Miracles performed by the Artist and by His chisels

The unknown artist planned what the family with five children would look like and used a chisel and other tools to achieve the planned result. My son Richard Powrie planned the carving of the two wooden rings and set about using chisels to achieve the result. 

Without the artist, those chisels would not have achieved as good a result - if they achieved anything! 

I have also often thought that it can become quite uncomfortable being a chisel - hammered on one end against something hard on the other. But the results are wonderful...

 I suspect that we consider a lot of things to mean quite different things now to 2000 years ago. I would not be surprised if a number of conditions that people have for which man has developed interventions such as spectacles, hearing aids, wheelchairs, walkers, crutches, leg braces, laser treatment, surgery, transplants, prosthetic limbs, medication and any number of corrective practices enable us to consider those that would have been classified as 'lame, or blind, or halt, or maimed, or leprous, or that are withered, or that are deaf, or that are afflicted in any manner' to be relatively capable now. 

Those that have developed these interventions have been instruments in the Creator's hands enabling many to be healed to varying degrees of their afflictions. Do we give the credit to the Master or to the instrument? Do we praise the chisel or the artist for the sculpture?

A consequence of our interventions quite probably has resulted in an increased frequency of these conditions in the population. In previous millennia many of those that are genetically inherited would have been less likely to have been passed on to future generations because individuals with these conditions would not have survived to an age of having children. Some conditions would have caused mates to not have been selected. So, we have enabled those conditions to proliferate. And we enable non inherited conditions to have less impact and afflicted people can have greater ability to function. In a way this increases our personal responsibility to do and be more than we might have been capable of doing hundreds of years ago.