Needed a new life including a trade

Many hand operations followed and Paul and his team were feeling rather flushed with success, until one patient came back and said that they had given him "bad hands". The problem was, beggars with deformed and useless hands got money. The ones with good looking, working hands did not. ... That patient challenged Paul to look at the whole man ... Leprosy patients needed a new life including a trade, not just new hands. Sharon Blyth speaking about the late Paul Brand

It's astounding but I've found a website and service called Tourist Remover! (here) The concept is that you'll take a picture and another picture and another and people keep getting in the way. This service will enable you to remove them from the picture. You create something quite nice or even beautiful but it is no longer really a accurate record of what happened or what it was like when you were there. I suppose that we have to be grateful is wasn't Tourist Eliminator!

If life were that simple. But memories and their history are important to us they often tell us who we are both in positive and negative ways. Even most psychotherapies do not attempt to wipeout memories but to reinterpret them. To wish them away is craziness because we need the experiences of life to give true wisdom. Unfortunately most wisdom comes from "the school of hard knocks" the bruises and woundings of life not from the good stuff. I written about Paul Brand and his writing on the importance of pain. He was a surgeon working with leprosy patients and I was taken by books I read many years ago about and by him. Fixing up patients came to mean more than simply getting the body to work or fixing hands, it was far more intentional, and it was far more than saving souls.

Fixing up a photo simply creates a fake which looks good but deny the people and relationships however irritating as people get in the way. WE are called to care for the whole person. You know what trade Paul Brand taught his patents, carpentry. There is a sort of irony and glory in the same moment.