Paper, please, not plastic

It's funny how the little things in life are so full of big lessons. Like my little bit of forgetfulness three months ago that let the bag boy at the supermarket pack my groceries in plastic rather than the customary paper. And the little bit of stupidity that prompted me to loop too many heavy bags over my fingers as I carried the groceries from the car to the kitchen. And then the odd little crook in the pinkie on my left hand.

"You probably tore a tendon," my doctor told me a few days later when I still couldn't straighten my finger. "But a splint for six weeks should probably take care of things."

It didn't, so last week I went back for his next best solution. And now I sit here thinking about the main problem with American health care in the 1990s. "No one ever hated his own body," the apostle Paul reminded us in Ephesians, "but feeds and cares for it."

My doctor offered three options. I could do a rerun of the clumsy splint, although maybe for eight weeks this time, and with scant prospect of success. I could have him do surgery on the tendon-surgery he told me he thoroughly enjoys; it would cost in the neighborhood of $900-$1,200, which my insurance company might or might not pay in full. Or I could live the rest of my life with a crooked pinkie.

As physical maladies go, a permanently crooked little finger is hardly the end of the world. As a boy, I had cut off the end of another finger in a printing press-so I knew one more digital deformity could be tolerated. But the question nagged me: If it can be fixed, why not? Yet isn't that precisely the question that ultimately drives first our health system, and ultimately our whole society, to financial ruin? Somehow, we've found ourselves today in a technological, financial, and social mix that tempts us to believe good health and freedom from infirmity are owed to us all.

Modern medicine has wowed us with just enough apparent miracles to prompt us to think the solution to any medical challenge is no farther than a few research experiments away. And our relative affluence has so addicted us that we now think every benefit of all this supposed medical progress is our birthright, no matter how modest our means.

But both those seductions are nothing more than illusions from the Evil One, who wants us to worship a false god. Sound health, and the financial ability to secure it, may be good things-but it's hardly unusual for Satan to construct a false god out of something good. It is, in fact, his modus operandi to do just that.

So the first difficult question for us is simply to ask: How much good health am I supposed to seek for myself? How many of the resources God has been good to give me does he want me to spend on achieving a perfect body?

For me, the issue of whether I ought to spend $1,000 to straighten out my pinkie might not be so hard-although even that relatively simple question is made quite murky because of health insurance and government involvement. Is the $1,000 that might be available from the insurance company really mine, or will my choice to spend it simply drive rates higher and then force us all to a socialistic system?

But what if the issue is a $50,000 treatment for cancer or a $100,000 liver transplant? When do I have the right-or maybe even the obligation-to say that I'm content with what God has sent and don't want to spend resources that aren't really mine anyway?

But the problem gets harder. Having dealt with the issue for yourself, you may still be called on then to deal with it for those who are close to you-for family members you love very dearly.

You may finally decide to forgo the high-tech heart pump that doctors say might add 10 years to your life. But what if it's your own mother, who is 65? Or your daughter, who is 20? What was relatively easy as it applied to you might be gut-wrenching as it applies to others.

Yet here is a magnificent context in which Christians might in today's society give profound testimony to their trust in the God who created their bodies and gave them the resources of life. Christians, among all people, can say: "Yes, God has given great gifts of insight and skill to doctors, and I will use those gifts to a point. But in the process, I won't use resources that aren't mine, or insist on health God never promised. God has set boundaries on my life and on my health, and I trust him with those boundaries. I won't be desperate."

To his credit, my doctor (who is a Christian) suggested no treatment for my little finger, even though it meant he wouldn't get a fee for surgery. I'm the first to admit that in following his advice, I was hardly pressed to the wall in the way others whom I love have been pressed. But I also know that as a society we're spending money we don't have on pursuing perfect bodies we'll never attain this side of heaven. If we Christians don't admit that, and start acting accordingly, who will?