Healing is Necessary

Let’s get one thing clear upfront- the recovery/healing process is often more painful than the actual act that required the healing in the first place.

On January 24th, King, my Love, had a surgical procedure to insert a subcutaneous implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) to prevent arrhythmia experienced due to his Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy (HCM). Whew, that’s a mouthful! From many people, we heard that the procedure, though three hours long, would be fairly simple. In preparation for the early morning procedure, King and I ventured over to a nearby hotel in Baltimore to get a good night’s sleep and then have a place to stay locally after the surgery/hospital stay was completed. We ordered a wedge pillow for King to sleep on post-surgery and made sure that we had properly controlled all that we could control.

King, being the caring partner that he is, communicated with his loved ones saying that I would post his health updates on Facebook and to look there instead of reaching out to me. King knew that updating dozens of people would be extremely overwhelming to me so he chose that method of communication to reduce stress. I love him for that. While he was very clear in his instructions, many chose to ignore those simple instructions, calling and texting throughout the procedure and early recovery hours. To be honest, that was overwhelming. Actually, it was frustrating because the very content that I shared publicly on social media, would be the basis of the questions that people with access to my social media content would ask me, right after engaging with said social media content. Yet despite the repetition in messages and the overwhelming moments, together King and I managed to plan for everything… except for the pain that would actually come post-surgery.

For some reason that can only be explained as a benefit of God’s grace and the abundant prayers of others, I was very calm during King’s surgery. I did not cry not once during his procedure, opting instead to fast and stay in a posture of prayer. It was a beautiful time with the Lord and I was grateful for the covering of our loved ones in prayers. When King came out of surgery and I spoke to his doctor, that’s when reality hit. He said that the procedure went beautifully, but because of the location of the incisions, recovery would be painfully rough for the first two days. I think that might have been a grave understatement. During the first 24 hours post-surgery, King experienced bouts of nausea (throwing up twice), pain when moving, extreme lethargy, and one v-tach. Seeing him writhing in pain broke my heart as I just wanted to find the best way possible to take all of his pain away from him. Yet as I sat next to him in that hospital room, I remembered the words of my pastor from a sermon he had preached in January and realized that the pain that King was enduring was simply his body’s way of healing and that the healing was necessary.

Beloved, I’ve been reading a lot of Job lately as he was a focal point of both of the devotional studies that I am currently reading. In reading about Job, I realized that the true pangs of Job’s pain didn’t present themselves until after all of his devastation had occurred. Losing his livestock was bad, losing his workers was horrible, losing his good health was devastating, and losing his children was the worst of the worst. Yet no matter how much he had lost, he still proclaimed the goodness of God. Yet we must not forget that all of those losses occurred in chapters 1 and 2 of the Book of Job… so what happened in the remaining 40 chapters of the book? In those chapters, we see the humanistic parts of Job that we can more readily relate to. We see his friends and wife reminding him of his trauma, one asking what he had done wrong to get “cursed” like this by God and the other encouraging him to curse God and be done with the pain. Both had their rationale and reasons for their words yet their words only made the healing process more excruciating.

Sometimes we have to be cautious with who we let join us on the road to recovery.

Job is a book of the Bible that continues to feed us no matter what season we may be in at a particular moment. And while we cannot escape pain which means we will never escape healing, we can choose who is on the road with us. Sweet Friend, who are you traveling with today? As with any good road trip, there are some essentials that we must consider:

Snacks
Adequate rest
Regular car maintenance
A travel companion

Now for some, that travel “companion” may be a good music playlist while for others, this may be a furry or human friend. Whatever the companion may be, a road trip is no trip at all if we are by ourselves. Likewise, when we travel on a healing journey, we must be sure to have a great companion with us.

For what seems like forever, I have been traveling on this healing journey and I was today-years old when God revealed that I have to choose my travel companion carefully. I have always invited you to travel with me because I recognized that if we travel together, we could get further than if we were alone. My invitation still stands, but with one modification- let’s do a caravan, versus carpooling. With a carpool, we are all in the same car and what impacts one, directly impacts the others in the vehicle. However, with a caravan, we are to travel towards the same destination, but in the comfort of our own space and [reasonably] at our own pace.

This is what I want for us.

Let’s travel towards this destination TOGETHER- in our own way- because healing is necessary.

Be blessed.