Man Amputates His Own Leg

Sixty-six-year-old Al Hill was forced to cut off his own leg with a pocket knife after a tree fell on him and pinned him to the ground for 11 hours last Friday.

Al Hill, 66, was cutting trees on a property near the Big Dipper Mine last Friday when a tree fell on his leg and trapped him, authorities said. Alone in the woods and in an area where cellular phone service is spotty or nonexistent, Hill was forced to take the extreme measure to save himself.

Read the whole story at FoxNews.

This story reminded me of the opening illustration in John Piper’s chapter on lust in Future Grace where he recounts how Donald Wyman did this exact same thing. The point that Piper makes is that Jesus says we need to attack lust with this kind of zeal.

Jesus knew that humans love to live. So he appealed to this passion in order to show the importance of purity. Just as Donald Wyman cut off his leg to save his life, Jesus commanded that we gouge out our eye to escape the fatal effect of lust. “Everyone who looks on a woman to lust for her has committed adultery with her already in his heart. And if your right eye makes you stumble, tear it out, and throw it from you; for it is better for you that one of the parts of your body perish, than for your whole body to be thrown into hell” (Matthew 5:28–29). Of course, if you gouge out your “right eye,” as Jesus says, you can still see the magazine with your left eye. So Jesus must have something even more radical in mind that literal mutilation (329–330).

It’s a great chapter to read and reread in its entirety. If you’ve never read it, you need to. If it’s been a while, it’s worth another read.

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