A couple days after my thirtieth birthday, I found out I had bad blood.
Bad, in the sense that it needed close monitoring and I needed a specialist for that, and oh yes, by the way it could be nothing .
The day I got that call, the very day, my mom was in a car driving to receive a kidney transplant. Hours into the journey, she and my dad stopped to see my grandfather at his home, only to discover that he had fallen and been lying in the floor for hours. That felt a bit much.
The day after I got that call, my mom was wheeled into an operating room and my aunt was wheeled into the adjoining operating room and we sat hours away and waited. And then a cell dinged with a news alert about a mercury spill at a local junior high. It happened to be the local junior high my brother was at. That felt like a breaking point.
A couple weeks after the phone call and the transplant and the mercury, I drove to meet my specialist who practiced out of a cancer center. I wasn’t prepared for that. I got a hospital band, had full body x-rays and vials and vials of blood were taken as the refrain, “Oh yes, by the way, it could be nothing,” was spoken over and over again. But when I came back for the results, the doctor didn’t think it was nothing and well, we would have to take the next step.
The next step was for my bones to be robbed of marrow and a sliver of my hipbone to be shaved off so that we could all see, once and for all, just what we were dealing with.
Bad blood.
I felt crushed by it because I was carrying within the very thing that might undo me. And even stranger? I couldn’t live without it.
It was in this season of overwhelm and heaviness that I heard the song “O the Blood”. And it became a refrain of faith:
O the blood of Jesus washes me
O the blood of Jesus shed for me
What a sacrifice that saved my life
Yes, the blood, it is my victory
The blood of Jesus - it spoke a better word.
The blood of Jesus - it rewrote my diagnosis.
The blood of Jesus - it was my victory.
Sometimes, you have to step back and remind yourself that the story you’re living in the here and now is not the only story. There is no bad blood for the one covered in the blood of Jesus Christ. And the truth of that changed everything.