The pain in your eye is sharp, and the memory of the past tumor sets a deeper dread within you. You pray that it is nothing serious, nothing life-threatening. But consider: when the body cries out, it often directs our gaze where it ought to be fixed already. You speak of an eye. The whole of your affliction points to sight. While you fear for the health of your physical eye, I ask, what of the eye of your soul? The sleepless Eye of God sees you, and you are trembling before a diagnosis you cannot yet see. The dread you feel at the thought of a tumor is a mercy if it makes you revere that unsleeping Eye more than the opinion of physicians. The things that gall us and give us pain are often the cure. A dread of hell keeps us from falling into it; so too, this sharp fear can brace your soul against a far more terrible negligence.
You ask for healing, and you shall have our prayers. Yet know that the Lord often heals one thing by wounding another. The law allowed "an eye for an eye," not to let your hands loose, but to bind the hands of aggressors by fear, to keep both sets of eyes safe and sound. In the same way, this present attack on your body functions as a warning, a flash of pain meant to arrest your attention and turn it heavenward. If this pain stops, will you then stop fixing your heart on the Physician? Of that I am in fear. The true danger is that the body recovers while the soul remains diseased, demanding a sign of health while the beam of earthly security still blocks its vision. You have one eye in pain and the memory of a tumor in the other; that is a history that does not lie. It forces you to look up. Mere physical comfort is a treacherous goal if it makes you a men-pleaser, seeking approval from a clean scan, while forgetting the fiery judgment that awaits an unexamined life. Pain is not the enemy. Unreverent ease is the enemy. The discomfort that drives you to your knees is more precious than the comfort that lets you walk proudly toward the pit.
So let us pierce our hearts with this. The body is held by death as in a prison, racked and torn until it vomits up the soul. The Lord loosed those pains. That is the healing we seek for you, the healing that endures beyond the grave. Whether this pain remains or departs, let the distress be a careful tutor. Let the eye of your mind become quick-sighted, not just to spot a shadow on a scan, but to gaze upon the Sun of Righteousness. Right now, you tremble at the thought of what a surgeon might find. Transfer that trembling to your standing before Christ. Let him that thinks he stands take heed lest he fall. The only truly life-threatening condition is to be found naked of all defense, abiding in wickedness without fear. If this pain compels you to shun even the least sin as you would shun a hot iron near the pupil, then your eye, even if it aches, has become your salvation. Do not merely pray for the pain to stop; pray for a mind greater than the fear of death, praying always with your eye on the unsleeping Eye.