I just had a day that felt like it was a week long with an extended visit to the full rainbow of emotions. For 24 hours I was convinced that my body was unraveling, and the thought overwhelmed me beyond description. I had an inexperienced nurse throw out the tumor and cancer words on the phone. So, I drove back and forth to Mayo three times that day doing tests. It should be illegal to use the “c” word with so little to back it up. It’s even scarier hearing it the second time around. The imagination doesn’t have to work hard for references or frightening scenarios. A wave of despair washed over me at the thought of being in the same place with another part of my body not even two years apart. In the end, the nurse (not Mayo) was wrong.
I took some time the next day to catch my breath. I needed to recuperate. I sat on the couch with my Bible in my lap for a long while. I didn’t open it. I just needed it near me. I don’t know what I’d do without its solidness. I don’t know how I’d stand. How does anyone stand without its unshaking ground? God’s word is so precious to me. It’s truly what I’d take if I was deserted on an island and could pack just one thing.
There have been many times in my life when I longed more for my heavenly home than this one, times when I thought I might be ready to go. My resounding thought that day last week was, “Lord, instead of slowing unwinding me, just take me quickly.” But in the aftermath of it, I am reminded that living is a gift. Heaven is a reward for later, but living here is a worthy gift for now. That fresh revelation awakened something in me.
I finished reading a book recently about a woman who was dramatically victimized when she was in college. She ends with her grown-up self giving this advice to her daughters: “You must survive. It is your business to survive…Because you will recover. You can recover from anything as long as you have breath in your body.” It registered with me when I first read it, but it came rushing up with even more force after my week-long day. Our attackers don’t always have faces. Life can victimize us in many ways, but our task is living just the same. We must survive. We have to remind ourselves of that whenever we’re tempted to roll over and give up. We have to live. We have to do whatever it takes to live until it’s time to go home. Too much is at stake. Our lives touch too many people. The call is too great.
And the task isn’t just surviving. Maybe it feels like it sometimes, but we survive to really live…to dream, to plan, to create, to overcome. We can’t overcome if we don’t live. Our overcoming is raising its own kind of hallelujah. It’s one we can’t offer in heaven. All things will be overcome there. God promises “To the one who overcomes, I will give some of the hidden manna. I will also give that person a white stone with a new name written on it, known only to the one who receives it” (Revelation 2:17). What God deposits inside of the overcomer is worth all the cost. It may be hard-earned, but it’s going to be worth it.
When the nurse said those words last week, I felt like I was going to break, but instead something in me broke. Something that needed the breaking. Something that was hesitant to live. And from the breaking, a sweet fragrance poured out…one that was new to me. I think that overcoming is a perfume to the Lord. I think that what looks like surviving to us sounds like worship to God. It sounds like the song of the renamed. I hadn’t realized that overcoming is an honor that the Lord bestows on us. He looks on it with fatherly pride…knowing that we’ll now have the capacity to hold what He’d give. He is worth the expense of any breaking. To be renamed by Him is worth all the overcoming.