Radically, Surgically, Different

I was in something of a fetal position, a towel under my face to catch the blood and drool oozing from my face. The thought of food made me want to vomit, and my head was in a cloud. Occasionally, I would sit up, dig my fingers into the bed, grimace, and swallow—trembling as the pain shot out to my ears and down into my throat. On the floor beside my bed was a grocery bag full of bloody gauze, tissue, and popsicle wrappers. It was clearly one of my finer moments. And in that haze I remembered a mere 24-hours earlier feeling so healthy.

I had scheduled my surgery sometime in June and had pretty much forgotten about it. The day before, I went shopping for popsicles, jello, pudding, and soup. Everyone told me that having your tonsils and adenoids out as an adult was terrible. I, for one, thought they were all wimps. But the night before my surgery, as I was brushing my teeth, I realized that my current feeling of health could be replaced by a radically opposite feeling the next day. I was a healthy, happy 24-year old, but my doctor insisted that my tonsils needed to come out. The cut and removal of tissue introduces pain, temporary sickness, and general malaise. And it sure did.

I finished brushing my teeth and went to bed with the feeling that I was about to jump off a large cliff—throwing myself into the control of forces outside me, with the knowledge that things could be much different when I hit the grou….err….woke up. Over the next five days, I dealt with a wide array of unpleasant feelings, lots of pain, and a fair share of frustration that things weren’t healing quicker.

Yet, in the last month or two, I have counseled a number of friends to go under the knife. Except the knife I was talking about was symbolic of some radical action that was needed in their life to fix something wrong. Their tendency (and probably the general tendency of humanity) was to make small, subtle changes to try to fix something that was deeply wrong and broken. What they needed was something like surgery, something like a leap of faith.

My surgeon is most well known for doing a procedure called a radical neck dissection. When a patient develops cancer in their tongue, jaw, or neck, the cure requires drastic action. The surgeon will spend hours cutting and removing cancer. Skin, bone, and muscle are replaced from other parts of the body, and then the mess is sewn back together. The patients come from the OR looking like they had a freak accident with a meat grinder. The procedure is called “Radical” for a reason. Over the next few days, the swelling recedes, and the patient is not only cancer-free but begins to heal and look good. (This is the reason I chose this surgeon; I figured if he could do that, he could handle my tonsils.)

I am afraid that many American Christians are walking around with one form or another of spiritual cancer that is eating them from inside out--addictions, greed, an obsession with personal comfort, to name a few. Such things will deform them and then destroy them if left alone. What is required is a radical cut—a major jump into the cure—and we are trying to make small, barely perceptible changes because we are too afraid of disturbing status quo. Or maybe we are afraid of the weeks of pain and slow healing that will inevitably follow.

Perhaps we all need to open ourselves up, and see if there is something cancerous or infected growing in us. A radical dissection of the soul may be just what the doctor ordered. The healing may leave scars, but the joy of freedom and new found health cannot be underestimated.