The Promise: Protocol for Healing

She took off her cape before she pulled the stool up and took her seat. She placed her music on the stand and gently laid her fingers on the cool white keys of the Steinway.

I sat waiting for my son to bring his grandfather down to meet me at the cancer center.

I attended a two-hour caregivers meeting earlier this morning. Some of it I knew; some of it they don’t tell you until the treatments are rolling along. It’s probably best. Everyone is different and if there is anything that requires taking a day at a time, it’s fighting cancer.

I told a friend in an email earlier this week what I had learned in the daily-ness of fighting this disease. While sitting in the waiting room, I began to develop a deeper gratitude for God's resolve to set in place his redemptive plan to send Jesus to save those that He loves. As I sat among those fighting to live, I started to think that we don't die when we get cancer or are hit by eighteen-wheelers. We began to die the day we were born into a sin-cursed world. We are all dying. That is why God wasted no time in Genesis 3 when he gave the first hints of the plan that would bring our peace.

The protocol for healing started with a promise.

“The Lord God said to the serpent,

‘Because you have done this, cursed are you above all livestock
 and above all beasts of the field; 
on your belly you shall go, 
and dust you shall eat 
all the days of your life.

I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring;
 he shall bruise your head, 
and you shall bruise his heel.’”                                                                                    (Genesis 3:14-15)

He was the Son of God, Jesus.

He would defeat sin and the devil.

This afternoon Dad and I will sit among the mask-wearers in the waiting room.

I will comfort my aching heart by remembering that God knows the end of every story. Life or death is our destiny...

We usually don't die daily. We live mundanely, and with a fundamental denial that our end is death, physical death. We grasp for the beauty in the now because we cannot wrap our minds around the beauty to come. We settle for what we see with our eyes, hear with ears, and taste on the tips of our tongues. 

Since we can't peak over into eternity, we struggle to live with an eternal mindset; we set eternity aside to live our days. 

God chose to save the dying from the beginning. He determined our redemption and exchanged our broken life for his eternal life. Sin would be crushed through the sacrificial life and death of Jesus.

The God Who Sees knew the end from the beginning. He knew all the living and dying that would happen in the lives of those He created to love, to give him glory.  

We cross the great chasm between our sin and our healing on a cross dripping with the pure blood of Lamb of God, the true chemotherapy. The cross is our healing. The resurrection is our hope.

I listened to the sound of the music climb up through a ten-story atrium. A little bit of heaven bounced off the stone and mortar of the building. People milled around, people who are hurting and healing. And I was reminded again that this is not all there is.

There is more. So much more…

For those of you who read my blog, thanks for indulging me through these days of the “new normal.” That's what they called our days in my class this morning. God is near and I am thankful for the woman who volunteered her talent at the Steinway this morning. God’s Presence seemed a little closer in those soft notes vibrating out of the beautiful instrument of His grace.

 It’s the little things…

Linking with Jennifer at #TellHisStory and Emily at Imperfect Prose