A spiritual, encouraging good morning message for you...

This is an excerpt from my part of our now published book,
An Almighty God? Get Serious!//Trophies of Grace.


I hope God blesses you somehow with it:

“Paraplegic, quadriplegic, comatose, or dead.” I remember looking at the faces around me to read their expressions. Was there angst? Fear?

Concern I saw, of course, but no one seemed overly wrought with worry – not even Lori, whose sleeve has always been prone to show her every emotion. So, I signed my consent, and put those horrific-sounding possibilities out of my mind.

After all, the surgeon and his medical team were scrubbed and ready to perform this critical life-saving operation. What could I do at this juncture, if things weren’t going to turn out as planned?

Besides, my soul was confident that God, whose creation I was in the first place, was also ready, and He would orchestrate this process from start to finish. If that process should take me home (to Heaven), I trusted Him with that, too – all of it was in God’s hands.

If ever there were a time to have faith, it was now. 

If someone had asked me earlier that April morning to predict what I’d be doing around…let’s say two o’clock, I certainly would not have guessed I’d be wondering whether this would be the last time I‘d see my parents’ faces, or my sister, or my dear friend Lori!

I confess, I don’t recall my exact words, or even all the thoughts that were going through my mind at the time, but I do remember talking to God my Creator, like I’d done tens of thousands of times before, and I was sure He could hear me.

You can bet it wasn’t one of those “thank You for the day and please be with me” prayers playing in my mind. No, this was a heartfelt, pleading, expectant prayer. I understood what the waiver said. …Or dead.

Somehow, I wasn’t afraid of moving on, yet I was eager to spend more time here with the people I loved. Spiritually, I was ready to go, but mentally, I wasn’t prepared to say goodbye.

It turns out that the other side of that 13-hour neurosurgery saw me, alert and able to use the forearm and fingers of my right arm “to command.” I clearly recall hearing my head nurse’s grinning voice say, “There she is – she’s awake!” I also remember hearing professional chatter about my movements, which were limited.

Lots of other conversations and events have unfolded since then, and as you can imagine, there are events I have forgotten. Some seem “lost,” and then comes a word, or a sound, or a smell, and a flock of memories rushes back.

What’s even better, though, is that some of these memories are in writing.

My journal keeping lacks a lot to be desired, but I’ve always done a superb job of jotting down noteworthy details on random fragments of envelopes, cardboard packaging, and notebook paper, which are then “filed.” So never fear, I do have a system, and when in doubt, I am willing to consult the documentation of others, if need be.

In fact, just a year after this neurosurgery, I had the satisfaction of reading the surgeon’s notes, which served to substantiate my pretty accurate(!) memory of some of the post-operation details. If you run across a photo of an “old- timey,” typed-directly-on-paper note, that’s my surgeon’s record of my operation, which I’ve included for those of you who are interested.

Oh my, that explanation reminds me of when I was a little girl, and my grandmother would describe things from her horse-and-buggy days. It would seem that I’m the “back in the day” reciter now…. (Really??)

Anyway, I’m so glad for my recoveries! No…that’s not a typo. I look back, and I see multiple blessings that you could put under the heading: Recovered. My life, my health, control of most of my motor skills, my voice, my vision, my sense of smell, my ability to walk, the fact that I can breathe on my own again….

I’m just as grateful, though, for the things I never lost: my family, my friends, my home, my sense of humor, my cognitive abilities, my job, my church family. In truth, the blessings are innumerable.

THIS spiritual encouraging good morning message:

God has saved me in so many ways.

Now – as a child of God – I’ve asked myself, how can I use the goodness I’ve experienced, personally, from His hand, in order to magnify His name? Could I help someone catch a glimpse of His beauty in their own life – someone who has, so far, been blind to it?

I think maybe I can. I should say, rather, that through my sharing His goodness to me, God can help someone see His eminence.

I’ve been wanting to write a book about God for a long time now, and my main purpose is to bring glory to His name, since I love everything about Him (not saying I understand everything about Him…but love and trust Him).

In my mind, He deserves all glory, honor, and praise.

But in addition to that – or really, in harmonization with that – I hope that sharing some of the marvels from my own life might help open a few minds to “see” God.

My Christian friends and I often reminisce about the ways in which He has helped us through difficult situations, and invariably, one of us will interject the discussion with, “I just cannot understand how anyone can make it through life without relying on God.”

We are constantly finding new blessings from His hand and find such joy in knowing Him, as our loving Father, that we agree that life outside of Him would leave us wanting. …EMPTY.

Even before David defeated Goliath, he felt this way. I don’t know when, in relationship to that event that he penned “the Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want (for anything),” but he most certainly knew God as his Guardian and Guide before he ever ran out onto that battlefield.

Would he have had the wherewithal to grab some stones from the brook, shout the giant warrior down, and run at that intimidating foe with all His might and only a sling, if he hadn’t felt God’s presence?

He didn’t just shout something like “Say your prayers, buddy!!” or “God is great!” No, David yelled at the top of his young voice: “you come against me with sword and spear and javelin, but I come against you in the name of the LORD Almighty!” 

Another English translation gives a fuller expression to this youth’s reverence for God’s Name. David was boldly communicating the fact that his Lord – the LORD Almighty – was the LORD of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, and he wasn’t afraid to call this enemy of God’s people out for arrogantly daring to taunt the Almighty.

In fact, David went on to declare with absolute certainty, “This day the LORD will deliver you up into my hands…that all the earth may know that there is a God…and that the LORD does not deliver by sword or by spear; for the battle is the LORD’s.”  

I have learned this lesson over and over again throughout my life, and I have come to realize that our Almighty God does NOT rely on humankind’s puny little devices and ideas to get the job done. He’s the One who has given us our knowledge and understanding, our strength and tenacity, our ability to achieve.

He actually loves us in our everyday walk, and I don’t see why. But He does, and He’s active, and my own life is my witness. Hopefully, by sharing some stories from my life, I can introduce someone to The Almighty God, who lives, and gives life.

This book is basically a collection of Scripture, thoughts, quotes, and personal experiences. I hope you, the reader, will see what I see… the committed, dynamic love that our Creator demonstrates to each of us constantly, in the hopes that we – with our freedom to choose our own destinies – will choose Him.

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