Peace Doesn't Wait for the Scan Results

I have people very close to me undergoing serious health issues. The kind that are scary and filled with the unknown. I am reminded of my own health issue when I was forty years old, when I suffered a brain bleed.

There was no warning, no family history, no slow build of symptoms I'd been ignoring. All of a sudden, a pain in my head hit like a ton of bricks. A 15 on a scale of 10. I had never felt anything like that ever. I was nauseated, dizzy, and couldn’t stand the lights being on. Within hours, I was lying in a hospital bed, hearing words I'd never expected to hear about myself.
I was lying in the ICU, not knowing what was going to happen. And I remember the question that came up in me before any prayer did: Will I be ok?

Nobody could tell me. Not the doctors, not my family, not me. Recovery from something like this doesn't come with a timeline. You don't know what will return, when, or whether life challenges will be radically different than I previously understood. In Psalm 46, it says:

"God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way, though the mountains be moved into the heart of the sea."

I had read that psalm many times. I had preached it. But in that hospital room I understood something about it I'd missed…it doesn't promise the mountains won't move. It assumes they will. It's written by someone standing in the middle of the chaos.

That was honest enough for me to consider. Because my life had moved. The things I assumed were permanent (my health, my mind, my future, my ability to care for my family) were suddenly uncertain. If faith meant pretending otherwise, I didn't have any.

Here's what I want to tell you, and I want to say it carefully, because I know some of you reading this are skeptical of tidy little stories about God showing up.

God didn't tell me I'd be fine. I didn't get a vision or a voice or a guarantee. What I got was stranger than that, and harder to explain. I had a strange but certain sense of peace. Before the answers. Before the prognosis was clear. Before I knew what my recovery would look like.

The fear didn't disappear. At first I had a hard time talking. And talking was part of my livelihood. But underneath the fear, something else was running, like a river under the surface. A steadiness I didn't manufacture. My wife and kids were feeling there own sense of fear, but there was something we all felt. People we loved were praying for us when we couldn't find words to pray for ourselves.

The apostle Paul, writing from a prison cell, described it this way:

"The peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus." (Philippians 4:7)

Surpasses all understanding. That's exactly right. I couldn't explain it then, and I can't fully explain it now. My circumstances hadn't changed. The scans were still the scans. But something was keeping watch over my heart and mind that wasn't me. For the first time in my life, I didn't have to hold everything together.

What I learned about control

I had spent forty years believing, without quite saying it, that I was in control of my life. That if I worked hard enough, planned well enough, prayed faithfully enough, things would hold.
A bleed inside my own head took that illusion away in a second.

What I discovered is that losing control isn't the same as losing everything. Psalm 46 ends with a line that is powerful and difficult to live: "Be still, and know that I am God." The Hebrew carries the sense of letting go, of a clenched fist slowly opening. That's what I had to learn in the hospital, to open my hands. To stop gripping an outcome I couldn't produce anyway and let God be in control.

It took many months to fully recover. I remember the doctor saying to me in a follow-up, ‘I can’t explain why the bleed stopped on its own; I suppose in my profession I would call it a miracle.’ I smiled and said, ‘My profession would call it the same.’

Maybe you're not in a hospital bed. Maybe your mountain is a marriage, a layoff, a diagnosis for someone you love, or just a slow pile-up of pressure you can't seem to get out from under.

I don't want to hand you a formula. But I'll tell you what helped me, and what Paul recommends, and I realize how simplistic that is going to sound… bring it to God. All of it, specifically, even the parts that feel too small or too scary to say out loud. If you can, remember a time you were carried before. And then, as much as you can, open your hands.

You don't have to believe all of it to try. If you're doubting, bring the doubt too. The psalm was written for people standing on shaking ground, not for people who have it all figured out.

I can't promise you the outcome you want. Nobody could promise me mine. But I can tell you that peace doesn't wait for the scan results. It met me in the not-knowing.
 
This week on the podcast, I go deeper into Psalm 46 and Philippians 4 in "Stop Trying to Stop Worrying," including a simple practice for moving anxiety into prayer.