Doing it Afraid - Again!

It's never easy to face surgery again. I say again because of the number of times I have been through this before. Going into the theatre and lying down for this particular procedure on the table, waiting for them to put me out, is a very lonely place to be. It's always very cold due to the extreme air-conditioning and the fact that the poor patient is virtually naked under a thin surgical gown.  As each of the people present introduce themselves to me one by one their names go immediately out of my mind because I am TERRIFIED! I smile politely at each of them a bit like Mary Queen of Scots is said to have tipped her executioner so that he would make a good job of it with his axe. I am always reminded of the old gospel song that goes "You've got to walk that lonesome valley, You gotta walk there by yourself.  And no-one else can go there for you, You gotta go there by yourself!"

Yet I am not alone, not really alone. Once a long time ago, when one of these very same ops had put me into Intensive Care for several weeks, and I came very near to death (another reason why I get so scared!!), I felt the presence of Jesus very real with me indeed. In the midst of my terrifying ordeal, and very near the end, I felt him come to me and imagined that I could feel him sitting on the bed. You may think it was the drugs that caused all that but I know differently. There was something supernatural about the calm that came into my fevered mind and my pain-wracked body at that moment.  I wrote about it in my book Braving the Storm. It changed my whole life at that time and it still has an effect today.  Because on Monday, when I lie down on that table and they are inserting tubes and lines into all manner of orifices and veins, I will hush my heart with the image of the face of Christ, and remind myself of his words 'Lo, I will be with you always, even to the end of the age'.

And I will get through it.  Not without fear. Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the will to go through despite one's fear. As Joyce Meyer says often in her television broadcasts, I will be 'doing it afraid'. And that's the only way to do it really. Honestly!