A year ago today, my sister, Sarah and I came into my parents’ house in the early morning hours before sunrise.  My Daddy was there, in his pajamas, and my Mama was there, fully dressed, ready for the trip to Baltimore.  We stood in the livingroom, our hands clasped around the circle, while Daddy prayed for our trip, for the surgery that Mama was facing that day, and for us all in the days ahead.  I could not bear to watch him tell her good-bye because I knew that he thought that she would not come home again alive.  In the weeks before, as he had driven her day after day to her radiation treatments in Baltimore, he had seen the ravages of cancer in its ugliest forms and he did not have any hope that she could make it through the surgery itself, much less the days that followed.
       It was a long, long day, starting at six in the morning and going on and on and on.  Around 5:20 that evening, the surgeon finally appeared, pulled an easy chair around so that he could sit and discuss the long, long day.
       “It feels good to sit down,” he said cheerfully, as he sank down. He hadn’t stopped to eat or drink all day, he said because he wanted to make sure that everything was done the way he wanted it. He told us that sometimes after a surgery like this, he has some uneasiness or discomfort about how something has gone at one point or another during the surgery, but he said that he could tell us that he had none of that concerning this surgery.
        “There are literally hundreds of steps in this operation,” he said, “and I can honestly say that there is not a single step along the way that I can say did not go the way I wanted it to go. Everything pretty much went the way I had hoped.”   That was certainly music to our ears, and we were all so thankful.
       There were lots of setbacks in the days ahead, and there were times when we all wondered if she was going to make it.  But God, in His great mercy spared her life, and now, a year later, we give grateful praise.