I spent most of Friday wrapped in hand-wringing, nail-biting, gray-cloud fear over four tiny metal pins.

The type of radiation I’ll have in a few weeks — my doctors’ attempt at making sure this tumor doesn’t recur a third time — is stereotactic radiosurgery, which, gloriously, means I only have to go in once, for a sort of extended session. As with (I think) most radiation of the brain, the radiation oncologist will fix a metal frame on my head, using four metal pins screwed into my skull, numbing the areas of insertion with a local anesthetic.

I am really. really. really not looking forward to those pins.

I spent Friday following long strings of Google results, trying to find someone who’d experienced this procedure and could tell me how much pain there was, how much the local anesthetic staved it off, how scary it was when the pins screwed in. It’s an oddly specific thing to Google, and I didn’t find much…so I just worried.

Sometimes, though, God does this thing where He speaks to you exactly where you are, in the middle of the upending of your little world, before you’ve even stopped shaking. From my daily reading of the #SRTAdvent study on Saturday, the day after all this happened:

“The comfort God provides is not an anesthetic. There’s no numbing, no loss of consciousness. He’s not a drug in your veins. He’s the Hope anchored within you.”

And then, in the other study I’m reading through, Kay Arthur’s Lord, I Want to Know You:

“The truth of God’s sovereignty makes it easier to obey those commands in the New Testament that charge us to rejoice in all circumstances of life…isn’t it easier to give thanks when you realize that your Father, El Elyon, God Most High, is in control and that nothing can happen in His universe without His permission?” 

I can’t (and, I hope, won’t) depend on numbing, on loss of consciousness. My trust is placed in the Hope anchored within me, and everything that’s about to happen was filtered through His hands.

–How You Can Pray–

For peace as I face those little pins, of course :) And for the financial stability to handle the continuing medical bills.