My Savior’s Love
I hear the piano music before I walk into sacrament meeting with my 13-year-old son. I’m wearing a hoodie, jeans and no make-up. My son, with an incision on his partially shaved head, wears hospital scrubs and pulls an IV pole. A woman with a kind face stands at the door and hands him a homemade fleece blanket.
I think: this is what it feels like to be in the Twilight Zone. The familiar hymns remind me of church, but don’t erase the antiseptic smell nor the sterile, white walls of the hospital.
I feel the sting of tears as we walk into a small auditorium at Primary Children’s Medical Center. I let them come.
I notice others in the room: a girl in a wheelchair with an NG tube coming from her nose, a little boy with an S-shaped scar that runs the length of his bald head, his mom, a man in blue scrubs. I feel a kinship with the boy’s mom, heart torn wide open.
Was it only last Sunday my son passed the sacrament in our ward? So much has happened in a week. Surgery to biopsy a brain tumor, a cancer diagnosis, wrestling with the decision of treatment options, my 5-year-old son so worried for his brother that he vomits the night before surgery, sleepless nights, lots of phone calls.
The opening hymn interrupts my thoughts: “Press forward Saints, with steadfast faith in Christ…” My tears continue. I can’t sing. I take in the words and melody like a drowning woman gulps for air.
The music brings something tangible. His love. His peace. I know He knows. I feel Him here where we all need so much.
“…With hope’s bright flame alight in heart and mind.” The gaping wound in my heart receives peace and love and hope. Open to the entire experience.
My husband arrives a little later and has his own powerful experience. We return to our son’s hospital room. Our son still has a fresh incision and an IV. The tumor is still there. His diagnosis has not changed. We face the same long, scary treatment plan.
But we are changed.
This is one of the tender mercies that helped me feel God was very aware of me. He knew me. He could restore me. He was my refuge.
His love held me up through months of surgeries, chemotherapy, hospital stays, radiation treatment, home-bound school and a roller coaster of emotions for every member of Team Banks.
Whenever I hear the hymn, it transports me to that time and place. I think of my son, married now and preparing for dental school. I remember God knows me. Not only knows me but loves me just as I am, right now.
I know others who haven’t had a miraculous outcome. I know some trials are not as easy to talk about as cancer and brain tumors, not as well accepted. I know some heartache is totally private. I’ve been there too.
Once, in the middle of one of those trials, on a day I was unsure, unsettled and needed God to restore me, I heard the hymn. I knew again.
Years later at the end of one of the most difficult seasons of my life, our family gathered in a church and sang a hymn of my choosing. You know, the words found in 2 Nephi 31:20.
Wherefore, ye must press forward with a steadfastness in Christ, having a perfect brightness of hope, and a love of God and of all men. Wherefore, if ye shall press forward, feasting upon the word of Christ, and endure to the end, behold, thus saith the Father: Ye shall have eternal life
2 Nephi 31:20
Again, I couldn’t sing. I could only feel. The price, the peace and joy of knowing my Jesus.
The One who knows and loves me intimately.
Exactly as He feels about you.
