The Unwants. Deleting The Suffering.

I had a patient who was quite old and quite sick.  He was in his late eighties and had a heart valve problem.  This is fairly common, and we do surgery on the elderly all the time; however, the risks in this age group are significant, for heart valve surgery in older patients can come with numerous complications.  And this patient, in particular, had many other medical problems that would make his recovery from surgery difficult.  He was undecided as to whether or not he wished to proceed.  He was quite worried that even if he survived the surgery, his quality of life might be worse than it already was.  He wanted an exellent quality of life all the way up until his death, for as he said to me, "I want to be alive when I die."

In this day and time, we are so used to having our every need met, and especially our basic needs.  Things that only a hundred years ago were impossible are now taken for granted.  There were more people connected to the internet in 2000 than were connected to running water in 1900.  Even America's poorest live in the top 30% of worldwide income. Heart surgery as we know it today did not exist until sixty years ago.  And beyond those basic needs such as food and shelter, we are used to getting our desires met right down to the correct size and color and flavor.  In other parts of the world, where any food would be welcome, we are able to order our meal with potato chips, french fries, seasoned fries, sweet potato fries, or home fries. 

And with health care, a hundred years ago kidney failure was fatal. You didn't have the option to go for dialysis or a kidney transplant.  Seventy years ago, if you had a heart valve problem, you died.  Now you can choose between mechanical heart valves or tissue heart valves, ones made with cow tissue or pig tissue, and from having a full chest incision to having minimally invasive valve surgery with a small incision.  So we expect to be able to choose the quality of our life up until the end. 

Much of our prayer life is intercessory in nature, for others and ourselves.
                      We pray for God to give us what we want, our wants.
                      We pray for God to take away from us what we do not want, our unwants.

Clearly, suffering is an unwant.  We desire to hit the "Delete" button and correct this bad thing that has come into our life.  The problem is that what is absolutely guaranteed to happen is what God wants.  And the unfortunate thing is that unless our wants and unwants are aligned with God's wants we tend to be discontented.  I think this level of discontent today is much worse than it was years ago, where we had less ability to satisfy our own wants.  There was more acceptance of things that could not be changed when there were so many things that could not be changed.  There was more dependence on God to change things because that was the only way they could be changed.  If you had a heart valve problem seventy years ago, you could not change how and when and where you would die or what your quality of life would be, which was pretty bad.  And the only way you could be healed was for God to work a miracle. 

God's soverign will is what is going to happen, what He wants.  We should be so very thankful that our unwants today, awful as they can be when they happen to us, are so much less common than before.