The Surgeon Who Put Down the Scalpel

In 2003, Dr. Elena Vasquez stood in an operating room at Johns Hopkins, her hands trembling over a seven-year-old boy whose tumor had wrapped itself around his brainstem like ivy strangling a fence post. She had mapped every millimeter on the scans. She had rehearsed the approach dozens of times. But now, with the skull open and the reality more tangled than any image had shown, she did something that stunned her surgical team. She stepped back from the table, closed her eyes, and whispered, "I don't know what to do next."

That pause — that admission — was not weakness. It was the precise moment her decades of training had prepared her for: the wisdom to recognize when her own skill had reached its limit and to ask for help. A senior colleague scrubbed in. Together, they saved the boy's life.

King Jehoshaphat stood before a coalition army so vast it blotted the horizon — Moab, Ammon, and the men of Mount Seir bearing down on Judah. He had fortified cities. He had appointed judges and trained soldiers. But when the scouts' reports came in, he did not reach for a battle map. He gathered all of Judah, looked toward heaven, and prayed the most courageous words a leader can speak: "We do not know what to do, but our eyes are on You."

Sometimes the bravest thing we can do is put down every instrument of self-reliance and fix our gaze on the Almighty. That is not surrender — it is the beginning of deliverance.