The Surgery Date That Collides With My Grandson's Graduation on the Calendar
# The Surgery Date That Collides With My Grandson's Graduation on the Calendar
The orthopedic surgeon's office called Monday with two dates for the knee replacement I have been putting off for three years, and I stared at both of them a long time before I noticed the second one shares a square on the calendar with my oldest grandson's high school graduation. The first date means six more weeks of climbing stairs on a joint that grinds like a rusted hinge. The second date means missing the one walk across a stage I have watched that boy work toward since he was small enough to ride on my shoulders. I hung up the phone having promised nothing, and I have rewritten the pros and cons list in my head so many times since Monday that I stopped trusting either column by Wednesday night.
I am sixty-eight years old and twenty-two years sober, long enough that you would think I had learned how to make a decision without wearing myself out over it first. What I have actually learned is that the exhaustion was never really about the knee or the graduation. It is about running out of a resource nobody warns you is finite, the plain capacity to choose, spent on a hundred smaller decisions before a real one ever reaches the desk. By the time this surgeon's office called, I had already decided what to eat, which bills to pay first, whether to say something to my son about his tone on the phone Sunday. The surgery date arrived into a mind that had nothing left to give it, and a spent mind does not weigh options well. It just circles them.
Solomon wrote something that has stopped me cold more than once this week. "A man's heart plans his way, But the LORD directs his steps" (Proverbs 16:9, NKJV). I have been treating this like my heart's job alone to solve, as if enough careful planning would guarantee I land on the one correct date. Solomon splits the labor differently. My heart plans. It was never appointed to direct. That distinction matters more to a tired man than it sounds like it should, because it means the actual directing was never resting on how clearly I could think this through by Thursday.
Here is where my own reasoning has nothing left to offer me. I can tell myself accurately that plenty of grandfathers have missed a graduation for a good reason, that my grandson would understand, that the knee will only get worse the longer I wait. Every sentence is true, and none of it has quieted the ache of picturing an empty row of seats where I was supposed to be sitting. Decision fatigue was never a shortage of true sentences. I have plenty. What it actually starves is the peace to trust any single choice once it is made, and no amount of correct thinking has ever manufactured that kind of trust.
This is exactly what abiding in the Spirit supplies that twenty-two years of knowing better could never finish producing on its own. Isaiah promises something that is not a technique for sharper thinking but a voice to actually walk beside. "Your ears shall hear a word behind you, saying, 'This is the way, walk in it,' Whenever you turn to the right hand Or whenever you turn to the left" (Isaiah 30:21, NKJV). That word behind you is not a louder version of my own circling thoughts. It is Someone present enough to correct my step after I have already turned, which is a mercy my spreadsheets were never built to offer. David prayed something I have been praying almost verbatim this week. "Cause me to hear Your lovingkindness in the morning, For in You do I trust; Cause me to know the way in which I should walk, For I lift up my soul to You" (Psalm 143:8, NKJV). I noticed this time that he asks to hear lovingkindness before he asks for direction, as if the peace has to arrive first or the guidance will not land right once it comes.
Paul describes a kind of knowing that was never going to come from my own weighing of two dates. "Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, Nor have entered into the heart of man the things which God has prepared for those who love Him. But God has revealed them to us through His Spirit. For the Spirit searches all things, yes, the deep things of God" (1 Corinthians 2:9-10, NKJV). My reasoning searches a calendar. His Spirit searches the deep things, which includes whatever this decision actually needs that I cannot see from where I am sitting. Paul tells the Colossians where the settling comes from once that searching is trusted. "And let the peace of God rule in your hearts, to which also you were called in one body; and be thankful" (Colossians 3:15, NKJV). Rule, not merely visit on the better days. And Paul reminds me elsewhere that this is not my own strength I am leaning on in the first place. "For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God" (Romans 8:14, NKJV). Led, the same way a father walks a small boy across a parking lot, not a memo handed down from a distance.
I called the surgeon's office back this morning and asked for a third option nobody had offered me on Monday, a date four weeks out that threads the needle without my even arguing for it. It may not have been there to find, and I would not have called back circling in exhaustion instead of resting in that peace first. I watch a weary, lurching world right now, treaties stalling, nations hedging their bets the same way I was hedging mine, and I believe the hunger for a wisdom wiser than our own exhausted planning is one more signpost pointing toward the hope that is coming due. Paul tells Titus what that hope actually looks like while we wait out our own smaller decisions. We are "looking for the blessed hope and glorious appearing of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ" (Titus 2:13, NKJV). God is alive this morning, and He already knows which two dates are circling in your own mind right now, keeping you up later than you meant to stay. He has a plan for you that was never contingent on you solving it alone, and a peace that reaches further than any list you could make on your own understanding. He will never leave you stuck between two good options, and He is coming back to settle, once and for all, every decision this tired world has ever handed any of us.
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Scriptures used (NKJV): Proverbs 16:9; Isaiah 30:21; Psalm 143:8; 1 Corinthians 2:9-10; Colossians 3:15; Romans 8:14; Titus 2:13.
