Trust
Monday Ministerial Musings
By Rev. Mark William Ennis
2026 Blog #5
March 2, 2026
Trust
I’m thrilled to be writing blogs once more after my extended illness that began last summer. Now I am recovering from surgery and I’m at home gaining strength, but I have a little way to go before I am at full strength. Over these past months of illness and treatments, hopes that diminished and fear, I simply had to learn to trust more than I have ever had to in life. Trust is not something that I learned as a child and I have struggled with it most of my life.
When my medical troubles started, I was confident that they would soon end with the intervention of a cystoscopy. This failed to grant the cure, as did three other cystoscopies. Each, I was told might grant me a cure, but this was not the case. I had several hospitalizations to treat the symptoms, but none lasted very long.
My medical team told me that it was time to begin hyperbaric oxygen treatments and assured me that these would heal me. They did seem to work for a while, and I had sixty such treatments. I trusted that these would work but two days after I had completed the sixtieth treatment, my medical problems began once more and I was again hospitalized. This time things got even more complicated. Not only had my problem remained and my symptoms returned, but during this hospitalization, I also had an infection. The only treatment left to me was surgery that I had hoped to avoid but was now unavoidable. This surgery would have to wait until the infection was eliminated from my body.
After two weeks of waiting the infection was gone and I was preparing for surgery. Surgery, of course is quite successful in this country but doctors tell me that something can always go wrong. It is both an art and a science. As I lay on the operating table, before being placed unconscious, I said a quick prayer of confession in case I died during the procedure. I had to trust God and the doctors. I would either wake up in the recovery room or wake up to see Jesus. The result was completely out of my hands.
Obviously, I woke up. After almost five hours of surgery, I woke in the recovery room. The trust that I had placed in the medical staff paid off. They did a good job, and I awoke to a surgically altered body that should not suffer the same difficulties that have plagued me this past year. I’m glad that I trusted the medical team and am pleased with the result.
During my time of recovery, I have had plenty of time to be contemplative. I have been asking myself many questions about life and death, longevity and how to live lives of meaning. One question that I have asked myself many times during this time, is if I am as trustworthy as the medical teams that have cared for me before, during and after surgery. Can people trust me as much as I can trust these medical teams.
How about you? Are you trustworthy? Can people rely on you? Are you trustworthy enough so that someone would place their life in your hands? Can God trust us to be faithful and can our neighbors all trust us to be blessings? Let us all strive to be as trustworthy as medical teams. God will be glorified and our neighbors will be blest.
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