Prisoner of Hope, Part 2


I didn’t really want to write about this, but my words won’t mean a thing if I’m not honest, so here goes.

To avoid afflicting you with too much information, let’s just say that for several reasons, I’ve been forced to make a decision concerning the aging reconstruction I received when I had breast cancer twelve years ago: whether to redo it or let it go. Either one would require a surgery.

I made what I thought was a rational decision based on the facts. Given that I’m a certain age, and the aggravation of it all, I decided to let it go. It just didn’t matter anymore, so I made an appointment, saw the doctor and scheduled the surgery. Almost immediately I sensed an unsettledness in my spirit, and I had no idea why.

Then I woke up one morning with tears streaming down.

What’s this?

Tears kept coming, and coming. One afternoon, I cried for two hours.

After prayer, discussion with my husband, my sister, and a friend, and then more prayer, I realized a couple of things.

The first is, more than ever over the past three years, I’ve tried not to allow feelings to guide me. It’s because of a heavy concern I don’t share to guard another’s privacy. But in order to get out of bed in the morning and keep marching, I’ve often had to push past the emotions that would drag me down.

So out of habit, when I made my seemingly prudent decision regarding the reconstruction, I did not consult my feelings.

My feelings rebelled. Breast reconstruction is an emotional issue. Whether one has it or doesn’t have it is going to touch the deepest part of a woman. This may sound shallow to some. I once had a health care provider act as if it was no big deal to lose a breast. “At least you’re alive,” she said. Of course, she still had all her body parts.

Secondly, that heavy concern, though I give it to Jesus everyday (and sometimes take it back in the evening), has made me weary. And the reason redoing the reconstruction didn’t matter is I was beginning to give up. Oh, not on a conscious level, but subconsciously I was saying, “What’s the point?”

I didn’t even know what I’d done it until the tears started.

Now, I do.

So, I called the doctor, and I changed my plans. I’m having the whole business redone if for no other reason than to say, and let me write this clearly, “I AM NOT GIVING UP.”

“Return to your fortress, O prisoners of hope; even now I announce that I will restore twice as much to you” (Zechariah 9:12).

I declare myself a prisoner of hope. Caged in to what Mr. Webster calls the “wish for something with expectation of its fulfillment.” The original Hebrew word translated hope in Zechariah means literally a cord and only appears a few more times in the Old Testament, most often in Job. And only once in the Psalms, “For you have been my hope, O Sovereign Lord, my confidence since my youth (Psalm 71:5).

Here from The Message: “You keep me going when times are tough—my bedrock, God, since my childhood.”

Our hope is tethered in God, and sustains us through the decades of life.

On this Holy Week Wednesday, I gladly bind myself in hope and to the one who suffered and died for me.

I am a prisoner of hope, and I am not giving up.

Surgery in a few days.