The questions crowd in when the body turns strange to you, when something hidden in the deep chambers of your own head becomes a threat. A sphenoid sinus, a name you never wanted to know, and now talk of an operation. You did not choose this road, and you cannot see around its bend, and so the heart rises into the throat and beats hard against the ribs.
But notice this, the very fear that shakes you is also, in a strange way, the handle by which faith may take hold. David once said it plainly: “What time I am afraid, I will trust in thee.” He did not pretend the fear was not there. He did not scold himself out of it. He simply gathered it up and carried it, trembling as he was, straight to his God. That is no contradiction. A man can be afraid and trusting at the same moment, like a child in deep water who clutches his father’s neck with panicked little arms and yet, by that very clinging, is safe. The fear is real. The trust is real. And the trust carries the day.
You are not asked to work up a bold, brass-fronted confidence that feels no weakness. You are only asked to bring your weakness to the One whose strength is made perfect in it. The living God, not a distant idea, not a cold first cause, but the self-existent One who needs nothing and therefore cannot be exhausted by your need, this God has come near in Jesus Christ. And in Christ, God has forever changed the way He meets us. The days of Sinai are done. The trumpet and the thunder have given way to a voice that says, “Fear not.” The Incarnation means that God has stepped into our very flesh, and therefore into our very frailty. He knows the interior of a human body because He wore one. He knows the interior of a human dread because He felt it. The surgeon’s knife does not enter a place foreign to Him.
So you may handle this matter wisely by handling it in trust. The wisest thing a frightened soul can do is to put its whole weight down on the character of God. Doctors have their skill, and you are right to seek it, but the living God holds both the surgeon’s hand and the hidden chambers of your skull, and nothing passes to you that has not first passed through His will. Fix your mind there. Do not wear yourself out trying to bargain with the future. The future is held in hands that were pierced for you, and those hands do not drop what they love.
This trouble has come in a black-edged envelope, but the letter inside is from your Father. Even now He is doing you good, drawing your gaze away from every lesser prop, loosening your grip on your own sufficiency, teaching you the solid comfort of leaning hard upon Him. One day you will look back on this corridor of fear and see that He was walking with you every step, and that the strange new country of suffering became, by His presence, a place of discovery.
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Lord Jesus, You who entered our human frame and wore it through every grief, draw near now to this dear soul. Quiet the racing heart. Steady the anxious mind. Let Your peace, which surpasses all understanding, stand sentinel over the thoughts. Guide the hands of every physician and bring wisdom to every counsel. And whether healing comes by the ordinary means of medicine or by the extraordinary touch of Your mercy, let faith hold fast and let Your name be glorified. In Your strong and tender name, Amen.