God is so trustworthy. He pours out His goodness in every area of our lives. I have found that when I take the time to examine the things God has done in my life, not only does my faith increase but I can truly enter into His rest because I know He has everything in control.
In March I was digging a ditch in Bolivia when I suddenly felt an extreme pain in my lower abdomen. At the time I though I had pulled a muscle but in reality it was a hernia. Within a few days the pain left so I continued on with life unaware that my insides were trying to escape. On May 12th, I was helping rebuild a church in a remote mountain village in Nepal when I experienced a 7.4 earthquake. In the chaos of that day, the little bulge in my lower abdomen had reappeared and had become significantly larger.
The Nepal Hospital I went to a few days later had some difficulty deciding if the bulge was hernia or an enlarged lymphoid. They concluded it was a hernia. The consulting surgeon encouraged me to leave Nepal and get the surgery in a more geologically stable country. For the next week I wrestled with the question of where to get surgery. Should I risk Nepal? Go to the States? Maybe fly to India or Malaysia? Thankfully God reminded me to pray, which I did and He told me that He was going to make the choice. I wasn’t sure what that meant but I had a wonderful peace about it.
Meanwhile, my team was struggling to decided what they should do. Did they want to leave Nepal a week early and head to Malaysia or did they want to stay. Finally they choose to leave Nepal a week early and find a place in Malaysia where people could begin to process the earthquake. This decision allowed me to fly into Malaysia a few days early and get surgery.
So without having picked a hospital or anything, a friend and I headed to Malaysia. When we got to the airport I looked at the list of 3 hospitals I felt were decent hospitals and prayed. God pointed me to one. The next challenge was getting there. I prayed, asking God to provide transportation and within 10 minutes a really nice guy shows up and offers to drive us into the city, it was 12:30am. We pull up to the hospital at 1:30am and found out that we would have to wait until 7am the next morning to see a doctor, so we head out and try to find a hotel. Miraculously we couldn’t find a cab so we decided to sleep in the hospital lobby. As we sit down, two security guards randomly give us the WiFi password (best WiFi I have ever experienced, it was lightning fast) and I check my email. I discovered that the insurance company still needed some information for pre-certification and I wouldn’t be able to get re-enberced for the surgery without it. Fortunately, when it is 2am in Kuala Lumpur it is 2pm in the mid-west, so I was able to call my insurance company (using “Google Hangouts” which had never worked for me in the past but worked perfectly in the moment) and get everything settled. If we had found a hotel, I wouldn’t have been able to get that critical work done!
The next day I walk up to the counter and explain my needs. A woman hands me a list with 20 general surgeons and says, “pick one”. I prayed and told her to pick on for me. She did and I headed to his office. This entire time I am at complete peace and so happy that God is in control. I show up and the Doc can see me right away (God’s timing was impeccable, later that afternoon there was a line of people out of his door waiting for consultations). He is amazing. He speaks awesome english, he took time to explain what a hernia was, and he did an examination in which he also thought that I didn’t have a hernia but a swollen lymphoid. He sends me to get an ultrasound and after seeing the results, that it was indeed an inguinal hernia, he asked me what sort of procedure I wanted done. He gave me three options, so I prayed and felt like God wanted me to get the first option. He scheduled for surgery the very next morning.
I show up the next morning (the 22nd of May) and wade through the morass of paperwork and the entire time I still have this peace that God is and will always take good care of me. They prep me for surgery and the next thing I remember is waking out of the anastisia. Now, I am under the impression that I had Inguinal Hernia surgery, so I was pretty shocked when a woman asks me if it would be ok to send the specimen to the lab for testing. A few hours later, after all the medications had worn off, the Doc came for a visit. It turns out that I did indeed have a swollen Lymphoid, which was the bulge in my abdomen, but he was also convinced that I had a hernia because the ultrasounds were very clear about that. So he kept looking and found a very rare type of hernia, in men, called a femoral hernia. He told me that I had been extremely lucky (I say blessed) because my bowels and bladder had not gone through the hernia, only a small piece of fat and tissue. The hernia had completely constricted the blood flow to the fat and tissue, killing everything. If that had been my bladder or bowels I would have been in serious trouble. He also informed me that if I hadn’t chosen that form of surgery, none of what he had done would have been possible. Also, the recovery time for a femoral hernia is much much faster than an inguinal hernia, so I will be able to get right back into life, I just can’t lift much.
Through-out the entire hernia episode, I was able to watch miracle after miracle and enjoyed basking in the wonderful goodness of God. But I know that if I were to take a 10,000 foot view of my life and carefully examine it, I would see many more miracles and many more instances where God’s goodness flooded my life.
So how about you? Where can you see God working in your life? Can you see His goodnesses flooding your life?
