Numbering Days While Doing Battle

Though I love the weather and routine and activity of the month of September, it has also become a month of personal remembering and reflection. Nine years ago today I was first diagnosed with cancer. 

All summer long I had been training for an October marathon, but also all summer I had pain that just wouldn't go away. When I mentioned it to my Ob/Gyn doctor, she recommended I go to a GI doctor. I remember sitting in that exam room, looking at a wall of pamphlets on issues and diseases I'd never heard of or considered before. How in the world, I thought, are they going to narrow it down to something??

Weeks later, when I woke up from my colonoscopy, the GI doctor was there to tell me they'd found a tumor. She was non-committal, saying it would be biopsied and she'd call in two days with results, but her eyes told us what she already knew. And two days later, late on a Friday, September 19th, she called with the cancer news. 

Just like that my life changed, never to be the same. Suddenly, I felt exiled from the life I loved. I had made plans, I had worked hard and made good choices and still, I was faced with this diagnosis that would change everything.

It's difficult to see pictures of me before that day. This is me on my 39th birthday in January (when my kids were all shorter than me!), a new, fresh year with possibilities stretched before us, no way of knowing what lay ahead.

I want to warn that girl....I want to tell her....tell her what? Tell her about the journey, the horrors, the unimaginable? Had it all been laid out for me as a choice, I would have said, no thank you and slid the offer back across the table. It just all would've sounded too... impossible.

And honestly, it nearly has been.  When I look back and think of so many unspeakable things I've been through and the sheer duration...it feels impossible. Though now time and experience have taught me that the impossible can become possible. I have a long list of "things I thought I could never do but have", yet still there is a looming list ahead.

You know that feeling, staring at something in your life you didn't choose, that feels too big and scary to face and go through. Maybe yours is depression or anxiety, addiction, or marriage struggles (or parenting toddlers or teens ;)). No doubt you have felt that impossible, overwhelming, out-of-control, how-is-this-my-life feeling.

We have to find a way to live now, forever changed. Maybe with love and courage and joy and hope. Because what other choice do we have, except to move forward with a life we didn't choose?

What I can tell you about my own personal experience is that I would not be here today without God. His daily presence in my life, the strength He provides so I can get up and face another day, the heart-knowledge of His steadfast, certain love for me, the promise of eternity.

Hear me say...there is so much I don't understand and so much of it I hate. But God is good and sees the entire picture. This is part of the story He is writing for me, for my family. He didn't make a mistake, this is not Plan B. I actively place my trust in that.

As Katherine Wolf says, The good life and the hard life aren't mutually exclusive. We can love and celebrate our stories, even the ones we never could have imagined ourselves living. God made us to do the hard thing in the good story He's writing for our lives.

I could fill pages and hours telling of the things I've learned, the miracles I've experienced, the good and beautiful of my story. In part I have, beginning with my first Doing Battle post and then my first Numbering Days post. Because ideally, you don't go through something like this without learning some lessons and secrets about life. In a nutshell, this life is hard, this life is short and temporary, there is true hope and sufficient grace in Jesus.

If I had to pick my top verse that has carried me, I wouldn't be able to do it. But when I think back on the last nine years, the top three that have been with me from the beginning and have helped me the most it is these:

Will you, with me choose to trust God, our Creator? Will you decide, for another day, to move forward with love and courage and joy and hope? God made us to do the hard thing in the good story He's writing for our lives.