I’m now seven days post surgery. I was so excited to have this surgery because of the weight loss I have already begun to see, and the more that is still ahead. With over ten pounds already lost since surgery, I look forward to a day when I can be comfortable again, without all of that weight weighing me down.
The incision does not share my excitement.
My abdomen is still recovering from something that was, by any honest measure, traumatic. Tissue was cut. Organs were rearranged. My body is doing the slow work of knitting itself back together, and it is not interested in my timeline. I can celebrate the scale and still wince when I stand up. Both things are true.
What I keep coming back to is this: we talk about a traumatic event as if it dropped out of the sky. We rarely sit with what led to it.
This surgery did not begin in the operating room. It began more than twenty years ago, in a long stretch of not taking care of myself. Skipped meals that turned into whatever was easy. Movement that got crowded out by everything else. Stress I carried in my body instead of handing it to God or to the people who would have helped me carry it. I have already written about self-care. I did not practice it in those years. The surgery is the recovery. The neglect was the road.
That has me asking a harder question. How many traumatic events do we live with that did not have to happen?
Divorce is one on a long list. To be very clear, I am not talking about the spouse who is abandoned, abused, or betrayed and then blamed for the ending. I am talking about the slow unraveling that starts when two people stop following God’s plan for marriage at the beginning. Self over covenant. Silence over confession. Small compromises that feel manageable until the day the papers are signed and everyone in the house is wounded. Ephesians 5 does not read like a suggestion once you have watched what the other path costs.
Ephesians 5:21 starts where a lot of people skip: “Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.” Then Paul tells husbands to love their wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, and wives to respect their husbands (Ephesians 5:21-33). God’s design was never a set of rules meant to shrink a marriage. It was a way of living that keeps two people from stacking years of small compromises until the only thing left is trauma.
Read it in order. Mutual submission first. Then a husband whose love looks like Christ giving himself up, not a husband who gets his way. Then a wife whose respect is answering that kind of love. Skip any part of that and the passage gets used to wound the very people it was written to protect.
The same pattern shows up in smaller places. A debt that started as “just this once.” A habit we kept feeding because quitting felt harder than continuing. A relationship we knew was costing us, and we stayed because leaving would have required a conversation we did not want to have. The crisis gets all the attention. The thousand quiet choices before it rarely do.
I want to be careful here, because not every wound is self-inflicted. Some trauma arrives through someone else’s sin, through illness, through loss that no amount of wisdom would have prevented. Cindy and I have lived inside that kind of suffering. God met us there. He did not wait for us to clean up the cause. If your hard place was handed to you, this post is not a verdict.
But some of what we call unavoidable was avoidable. And recovery, whether it is an abdomen or a marriage or a life, still asks the same things of us.
Rest that is real, not performed. Nourishment on a schedule, even when we do not feel like it. Honesty about what hurts. People who will check on us when we would rather isolate. Obedience in the small next step, not a speech about how different next year will be. The incision heals from the inside. So does most everything else.
Seven days in, I am grateful for the weight that is already gone. I am more grateful for a God who lets us start again after years of not starting. The scar will fade. The lesson does not have to.
If you are standing at the front end of a decision you already know is the wrong road, turn now. It is easier than the surgery later. And if you are already in the recovery room, physical or otherwise, do the slow work. God is not in a hurry. He is present. That has always been enough to get through today.
Hold on. Your story is not over.
