Paul Brand is known for his brilliant work as a hand surgeon and his work with lepers. He was Philip Yancey’s authority on pain when Yancy wrote Where Is God When It Hurts? In this book, the two Christian men discuss the amazing creation of the human body — the cells, bones, skin and mobility. It’s divided into short chapters, each dealing with some particular aspect, describing the body’s amazing ability to heal or feel or see, then giving a spiritual analogy of the Body of Christ.

In the introduction, G.K. Chesterton is quoted as saying that the Dark Ages resulted because paganism and mythologies had stained the natural order so deeply that Christians could not perceive nature as part of God’s revelation. Yancey wonders if a similar process is taking place today. “Christians have abandoned the created world, not to paganism but to physics, geology, biology, and chemistry. We too have cleaved nature from the supernatural.”

I learned some interesting stuff. For example, each of us “lose ten thousand-million skin cells a day. Just shaking hands or turning a doorknob can produce a shower of several thousand skin cells. Up to 90 percent of all household dust consists of dead skin.”

I also learned some stuff I didn’t particularly want to know. “Even today an eight-legged creature just a third of a millimeter long, the Demodex folliculorum, squirrels its way inside hair follicles and contentedly lives out its days in its burrow of choice, the eyelash. This mite, cigar-shaped and seemingly harmless, is found on almost every human examined. Male and female Demodexes merrily mate in the tunnel beside the hair, and as many as twenty-five of the creatures can congregate in one warm, oily fat gland.”

The chapters of the book function as object lessons, and some work better than others, but there are a few that I found thought-provoking. In a lesson on touch (that opens with a quote from King James I: “No one but kings and princes should have the itch, for the sensation of scratching is so delightful.”), Brand talks about the need for tough that all humans and other mammals share. Experiments with monkeys have shown that young raised with a warm, terry-covered surrogate “mother” thrive and grow up healthy. Young raised in a wire mesh cage, although given all they need for health and growth, show signs of extreme stress and often die. Similar studies among children in orphanages have shown that caring touch alone is often enough to determine if a child dies or grows up healthy. Brand goes on to show that Americans, and especially upper-class Americans, spend far less time toughing their children than other societies do. The average American father spends about 30 seconds a day in tactile contact with his children.

Although Brand didn’t take his discussion in this direction, the above information made me think about how touch has almost become taboo in our society, labeled as abuse or harassment. Sin has corrupted something wonderful and necessary and made it evil. Any sort of contact outside the family is strongly discouraged, and even within families there is a suspicion of touching between fathers and daughters. Perhaps this is part of the reason that the younger generations seem to be more stressed, more inclined to overeat, less controlled and less happy than most of us were as children.

The final chapter talks about how Jesus Christ left the earth with no body to exhibit God to the world except the Body of Christ, the “faltering, bumbling community of followers who had largely forsaken Him at His death. We are what Jesus left on earth.”

As with all of Yancey’s books that I’ve read, I was provoked and forced to think of things from angles I hadn’t thought of before. This book was a quick read that I’d recommend, especially if you’re looking for challenging lesson ideas.