Heaven Is For Real: An Excerpt

The doctor immediately ruled that out. "Crutches don't do that," he said. "I need to call a surgeon."

The surgeon, Dr. Timothy O'Holleran, performed a needle biopsy. The results that came back a few days later shocked me: hyperplasia. Translation: the precursor to breast cancer.

Breast cancer! A man with a broken leg, kidney stones, and—come on, really?—breast cancer?

Later, when other pastors in my district got wind of it, they started calling me Pastor Job, after the man in the biblical book of the same name who was struck with a series of increasingly bizarre symptoms. For now, though, the surgeon ordered the same thing he would've if a woman's biopsy had come back with the same results: a mastectomy.

Strong, Midwestern woman that she is, Sonja took a practical approach to the news. If surgery was what the doctor ordered, that's the path we would walk. We'd get through it, as a family.

I felt the same way. But it was also about this time that I also started feeling sorry for myself. For one thing, I was tired of loping around on crutches. Also, a mastectomy isn't exactly the manliest surgery in the world. Finally, I'd been asking the church board for a long time to set aside money for me for an assistant. Only after this second round of kidney stones did the board vote to authorize the position.

Instead of feeling grateful as I should have, I indulged myself with resentment: So I have to be a cripple and be on the verge of a cancer diagnosis to get a little help around here?

My pity party really got rolling one afternoon. I was down on the first floor of the church property, a finished basement, really, where we had a kitchen, a classroom, and a large fellowship area. I had just finished up some paperwork and began working my way upstairs on my crutches. Down at the bottom, on the first step, I started getting mad at God.

"This isn't fair," I grumbled aloud, as I struggled up the stairs, one crutch at a time, one step at a time. "I have to suffer and be in this pathetic state for them to give me the help I've needed all along."

Feeling pretty smug in my martyrdom, I had just reached the top landing when a still, small voice arose in my heart: And what did my Son do for you?

Humbled and ashamed of my selfishness, I remembered what Jesus said to the disciples: "A student is not above his teacher, nor a servant above his master."1 Sure, I'd had a rough few months, but they were nothing compared with what a lot of people in the world were going through, even at that very minute. God had blessed me with a small group of believers whom I was charged to shepherd and serve, and here I was griping at God because those believers weren't serving me.

"Lord, forgive me," I said, and swung forward with renewed strength, as if my crutches were eagles' wings.

The truth was, my church was serving me—loving me through a special time of prayer they'd set aside. One morning in the beginning of December, Dr. O'Holleran called me at home with strange news: not only was the tissue benign; it was entirely normal. Normal breast tissue. "I can't explain why," he said. "The biopsy definitely showed hyperplasia, so we would expect to see the same thing in the breast tissue removed during the mastectomy. But the tissue was completely normal. I don't know what to say. I don't know how that happened."

I knew: God had loved me with a little miracle.

Return to the Heaven Is For Real Book Club at Patheos.