So I’m through the op. It’s not nearly as bad a thing as many blokes who may read this have had to face. But I’ve allowed myself to get down and frustrated over this. There have been weeks stuck in the house, off work, a premature retirement and being made to face for myself, the sort of risks/benefits decision, as a medic I ask my patients to take. Like the decision to have a treatment which carries risks, not as a life saver (as it often is with my patients), but to give me full exercise capability in the long term. For instance, getting back to 100 mile-a-day cycle treks across France, with the mad Revd. Beech. And after making the decision, with difficulty, I get an infection so the op’s delayed for a week with one day to go and the risks increase and other things go wrong.
Nothing new for many blokes reading this, but one of the things I do best is worry. I’ve done dangerous sports in the past and now, extreme (some would say) endurance cycling, which literally reduces grown men to tears. But through it all, I worry. I worry about all sorts of things, not just this. During these frustrating weeks, I’ve been reading the first part of the Book of Psalms. It’s all there; The Lord is always with you and will guard you and guide you through everything including in David’s case, life and death situations, not just non-urgent back surgery. That’s the unchanging truth in Scripture and that’s enough for anybody. But because I’m weak and a worrier, I keep asking God to give me some more reassurance that I’ve made the right decision. But I’m not looking around for ‘signs.’ I don’t do that, much.
Then 2 days before the final date of the op, I’m reading a national daily paper. I don’t get it normally; I’ve just read it a few times while stuck in the house and not for several days previously. Again, my mind’s a million miles away from ‘signs’. I’m just browsing, filling in the boring hours, when I realise I’m reading an article featuring my surgeon and the hospital where I’m going to be a patient. It’s not a complaint, by the way, it features him as a leading expert in something. Then, at the top of another article on the same page, I catch sight of a photograph of a familiar face–someone who was a medical student in my year, who now does medical articles for that paper. I haven’t read one for years, but that day, his column was about the latest evidence showing that the best treatment for people with back problems like mine is not to mess about delaying things with physio etc, (the previous traditional way to deal with it), but to get on with early surgery–which was just what I had decided.
Carl came to see me and I showed him the page. And just as though to underline it, while we’re talking, in a lull in the conversation, a voice on the radio solemnly names the newspaper. We both smiled and thanked God. This sort of ‘fleece’ experience hardly ever happens to me, but when it does, it comes completely unexpectedly. I shouldn’t require it and I don’t deserve it and it’s always possible to dismiss it as a coincidence. But I’m taking it as a kind reassurance to a worrier at just the right time, from a God who amazingly cares about details. What do you think?
I went for my op with much more confidence. The lesson I suppose is to be thankful for the health I‘ve got and when fit again, to strengthen my all too weak resolve to use it in following Jesus–and perhaps, to try and stop worrying so much. Lord help me to do that.
