I need to begin with care, since your worry has you feeling desperate, and mention that if you or your mother are facing a crisis where immediate danger is present, you should reach out to your local emergency services, and you can find a helpline in your country at
findahelpline.com. But let me sit with you now, as a pastor might, and speak to what is heaviest on your heart.
You are carrying two burdens on the same tired shoulders, and they are wound together so tightly you can scarcely tell where one ends and the other begins. The tumor in your mother’s intestine, that alone is enough to make a child weep and cling to God. But the deeper knife-twist is the unforgiveness you sense in her, and the terror that it might mean she is not ready to meet the Lord. That fear has you by the throat. I know that fear. It is the salt in all the other wounds.
Listen for a moment. There was once a man so paralyzed he could not lift a finger, could not drag himself to Jesus’ feet, could not even cry out in a public way. But he had friends who tore open a roof and lowered him down through the clay and the thatch, right into the presence of Christ. You are that friend for your mother. You are the one bringing her by faith when she cannot bring herself. And do you remember the first thing the Lord said to him? He did not say, “Rise up and walk.” He looked at that helpless man and said, “Son, be of good cheer; your sins are forgiven you.” The physical healing came afterward, as a visible sign, but the first fountain Christ unsealed was the forgiveness of his sins. He gave the deeper gift before the lighter one, because He knew what the man needed most, and He gave it freely, on the spot, simply because the man was brought before Him.
Your mother is being brought before Him. By you. By your prayers, your tears, your desperate clinging to the hem of His garment. You are the roof-breaker here, and you are lowering her again and again into the presence of the One who has authority on earth to forgive sins. I want you to take that image and hold it fast. Her eternal safety does not hang on the strength of her own grip on God, oh, what shaky creatures we all are, but on His grip on her. Jesus said of His sheep, “I give unto them eternal life, and they shall never perish, neither shall any pluck them out of My hand.” Not even her own faltering heart can pluck her out, if once she is truly His. We do not save ourselves by the perfection of our forgiving; we are saved by the perfection of His atonement.
You are afraid of the unforgiveness in her heart. I will not make light of that, because bitterness is a cold hearth and a dark room. But I want you to see something. The pardon of God does not wait for us to become spotless before He bestows it. “I, even I, am He that blotteth out thy transgressions for Mine own sake.” For My own sake! Not because you have first blotted out everyone else’s debt, but because of the kind of God I am, because of the blood of My Son, because My mercy rejoiceth against judgment. The forgiveness your mother needs is a love letter written in crimson, sealed with a cross, delivered in a black-edged envelope straight to her hospital bed. It does not require her house to be in perfect order before it arrives; it arrives precisely because her house is a ruin and because Christ is the repairer of ruins.
And what of the tumor? What of the cancer that has traveled through her body like a prowling thief? I tell you that Christ’s power over the body is as real as His power over the soul, but it works to a different timetable and toward a different end. For that paralyzed man, immediate healing was the outward proof of inward grace. For your mother, the outward healing may come now, or it may be delayed, or the ultimate healing may be the very act of passing from this worn tent into the house not made with hands. But whether she stays or goes, she is not beyond the reach of the Shepherd’s crook. A sheep that has wandered and grown stubborn and sour can still hear the Shepherd’s voice in the eleventh hour. The thief on the cross had only a few gasping breaths left, and yet in that narrow window, Christ drew him through. Do not let the size of the tumor tell you the size of her Savior.
I want you to do two things. First, go on being the roof-breaker. Pray. Weep if you must. Fast. Lift her before the throne of grace with the cords of intercession. You are not wrestling against flesh and blood, nor against a tumor, but you are taking hold of eternal life on her behalf. That is a good fight to fight. Second, entrust the outcome to Him who loves her more than you do, hard as that may be to believe, it is true. The hands that were nailed flat to the cross for sinners hold her now, and they hold you too. You cannot carry the weight of her eternity on your own back; that load belongs to Christ alone, and He has never yet failed to carry what He purchased with His own blood.
Let me pray with you.
Lord Jesus, You who did not quench the dimly burning wick or break the bruised reed, draw near to this dear mother in her hospital bed. You know every dark chamber of her heart, every injury she has nursed, every chain of bitterness that still clings to her. Not because she deserves it, but because You are gracious, breathe upon her now. Let the weight of Your own forgiveness, purchased at such cost, fall upon her with gentle, unrelenting love, until the ice within her cracks and melts. And touch her body, gracious Physician, according to Your perfect wisdom. Whether You raise her up from that bed to walk among the living once more, or whether You take her home to be with You, grant that she may meet You as her Savior and not her Judge. And steady the heart of Your child who is so desperate for her. Give him the peace that passeth understanding, knowing that You are faithful, that You lose none of those the Father has given You, and that Your love will not let her go. Amen.
Prayer Focus: God, Thank You for loving me. Thank You for loving me, Jesus. God, I ask You in Jesus’ name please bless me with everything that I stand in need of and everything You want me to have. 
