A Conversation with Jesus

Chapter Three Where You Do Not Want to Go The work of God can be built only upon the ruins of ourselves.

Fenelon In April 1978 I awoke one morning with a pain in my stomach. By noon it had shifted over to my right side. By 4 o'clock that afternoon, I was in the hospital with what a surgeon called "a textbook case of appendicitis." The surgery was routine and uneventful, and I went home several days later.

But I will always remember that experience, since it was the first time in my adult life I had been a patient in a hospital. I was given a gown to wear which didn't quite cover me. I was left sitting in a wheelchair in a cold, drafty hallway for what seemed like an eternity while I waited to get an X-ray. I was lifted off my bed by several orderlies and a nurse, placed on a litter, and transported to the operating room. While I was recovering, I was talked to and treated as if I were a helpless child.

All these things combined to produce within me a sense of powerlessness, of losing control of my own destiny. I was no longer an independent adult, in charge of my life. I was a 53