thought that all of these children would just die and that was the only was it would be. In the 1930s and 1940s, Dr. Blalock and his assistant Vivien Thomas started working on a way to bypass the heart- to move blood flow in a different way so that the babies could live longer. It’s a great story about medical advances and also racial tensions as Thomas is actually a black man who has not gone to medical school at all, but learns how to perfect the procedure on animals. They work on this procedure for over a decade, finally trying it on the first child on November 29, 1944. But it wasn’t until we got that far in the movie that I realized what the ending was going to be.
The surgical procedure that we learn as medical students is called a BT shunt- short for a Blalock-Taussig shunt. Dr. Taussig was the person caring for the little girl who had the first surgery done. Have you noticed the problem yet? Vivien Thomas is not included in the title at all. The man who worked for years to do the surgery and develop the procedure is not even recognized. If you research the procedure it clearly says that Dr. Blalock and Dr. Taussig became world renown and helped thousands of children. Vivien Thomas lived barely above the poverty line, was never able to officially go to medical school and be given the title doctor though he performed thousands of surgeries, and many times was discriminated against and completely ignored even in his own hospital. Vivien Thomas did not get any recognition for even been a part of the development of the shunt until 1985, forty years later. Now put yourself in Vivien’s shoes and tell me- would it have been worth it? Was he successful? Would you have kept working there if that was you?
Because true success for God was taking a man with a speech impediment and a history of murder and making him the leader of a million Israelites as they wandered around the desert for forty years. True success for God was a seventy year old woman laughing in His face as He promised a son and her waiting another thirty years to see if that impossible promise would come true. True success for God was taking his own son who the entire country thought was going to save them from Roman rule and allowing him to die a heinous death on a cross. True success for God doesn’t always look like true success to man. Sometimes it honestly just looks like defeat. But great is your reward in heaven for refusing to give in where everyone else compromises. And it’s usually when you give up the things most important to you in life that God can truly move.
And thankfully, for most of these stories I stopped in the middle- where it gets the hardest and seems the most impossible. Where you exist in between the lines of what you hoped for and what you worked for and wonder if that’s all you’re going to get. Where you know the vision and the promises and are expectant and ready for the eventual payout of the time and energy and sacrifices that you put in. But the reward for that payout only lasts a few seconds before it fades. But the reward for a life dedicated first to God and then second to our own success is an eternal one that can’t even be measured in gold.
Are you willing to trust Him no matter what that success looks like for you?