The Day Before Surgery

Tomorrow I go in for surgery.

It isn't something I can really wrap my mind around.

I know how I will wear my hair, what I will pack to come home in, and what time I am supposed to report. But all of my hospital knowledge comes from tv. I've never broken a bone, never had a surgery, never even been very sick.

Tomorrow I go in for surgery and I will come out different. The prayer is that I come out cancer free, requiring no further treatment. The prayer is that my body heals in miraculous ways because I am young and otherwise healthy.

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't nervous.

Yet it seems fitting to combine a physical scar with the less visible scars from the difficulties of the last few years. To be honest, the diagnosis didn't surprise me. Extreme and prolonged stress/trauma messes with you, no matter what the surgeon says.

I'll be honest.
Cancer is a cake walk compared to what I went through last summer.

And though I am scared of the hospital, the recovery, the changes to my everyday life in the future, I know one thing for certain.

God will heal me.

At the beginning of my diagnosis I found it written in the margin of an old notebook from graduate school.

My daughter, my daughter, by your faith you have been healed. 

I caught a vision early on of the woman who was healed by touching Jesus's cloak and I began to pray.

Jesus let me touch the hem of your cloak. 

I mentioned that prayer off-handedly to my father a few weeks later.

That is weird. He said. I've been praying the exact same phrase. 

I went to a new church this past Sunday. A liturgical church that read a Gospel Scripture, one that had nothing to do with the message but was simply the assigned Scripture for the day.

 ²⁶ She had suffered a great deal under the care of many doctors and had spent all she had, yet instead of getting better she grew worse. ²⁷ When she heard about Jesus, she came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, ²⁸ because she thought, “If I just touch his clothes, I will be healed.” ²⁹ Immediately her bleeding stopped and she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering.

³⁰ At once Jesus realized that power had gone out from him. He turned around in the crowd and asked, “Who touched my clothes?”

³¹ “You see the people crowding against you,” his disciples answered, “and yet you can ask, ‘Who touched me?’ ”
³² But Jesus kept looking around to see who had done it. ³³ Then the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell at his feet and, trembling with fear, told him the whole truth. ³⁴ He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.”

It is going to be a journey. It is going to have its challenges. But in the end, I know that one way or another I will be healed and all will be made well again. 

In fact my friends just texted me and I think what she said was true. 

All has already been made well.