The Village Shepherd
Enabling Suffering
Sermon
In my first job as a newly-qualified physiotherapist, I had to treat a young woman with a fissure. That's a kind of deep wound which tracks back into the body from a tiny hole on the surface. The problem is, the surface wound is so small it often heals over, so that everything appears to be all right. But because the depth of the wound hasn't healed, pus builds up inside the fissure in a kind of abscess, until eventually the surface wound breaks open again and the pus is discharged. And as you can imagine, all this is accompanied by recurrent bouts of extreme pain.
