Bellybutton Blessings

I had two thoughts gently floating around my doped up head when they finally admitted me into surgery. The first, obviously, was that I could not even begin to conceive of what had lead me to this point in time. The second, even more obviously, was to wonder what an appendix looked like and what, in heaven's name, it ever did for me, anyway.

I never thought I would be that person. You know? Like in those movies where at the end, everything goes into slow motion as the car pulls up and a girl in a white dress comes running toward the door that's slowly beginning to open. And then the stutter, as the camera shows three different shots of three different people. The doors opening, the footsteps coming closer, and then the one foot coming out and stepping down on the blacktop. And somehow, in all the chaos, everything comes together and in a single moment the whole awful procedure, an entire movie's worth of emotions, comes to a peak as the music gets louder and the credits start to roll.

What they don't show in those movies is that after girls in white flowy dresses come to meet you, they help you into bed and sit around making you clutch your stomach in pain as you laugh hysterically at all the things you felt like crying about in the hospital the night before. What they don't show is that it's more than just a welling up of emotions as people show they care. It's the actual fact that so many people *do* care, and they're right there, waiting to remind you.

If there's one thing I'll take away from this whole (painful) ordeal, aside from a deformed belly button and bragging rights, it's that blessings really do come through raindrops, and sometimes those raindrops - lightning, thunder, hurricane - are just God reminding me of what I seem to keep forgetting. He didn't place me on this earth to see how many things He could take away from me and still get a smile out of it. I'm here to have a smile for everything, even when He takes some of those away.

And sometimes, like now, the things He takes away are pinky-long, inflamed, infected, and rotten appendixes that I don't really need anymore, anyway. And now my slightly-less-drugged thoughts linger on the nurses and doctors I've come into contact with over the past 30-something hours. And how almost every single one of them had something to say about my smile and my attitude through this whole ordeal. That's the kind of God I serve. The kind who changes a person so entirely that they can smile while they're waking up just out of surgery. The kind who transforms a life so completely that they can gently laugh along with the doctors while waiting patiently to be released from the tubes and straps holding them down.

I serve the kind of God who reminds me of the pain He dealt with a couple thousand years ago when a doubter just like my surgeon stuck a spear into His belly. Reminding me that this life is not what it's all about. But tomorrow? Tomorrow really is what it's all about. Because love is way too much to give us any less.

Happy Easter, everyone.