I won't go into all the gory details here. (This doesn't need to be a novel, after all.) But 27 years ago this November, I was living in the city 800 miles away from home, and I went to the wrong surgeon for an appendectomy. Had he known what he was doing, the whole thing wouldn't have happened, but he messed it up big time, and I was in the hospital for three months trying to get over it.
No, not that hospital. My family came down from the Midwest, moved me to one of the large teaching hospitals, found me a better doctor, and the rest is history.
Well, anyway, there were several setbacks, and I fought my way through each as best I could. The moment came one night, as the nurses were settling me in for the night, and I knew that all the setbacks had been encountered. I don't know how I knew that; I just did. It was time to start healing now.
And I had run out of strength.
I didn't even care, for a few minutes, if I lived or died. It was just too doggoned hard to face going on.
I had been in a period of rebellion, to put it in orthodox Christian language. But that night I crawled back to God on my - no, not my knees, but my belly. I told God that I didn't care if I lived or died, I just wanted out of there ASAP, and how I got out - gurney or body bag - was up to Him. I knew exactly what I was saying, and for a moment I briefly hesitated, but I went ahead and finished it.
Then I went to sleep.
Something happened to me in the night. I have to admit that I have no actual memory of it, although I do have a couple of pictures of what it must have been like. But there was an Encounter in the night. There is no other explanation for the transformation that I discovered when I woke up the next morning, still alive and glad of it, joyful mind you, feeling all cleaned out and free of baggage. I was another person, and I hope it has been an improvement over the original version.
There were still several weeks to go in the hospital, although after that experience I soon graduated from Intensive Care. I had time to think and "process" what had happened.
By the time I went home to finish recuperating, I had two main concepts to chew on:
- God loved me unconditionally, absolutely, and abundantly.
- God was colossal, far grander than anything I or any other human could ever comprehend, and utterly beyond all our attempts to confine Him in our boxes.
I will expand upon them in the next post, because they sort of grew. For now, let me leave with a description of the picture I took home with me, the picture of the Encounter that is the closest thing I have to an actual memory of it:
I am standing on one side of a chasm about the size of the Grand Canyon. On the other side of the chasm is a vast mountain, wide, high, massive as Mt. Everest. It was made of love. And it was all for me.
And ever since then, I cringe for all the people who are afraid of God. We are loved! There is a mountain of love for you as well as for me. What are we so afraid of? How can we be afraid of such love? I love God, I revere God, and I speak candidly to God, but I have absolutely no fear of God. I can't be afraid of a mountain of love.
To be continued . . .
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