In last night’s post, I asked the Lord for a sign about whether or not I should go ahead with the surgery that I was so afraid of…and my last sentence professed the desire to be able to reach out and touch Jesus’ robe and be healed.

Some modern day Christians don’t think that God still does miraculous healing these days…their thinking is that those Bible-time healings by Jesus and the apostles were limited to the early church in order to “jump start” the faith.  I don’t happen to believe that miraculous healings are all in the past.  I believe they happen today.

All along through this endometriosis journey, I’ve asked the Lord to just take it all away…to heal me and make me whole, without having to undergo a surgery.  I have never doubted that he is ABLE.  But as month after month passed with me feeling hopeful that this is the month that He will heal me, but the pain continued, I began thinking that perhaps the Lord is using my suffering to get me to a place where I will trust him fully, even if it means undergoing surgery.

Can I tell you my feet felt like lead as I walked across the parking lot to the doctor’s office entrance?  Tears filled my eyes, and I gritted my teeth as I put one foot in front of the other.  I knew my friends were praying for me, and I believe it was their prayers that kept me going into the building, when all I wanted to do was climb back in the car and drive home.  I asked God to give me peace.

Like last time, I felt peace as I exited the elevator and approached the office door, but that peace fled as I sat in my seat and waited to be called.  Last week when I spoke to the nurse, she specifically called this appointment a “pre-op” appointment and told me that the surgery would be scheduled for the following week, so I fidgeted in my chair in the waiting room.  A little pamphlet called “The Light” grabbed my attention, so I opened it and found it was the entire book of John.  I read it until the nurse called my name.

My legs shook as I stood on the scale — not from fear of what the scale would reveal, but from anxiety about what I would find out about surgery.  In my mind I pleaded with the Lord to give me a sign and to give me peace.  Again I asked the Lord to have the doctor say something about Gideon and the sheepskin if He was directing me to get surgery.

The nurse, though, took my thoughts in an entirely different direction.  She spoke to me about faith.  I mentioned my anxiety about the upcoming surgery and my belief that the Lord COULD heal me without surgery if he wanted to and that I WANT THAT.  I want His healing…not the doctor’s healing, but the Lord’s healing.  I expressed my desire to reach out and touch the hem of Jesus’ robe…

This was when she took my hands and told me about how the Lord healed her of two conditions: first, he healed her of cervical cancer.  Then, he healed her of kidney disease.  The first healing was through surgery and prayer; the second healing was through prayer alone.  The message she received from the Holy Spirit was this:

If I conquered the grave, I will surely heal you.

All we need to do, she said, was to reach out for Him.  He reaches down to meet us where we are.  She asked me if I would like for her to pray for me.  Of course I said yes.

So I stepped into the examining room and was prayed over by the nurse and another employee in the office.  As they prayed, I felt warmth spreading throughout my whole body.  I felt twinges in my abdomen; it felt as if things inside me were actually moving around.  As they rebuked fear, peace surrounded and enveloped me.  Overcome with emotion, throat choked, tears in my eyes, I hugged them before they slipped out of the room, leaving me, my thoughts, and peace in their wake.

At that moment the fear was gone, but I still felt unsure about what to do.  If I went through with a surgery, would that mean I wasn’t believing in God’s ability to heal me?  Or would that mean I was being obedient to the WAY in which He has planned to heal me?  I continued to pray for the Lord to give me a sign on whether or not I needed surgery right away.

God is so good!  He did MORE than give me a sign.  He went a neon step further and completely took immediate surgery out of the picture!  Somehow my appointment got changed from a “pre-op” to a regular appointment.  I did not tell the doctor that I didn’t want to schedule a surgery; I simply told him I was unsure what to do, needed guidance about moving the surgery up, and wanted to tell him about the severe pain I had last week.

Then the doctor said the December surgery should still be fine, and he ordered a sonogram and a follow up appointment in a month to see if this particular pain returns.

I suspect it won’t!

But stay tuned.  I would LOVE to have this testimony:

The Lord healed me by His own hand.

…but I will be obedient if He chooses to heal me by the doctor’s hand.  I hope.