Dear Doctor

It’s 3am again. I was jolted awake tonight with one of those vicious pregnancy leg cramps. For some reason afterward I just kept replaying the conversation with one of the doctors. His look of almost pity toward me with the statement that, “You’re going to change your mind. In a couple weeks, I know you’re going to change your mind. I just want you to know that I know that, and I give you permission to do that.”

I’d like to tell you that at that point I launched into some great defense of my daughter’s existence. But in the moment, in the shock of a diagnosis so unexpected and so fresh, all I could do is muster out a hardly persuasive, “I won’t change my mind.” To which he responded, “I can see that today you don’t think you’ll change your mind.”

I keep thinking about what I wish I could say to that doctor. I don’t know that I will have the opportunity to speak to him again, nor do I know that I would have the eloquence to be able to speak well in that moment. But if I could, this is what I would want to say to this man.

You think I continue out of the hope that somehow the diagnosis is wrong, or that somehow the end outcome will be different. That I am clinging to some unreasonable shred of hope that this child might survive here on this earth.

You don’t know my Jesus. She could survive. Not because of any error in your reading, but because my Jesus heals. Here and now, in the present day He heals. And He could choose to expand that little ribcage. And He could choose to repair her heart – with His hands or the hands of a doctor. I know He could do that.

But I don’t know that He will. What I do know is that she will be healed. If not in this shadowland of a place that we mistakenly call “real,” in His permanent kingdom, where there will be no death and no dying, she will be wonderfully and completely healed. Here or there, my girl will be whole.

So it is not in what you would term foolish hope of present healing that I continue.

I know that it is with no malicious intent that you tell me I will change my mind. I know that as a doctor, you spend your days seeking life and healing. And if you could do anything for my baby girl, you would. But you can’t. So you’re turning to me as your patient as well. You see that this is presently breaking me and will break me. You know that as I fall deeper in love with this little one, that that break will only get deeper. And as a physician, you want to stop that pain before it goes further. I get that, and I appreciate your care for my well-being, both physically and emotionally.

But here’s the thing. I know it will break me. Deeply. I can feel the cracks spreading now. But you don’t know my Jesus. I know that He’s the one doing the breaking, and that He’s doing it with a surgeon’s precision. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt. That doesn’t mean it won’t hurt. It doesn’t mean there won’t be scars. It doesn’t mean I won’t carry this for years to come. But you don’t know my Jesus. He doesn’t break to destroy, He breaks to heal. And He will piece me back together again. I will never be the same again – by golly, if that’s what He was after none of this pain would be worth it. But He will heal me too.

And so, I struggle to say with a man named Job, who endured much more suffering than me many years ago, “Though he slay me, yet will I hope in him.”

Imagine someone from a faraway bushland, with no conception of modern medicine, being placed in an operating room. At the sight of the seemingly lifeless body, and a hand that cuts open that body, what would he think? Perhaps he would leap to restrain that doctor under the assumption that that man sought the torture, or worse, death, of the one on the table. He would likely not perceive that that surgeon instead was fighting desperately for the life of the one on the table. That that individual would wake up again, and would have greater wholeness because of the surgeon’s work. That the pain, and the bleeding, and the scars, and the trauma would be worth it. That they were all a part of the triumph of life over death.

You don’t know my Jesus. You don’t know that He is now, has always been, and will always be working for life. For life for me, for life for this little one in my womb, for life for my other daughter, for life for my husband. And so we continue. He made her. He created her. For life beyond the terminal diagnosis we all share on this earth. He knows even now the number of hairs on her head. And He knows when He will take her home. I refuse to choose that day.

And so I hope you will catch the aroma of life, not death, on our family. I hope you will catch the aroma of my Jesus. Because He is and will be present. And because He is and will be present, I will rejoice in every kick and every day with this daughter of mine.

The Lord will surely comfort her and will look with compassion on all her ruins, he will make her deserts like Eden, her wastelands like the garden of the Lord. Joy and gladness will be found in her, thanksgiving and singing. Isaiah 51:3