This Mountain of Sickness

What a description. I do a lot of "sporadic" reading. I have books, pamphlets, and journals where I pick up nuggets of inspiration, ideas, hope, direction, and prayers. I have rarely completed an entire book on healing or blessings or living strong and long. But I have certainly gleaned so much from these books. Their little sayings, attitudes, mantras and prayers are what help me start and get through each day. I have learned that God will usually make something leap off a page and hit me between the eyes that is so relative, so exactly what I need for that day, and it is so perfect that it can only be His words for me.

In a little devotional book on healing by Joe McIntyre, I found two sentences that I cannot let go of. They are my latest song, my latest chant, my latest prayer. McIntyre takes healing scriptures from the Bible, then gives you a daily prayer to say that goes along with the scripture.
In expanding on Proverbs 12:18, the author gives a long prayer to use on speaking health to yourself. I do this quite often, but two sentences in his prayer have stayed with me for over a month, so I thought it might be time to share. They go like this:

"The mountain of sickness is being removed and cast into the sea. It is being plucked up by the roots and thrown out of my life."

Notice how the author takes such a large thing (mountain) a reduces it in your mind to something small enough to be "plucked by the roots"....like a weed?
Cancer is so like this metaphor. Sometimes the disease appears on my horizon as a huge mountain. A mountain of fear. A mountain of pain. A mountain of treatments, tests, and uncertainties. A mountain so large and looming that there are days I have to turn away from it.
Crawl away from its shadow....hide from its enormity.

But if I follow through onto the next sentence and think of the mountain being plucked away like weed from a garden and thrown out of my life, it is so much easier to face. Bit by bit, weed by weed, no matter what your circumstance or diagnosis, aspects of cancer can be plucked up and thrown into the sea. Like your garden in the summer, you have to be ever-vigilant to keep up with the weeds. You have to pull at them everyday. If you don't, the weeds take over....the mountain looms....the enemy advances. But if you can just think of plucking the weeds for the day and throwing them away, you can weed out the fear for the day, the pain, the advancement, the uncertainty....for that one day.

So get out there people and pluck away....a little each day. Then the mountain of sickness won't be such a looming giant. Weed your garden, visualize the base of the mountain being chipped away....every day. Stand in the sun and ask God to help you rid yourself of the weeds. Speak it, pray it, sing it, chant it. He will hear you. He has on His gloves and will help you pluck. He will.
He has to. For He alone is the Master Gardener. And he is much much greater than our mountain of sickness.

"...but the tongue of the wise promotes health." Proverbs 12:18