Faithful

At my yearly check-up a few weeks ago my doctor found a mass in my abdomen.  The discovery was followed by X-rays and then an ultrasound and finally a CT scan.  I was pretty scared.  It turned out to be nothing, though.   All the various scans came back saying there was “nothing of interest in the location of the mass.”

It’s weird.  The mass is still there (Jason can feel it) but nothing shows up on the scans.   Strange, right?  My friend, Shane, thinks its a mochi ball.  I’d like  to say that I was very zen about the whole thing and totally chill during those anxious days of waiting.  I wasn’t, though.  I vacillated between “it’s probably nothing” and total hysteria.

My new glasses were supposed to be arriving in the mail and I kept wondering if I would end up wearing them.  You know, if I had cancer. Because who cares about new glasses when you have freaking cancer, right?   I know, I know.  So maudlin and melodramatic. 

But I don’t have cancer.  Not today anyway and to say that I’m grateful is obviously an understatement.   I read this recently in My Bright Abyss and resonated with Wiman’s notion of definite beliefs and what they enable one to withstand…

“Definite beliefs are what make the radical mystery — those moments when we suddenly know there is a God, about whom we “know” absolutely nothing — accessible to us and our ordinary, unmysterious lives.  And more crucially: definite beliefs enable us to withstand the storms of suffering that come into every life, and that tend to destroy any spiritual disposition that does not have deep roots.”

I once thought that having “definite beliefs” would mean that if I one day found myself with cancer, I would believe without a doubt that God would heal me.  Or, at the very least, that God would “have a plan” and that my cancer or illness would somehow be part of that grand plan.  But my theology has shifted and taken a different shape over the years and my experience this month has revealed a new sort of “definite belief.”  I didn’t necessarily think that God would save me.  And I didn’t think that this was part of some divine plan.  But I did believe that God would be faithful.

Faithful to heal me?  Not necessarily.   Faithful to somehow make it ok for me and for Jason and the boys?   No, I don’t think it would have been ok.   But still I believed that God would be faithful.  God is faithful.  And those words kept bubbling to the surface during that week of waiting.  God is faithful; faithful to draw near and extend over me a banner of love.  And I’m praying the roots of that belief go deep enough to sustain me through whatever storms of suffering may one day come.