The day and time this post releases, I’ll be in surgery prep for a life-changing experience. I have battled my weight for more than 15 years and finally have the opportunity to have a surgery that will guarantee I lose the weight. This is something I have fought for and prayed for and finally have the answer to prayer. Maybe there is something for me to learn from the waiting. Maybe I needed to remain out of the hospital for Cindy. I can ask all of the maybes, but I know everything happens in God’s timing, so I’m excited to see what He has in store.
I am not writing this as a victory lap. I am writing it from my quiet office at home ahead of time, for you to read on the day of my procedure. For a long time the fight felt like it had no finish line. I tried the things people try. Some of them helped for a season. None of them held. The scale became a kind of accusation, and the waiting became its own kind of weariness.
Waiting is not empty. That is the part I did not want to admit while I was in it.
Cindy needed me present through years that already had enough hospitals in them. Our family needed a husband and a dad who was not disappearing into another recovery room. I do not know every reason God allowed the delay. I do know this: He was not late. He was keeping me where I was needed until the time He had already chosen.
Scripture never pretends waiting is easy. Abraham waited. Joseph waited. David waited. Hannah waited. None of them waited because God had forgotten them. They waited because the story was still being written in a room they could not see.
“The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient with you…” (2 Peter 3:9, NIV)
I used to read that verse as a comfort for other people’s delays. Today it is mine.
This surgery is not magic and it is not a shortcut around obedience. It is a tool. After this, the work does not end. It changes. There will be new limits, new habits, new ways of paying attention to my body and to the Lord who made it. I am asking Him for more than a smaller number on a chart. I am asking Him to finish the work He started in the waiting: patience, gratitude, stewardship, and a quieter kind of hope that does not need everything to happen on my timetable.
If you are in a long fight of your own—weight, illness, a prayer that has not moved, a door that will not open—I will not tell you it is simple. I will tell you this: the delay is not proof that God has said no. Sometimes the no is only “not yet,” and the “not yet” is mercy you will only recognize later.
Hold on. Your story is not over.
I would be grateful if you would pray for the team in the room, for a clean procedure and a steady recovery, and for Cindy and our family as we walk the next stretch. I will write again when I can. Until then, I am walking into this the same way we have walked into every hard place we have been given: not because we are strong enough, but because He is already there.
“He has made everything beautiful in its time.” (Ecclesiastes 3:11, NIV)
