[Update from original post – No malignancy!]
My letter to me:
It was just supposed to be a routine checkup. And yet, it wasn’t. So because I have no better way of dressing up the words, I’m just going to say it – bare and all – I have a thyroid mass.
This past week after delivering a sermon on, “Do not be anxious,” I went to my scheduled appointment as a routine follow-up. After the usual greetings and pleasantries with my physician, he asked if I was still waking up numerous times throughout the night and if my energy had still been low. He also asked how often I have heart palpitations. None of these were random questions – they were appropriate given my previous check-ups and blood results.
He then proceeded to walk towards me with his arms stretched out like a friendly lab coat-wearing zombie, his hands coming straight for my throat. His fingers pressed firmly as he assessed my neck with studying eyes, checking for any abnormalities. He had a very focused look about him.
“Have you ever noticed this bump?” he asked. “My Adam’s apple?” I wittingly responded, trying to break the serious look off his face. He didn’t even smirk. “You have a thyroid mass,” he replied.
In that moment, the very sermon I had preached was now preaching to me; every anxious word echoing back like a divine reminder. I responded, “So now what?” He went back to his computer and began typing, charting, and talking about the additional tests, procedures and referrals that he would need to set up.
The first thing I instinctively wanted to do when I sat down in my car to drive home was to pick up my phone and Google search “thyroid mass.” Instead, I reached for the phone, opened a Bible app and turned to Matthew 6:25-34 and put myself squarely in the mix of the audience to whom Jesus was speaking. Yes, I was sitting in my ’98 Ford Crown Victoria in the parking lot of the medical office building, with a phone and an app, but it felt like I was in the middle of the crowd pushing my way towards the front to hear Jesus’ sermon on the mount all over again. I listened intently and entirely as I read quietly, His words aiming at my heart, “Do not be anxious about your life… your heavenly Father knows…”
When Jesus had finished His sermon, I closed my phone and the crowd was dismissed but the preaching of Jesus’ timely and timeless message stood freshly on the mount of my heart. I knew Jesus’ sermon was not merely about knowledge. Yes, the Father knows my diagnosis, but it’s also much more than that. It’s about being known by Him and His unfailing love and the calm assurance of my final prognosis: redeeming love secured by my heavenly Father.
Since my sermon-on-the-mount-experience in my Ford, I have been publicly, privately, openly, quietly, and perhaps even annoyingly whistling, humming, and singing, “Redeeming love has been my theme and shall be til I die” from the song, “There is a fountain filled with blood.” No, not because I think I’m imminently facing death, though I may very well be. Rather, that song is on repeat in my head because those 6 words have freshly pierced my soul: redeeming love has been my theme.
A fresh grip of God’s unending and redeeming love through the death of Jesus on the cross in my place for my sins, is the source of my spontaneous and sometimes obnoxious bursting into loud song, causing even my wife to lovingly and abruptly say, “bring it down!”
Honestly, I have no idea what a thyroid nodule means for me. I did eventually search on Google and I found enough to lead me to believe that this could actually be nothing or it might absolutely be something. Yay, Google!
But the point is that on that day after my checkup as I walked to my car, Jesus my good shepherd led me into the green pastures of his Word, caused me to lie down beside the rivers of its comfort as I listened to him preach his sermon once again, “Do not be anxious about your life.”
Will I undergo additional tests and procedures? Yes. I’m already scheduled to see several white lab coat wearing clinicians before the end of the month. Most of them will probably treat me as yet another one of their countless patients who have all had the same diagnosis. I will continue to be passed from place to place, procedure to procedure, and doctor to doctor, some of whom will never bother to ask about me, my pregnant wife and my three small children who all depend on the health and strength and loving care of their husband/daddy.
Will I be tempted to be anxious? Yes, because I am a sinner who often lacks faith – those very fears expose my frailty, my clinging to health and security more than to God Himself. Yet where I falter, Christ never faltered. As the Second Adam, He perfectly trusted His Father, even unto death. By His Spirit, I am led again and again to run to my soul-physician Savior who preaches to finite sinners like me a sermon of redeeming love that cannot be revoked.
So even though I still have no idea as to what to make of my thyroid nodule, I do know this: my soul has been healed from the far deadlier disease of sin and death. My final prognosis is already written in blood—not in a medical chart but on Calvary’s cross. “Redeeming love has been my theme and shall be till I die” is not just a hymn lyric; it is the eternal anthem of every sinner who has been carried by Christ into the Father’s redeeming love.