The orthopedic surgeon's office called Monday with two dates for the knee replacement I have been putting off for three years, and I stared at both of them a long time before I noticed the second one shares a square on the calendar with my oldest grandson's high school graduation. The first date means six more weeks of climbing stairs on a joint that grinds like a rusted hinge. The second date means missing the one walk across a stage I have watched that boy work toward since he was small enough to ride on my shoulders. I hung up the phone having promised nothing, and I have rewritten the pros and cons list in my head so many times since Monday that I stopped trusting either column by Wednesday night.
I am sixty-eight years old and twenty-two years sober, long enough that you would think I had learned how to make a decision without wearing myself out over it first. What I have actually learned is that the exhaustion was never really about the knee or the graduation. It is about running out of a resource nobody warns you is finite, the plain capacity to choose, spent on a hundred smaller decisions before a real one ever reaches the desk. By the time this surgeon's office called, I had already decided what to eat, which bills to pay first, whether to say something to my son about his tone on the phone Sunday. The surgery date arrived into a mind that had nothing left to give it, and a spent mind does not weigh options well. It just circles them.
Solomon wrote something that has stopped me cold more than once this week. "A man's heart plans his way, But the LORD directs his steps" (Proverbs 16:9, NKJV). I have been treating this like my heart's job alone to solve, as if enough careful planning would guarantee I land on the one correct date. Solomon splits the labor differently. My heart plans. It was never appointed to direct. That distinction matters more to a tired man than it sounds like it should, because it means the actual directing was never resting on how clearly I could think this through by Thursday.
Here is where my own reasoning has nothing left to offer me. I can tell myself accurately that plenty of grandfathers have missed a graduation for a good reason, that my grandson would understand, that the knee will only get worse the longer I wait. Every sentence is true, and none of it has quieted the ache of picturing an empty row of seats where I was supposed to be sitting. Decision fatigue was never a shortage of true sentences. I have plenty. What it actually starves is the peace to trust any single choice once it is made, and no amount of correct thinking has ever manufactured that kind of trust.
This is exactly what abiding in the Spirit supplies that twenty-two years of knowing better could never finish producing on its own. Isaiah promises something that is not a technique for sharper thinking but a voice to actually walk beside. "Your ears shall hear a word behind you, saying, 'This is the way, walk in it,' Whenever you turn to the right hand Or whenever you turn to the left" (Isaiah 30:21, NKJV). That word behind you is not a louder version of my own circling thoughts. It is Someone present enough to correct my step after I have already turned, which is a mercy my spreadsheets were never built to offer. David prayed something I have been praying almost verbatim this week. "Cause me to hear Your lovingkindness in the morning, For in You do I trust; Cause me to know the way in which I should walk, For I lift up my soul to You" (Psalm 143:8, NKJV). I noticed this time that he asks to hear lovingkindness before he asks for direction, as if the peace has to arrive first or the guidance will not land right once it comes.
Paul describes a kind of knowing that was never going to come from my own weighing of two dates. "Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, Nor have entered into the heart of man the things which God has prepared for those who love Him. But God has revealed them to us through His Spirit. For the Spirit searches all things, yes, the deep things of God" (1 Corinthians 2:9-10, NKJV). My reasoning searches a calendar. His Spirit searches the deep things, which includes whatever this decision actually needs that I cannot see from where I am sitting. Paul tells the Colossians where the settling comes from once that searching is trusted. "And let the peace of God rule in your hearts, to which also you were called in one body; and be thankful" (Colossians 3:15, NKJV). Rule, not merely visit on the better days. And Paul reminds me elsewhere that this is not my own strength I am leaning on in the first place. "For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God" (Romans 8:14, NKJV). Led, the same way a father walks a small boy across a parking lot, not a memo handed down from a distance.
I called the surgeon's office back this morning and asked for a third option nobody had offered me on Monday, a date four weeks out that threads the needle without my even arguing for it. It may not have been there to find, and I would not have called back circling in exhaustion instead of resting in that peace first. I watch a weary, lurching world right now, treaties stalling, nations hedging their bets the same way I was hedging mine, and I believe the hunger for a wisdom wiser than our own exhausted planning is one more signpost pointing toward the hope that is coming due. Paul tells Titus what that hope actually looks like while we wait out our own smaller decisions. We are "looking for the blessed hope and glorious appearing of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ" (Titus 2:13, NKJV). God is alive this morning, and He already knows which two dates are circling in your own mind right now, keeping you up later than you meant to stay. He has a plan for you that was never contingent on you solving it alone, and a peace that reaches further than any list you could make on your own understanding. He will never leave you stuck between two good options, and He is coming back to settle, once and for all, every decision this tired world has ever handed any of us.
---
Scriptures used (NKJV): Proverbs 16:9; Isaiah 30:21; Psalm 143:8; 1 Corinthians 2:9-10; Colossians 3:15; Romans 8:14; Titus 2:13.
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