A Rumor of Hope

We are not born into certainty this Easter morning. We are born into hope. While death is conquered, life remains conquest, a daily process of leaning on faith, learning from love.

Four months ago everything had changed in my life. For thirty years I had fought to avoid my father’s decline into heart disease, to avoid the open-heart operation that he’d undergone. I had become trim and fit, full of boundless energy and youthful endurance. Four months ago my doctor told me, his face grave, that I was a lucky man, that aneurisms like the one he’d found on my aorta are rarely found before they cause serious problems. He said I’d need to be a slug until more tests could be run, that open-heart surgery would be the means of repair.

The next months were a kind of slow-motion Holy Week. The brightness of my life became clear against the dark backdrop of mortality. Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Lent were somehow carved in deeper relief on our hearts. Finally a few weeks ago we scheduled surgery here near home and asked for a second opinion at Mayo clinic, just in case. Our out-of-town daughter and out-of-the-country son made plans to be here a few days before the operation, to spend some time with me knowing that there was the 1% chance it would be the last time, and to be here to celebrate…or not celebrate…when the surgery was over. All of this was quite resonant with Lent, living with dying.

Ten days ago, I was surprised by a personal telephone call from the surgeon at Mayo Clinic who we were planning to visit. I listened to him saying that he, along with a cardiologist and radiologist there had thoroughly studied my case. “All three of us agree, that your tests indicate…” my head was already nodding in acceptance of his concurrence with the plan for the open-heart operation, when I was startled to hear “…no surgery in your case.”  I sat in disbelief as he described his hypothesis that the bulge on my aorta may have been there since birth, an adjustment to a problem in my heart’s fetal development that may be stable, and not growing or in need of repair. He said that it was not necessary or me to “be a slug”, that there was no need for restrictions while my cardiologist here monitors the aneurism through six-month scans.

I had my Easter ten days early. I looked into the cave and found death gone, found life in its place. But I didn’t run, like Mary Magdalene, to shout the news. I sat, just sat, in gratitude, and relief, and acceptance of life as a gift endlessly more precious for its having been threatened. I calmly shared the news with Kathy, and we wept in each others’ arms, much as we had four months earlier when we had found death to be closer that we’d thought. We told the kids, of course, and we told our families and our closest friends. And the word is getting around, as it did that first Easter morning. This Good News spreads, like the late evangelist Carl F. Henry called a rumor of hope: “He planted the only durable rumor of hope amid the widespread despair of a hopeless world.”

We are not born into certainty this Easter morning. We are born into Hope. I didn’t run because while death is conquered, life remains conquest, a daily process of leaning on faith, learning from love.

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 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.