“Do not be afraid or discouraged, for the Lord will personally go ahead of you. He will be with you; he will neither fail you nor abandon you.” – Deuteronomy 31:8

This is not an easy morning to write, or to post my usual blog. But here we are, and I don’t think I should just skip this devotional exercise when life is not all sunshine and roses (well, actually it’s a sunny day and I can literally see a rambling rose right outside the kitchen window where I am writing – but I think you know what I mean!).

The cloud I am writing under right now is that our daughter, Naomi, is at this moment two and a half hours into an estimated six-hour surgery. Her kidney, the one that has been giving her such difficulty over the past couple of years, finally has to go.

1987…

It has been almost 38 years since the first surgery, when then three-year-old Naomi spent five days in Pensacola’s Sacred Heart Children’s Hospital having all the plumbing around a kidney abnormality reworked.

“I wanted so very much to take her place,” I wrote when I told the story in my Advent book, In My Heart I Carry a Star, “I wanted to have her surgery, to be stuck with her needles… I wanted to have all those tests. But I couldn’t…”

And later, toward the end of the chapter: “I felt an odd sense of peace there, for all the hurting and the pain… Prayer filled our daughter’s room. Silent and spoken, thought or as yet unthought, written and telephoned, corporate and alone; prayers full with faith and prayers strong from hearts full with love; prayers squeezed out from minds that barely believed and prayers that flowed from the substance of certain conviction…

“I still fail to even barely understand how this all works, but I do remember being broken under the truth of the love…”

This time (2025):

Today’s surgery is not repair it is removal. Losing an organ is a big deal, so this is very serious.

Of course this time Rebekah and I cannot bring her home and take care of her, and our neighbor isn’t going to show up at the front door and give her a cat. Naomi has her own family with a house full with children and pets, and Craig’s parents are there for the next couple of weeks; they will all work together and stumble through recovery as best they can.

But the same volume of prayer is certainly being lifted, from all over the country, and the same torrent of love is flooding in, and the same deep sense of faith and blessing undergirds this family – spoken and unspoken – and the same Jesus holds all of us in the palm of God’s hand.

And this time – every time – belief and trust has to be enough – DEREK