Surgery

6/25/13

Today, I had the opportunity to assist in a surgery for the first time. Yesterday, Mike Riley brought me into the operating room to see five gall bladder removals. Today, I scrubbed in with the surgeons and was allowed to hold the scope for four gall bladder removals.

The surgical procedure was quite interesting. To reduce the size of scars and lower the chance of infection, the surgeons will create four small incisions into the stomach rather than one large one. Long instruments are then fed through the four incisions and all of the surgical cutting, cauterizing, and even sewing are done underneath the skin. To see what is happening, a surgeon inserts a long camera and light into one of the incisions. This camera is called the scope. My job was to be the eyes for the surgeon.

God has given me a lot of time to think about surgery and what lessons that can be learned from it. Here are my thoughts:

1. The first step in surgery is cleanliness. Everything instrument used for the surgery is sterile. Every surgeon operates within a sterile field. The patient must be cleaned to reduce all risk of infection. The same has been true for my walk with Jesus. Before ripping out any weeds in our bodies, Jesus cleans us. I know that when I’ve been battling something for a long time and fail, I’m prone to respond by being indignant and channeling my emotional response into a renewed conviction never to fail again. The renewed conviction has always ended in failure that goes beyond how far I’d ever failed before. There is no emotional conviction, mental determination or physical sacrifice that can ever match the sustained power of the cleansing blood of Jesus Christ. God wants to clean you before performing surgery on your heart, mind, and body.

2. Although surgery is very clean, it is certainly not beautiful. I guess I had thought at one point that a removal surgery would be rather graceful and intricate. Nope. The human body is a massively complex system of sustained consciousness. But for all their complexity, our internal organs are not anything close to being pretty. Especially not gall bladders. A gall bladder removal mainly involves blood, bile, and cauterized flesh. Spiritual surgery has never really looked pretty either. When God puts things into light that have been hidden for a very long time, the revelation is usually disgusting. More than likely, spiritual surgery is going to be very messy and rather painful.

3. Surgery is worth it.

“Our fathers disciplined us for a little while as they thought best; but God disciplines us for our good, that we may share in his holiness. No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.” – Hebrews 12:10-11