ACL Tears have been PROVEN to re-attach themselves, without surgery since the 1990’s! (Kurosaka et al, 1998) Even more, early bracing protocols can yield rates of healing upwards of 80-90% -- yes, this is for fully torn ACLs! (Filbay et al, 2023) How is this possible? 🧵

The Bad Translation That Shaped Your Theology When we sit in church pews today, we often assume our theology comes straight from Jesus or the Apostle Paul. In reality, much of modern Western theology—especially our cultural obsession with human "wretchedness" and original sin—was scripted by a 4th-century bishop who didn't even speak the language of the New Testament. Enter Saint Augustine of Hippo. Augustine was a brilliant thinker, but he was also a wounded soul wrestling with immense guilt over his youthful sex life. When he formalized the doctrine of Original Sin, he built his entire legal argument on a flawed Latin translation of Romans 5:12. What Paul actually wrote in Greek: Death spread to all men because all sinned. What Augustine’s Latin Bible said: Death spread to all men in whom (meaning in Adam) all sinned. Because Augustine didn't know Greek well enough to double-check the original text, he concluded that humanity inherits Adam's actual legal guilt and cosmic condemnation at the exact moment of conception. He labeled humanity a massa peccati—a totally ruined "mass of sin." To process his own brokenness, he wrote Confessions, pioneering the emotional, "wretched-to-saved" spiritual memoir. Fast forward through history: The 400s: Augustine invents the concept of inherited cosmic guilt based on a Latin mistranslation. The 1500s: The Protestant Reformers formalize his ideas into the doctrine of Total Depravity. The 1700s: Revivalist preachers use this high-stakes "wretched sinner" rhetoric to fuel the Great Awakenings, baking it directly into modern evangelical DNA. When Christians sing about being "wretches" or preach about how fundamentally corrupt we are from birth, they aren't quoting Jesus—who actually pointed to children as the standard for heaven. They are repeating a script written by a fallible Church Father trying his best to navigate his own baggage. We owe the Church Fathers an immense debt for defending the faith, but we don't owe them blind alignment. They were titans of history, but they were also just men. And sometimes, a 1,500-year-old tradition starts with nothing more than a bad translation.

Did this ACL heal or not? Comment your thoughts below! (MRI Images from the "KANON" trial by Filbay et al 2022)

To you, it's just a Cracker Barrel parking lot. To me, it's where I gave my life to Jesus Christ. I was 21 years old. I was working at the Cracker Barrel in Tallahassee after some of the worst years of my life. I'd made mistakes. Real ones. I grew up in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, raised by a mom who worked hard and didn't accept excuses. But I made decisions that should have ended my story before it ever really started. By the grace of God, they didn't. But every day, I was carrying them. One afternoon, a church group came into the restaurant, just back from a revival. I served them their meals like I served any other table. But something happened while I was serving them. I can't fully explain it to you. The Lord spoke to me. He said, “Stop running from Me.” It knocked me back. I went to find the table, and they were all gone. I could see through their windows that they were getting on their bus, and I knew deep down that if I let them drive away, I was going to keep running. So I went outside. The last woman, just as she was stepping onto the bus, turned to me and asked, “Are you okay?” I told her, “No ma’am, I’m not okay.” I told her the Lord was telling me to stop running. That whole bus emptied out, stood with me in the parking lot of a Cracker Barrel in Tallahassee, Florida, and prayed over me right there. I gave my life to Christ that day. Right there. I still get emotional about it. Because I know what I was before that moment, and I know what He's done since. He gave me a wife who shares my faith. He gave me three sons. He gave me a career, a community, a calling I never would have dared to ask for. He took a kid from Crown Heights who’d run out of chances and gave him a life that doesn't make sense apart from grace. People ask me sometimes why I talk about it. Why I bring up the parking lot. Why I don't just keep that part private and let folks see the polished version. I'll tell you why. Because there's a young man out there right now — maybe in Tallahassee, maybe in Tampa, maybe in Miami, maybe in a small town in the Panhandle — who thinks his story is already over. Who thinks the mistakes he's made disqualify him from the life he could have had. Who thinks God doesn't want anything to do with somebody like him. I'm here to tell him: that's a lie. In life, you're not who you are at the lowest point. You're who you choose to become after. The Lord met me in a Cracker Barrel parking lot. He'll meet you wherever you are. You just have to stop running.

“He healeth the broken in heart and bindeth their fractures together. He numbereth the multitude of the stars and calleth them all by name. Great is our Lord, and great is His strength, and of His understanding there is no measure.” Psalm 147 (Septuagint 146)

When we are young and inexperienced, we think of sin in legal terms (like a parking ticket). But when we grow up and fight it and inevitably develop scar tissue, we start to think of it in medical terms (like radiation poisoning). Sin really is sickness, and “He healeth” us.

Meniscus Monday: My client Zylar rehabbing his torn meniscus ! @ATGExercise