August 22
I can’t think of titles for these posts. My brain has paragraphs and paragraphs going through it that are full of emotion and words upon words. But when I try to write them, the sentences become cryptic. Stark. Void of emotion. Almost like bullet points.
This is a lot what life feels like right now. There is a tsunami of emotions and happenings and feelings and truths circulating in my brain at any given moment, but there is no time to process them. I simply have to move to do the next thing. And so they accumulate into muscle tension. I wake up some mornings with jaw pain because I’ve been clenching my teeth so hard at night without being able to mentally remind myself to relax my jaw.
There is no time. We are still a homeschooling family of seven. We were BUSY before. So much laundry and cooking and childcare and school and all the things that go with having a home and a family. This doesn’t make any of that go away. It just collides into it. My mom has been coming once or twice a week to help do school with Zara. My sister in law helps me clean when I can’t get it done myself. Friends bring meals when we are in the hospital. But my life is an absolute race track much of the time and the mental load is not one anyone else can carry. There are so many things to remember and take care of.
Osteosarcoma is ugly, aggressive, and unpredictable. Unlike many cancers where they can give you a prognosis based on staging, osteo is a wild card. You hear things like good chemo response, percent necrosis of tumor (percentage of cells that died during chemo) determined after surgery, clean margins (are they sure they got enough healthy tissue around the tumor so as not to leave any cancer cells behind), but they don’t tell you much. There are people with 90% necrosis who relapse before they ever finish MAP (the standard chemo protocol) and people with 30% necrosis who go on to become NED (no evidence of disease).
It feels as though it is completely in God’s hands. A wild card if you will. And so, we are interceding for a miracle. Because of the vision I had and the intensity of the spiritual battle I sensed in so many ways, I told David I need a spiritual warfare person. This isn’t just a physical battle with cancer for Liam. This is a spiritual battle where satan is trying to thwart his life because of the calling God has placed on him.
David held me and listened as I scrambled to think of someone who knows what it is to do spiritual warfare. “I think God will bring the person to you. Remember how Peter had the vision and the man from Macedonia came? I think the person will come.”
That very afternoon the girl who survived osteosarcoma and has had a miraculous healing called me. Our nurse told us about her and asked if we’d be okay talking with her. Of course I said yes. As Courtney and I talked, she said, “I’d like to come see you if you are okay with that. I’d like to pray for Liam and to anoint him with oil.” I had goosebumps.
David was right. We have found so much strength in recognizing the ways our giftings complement each other. When I contacted Ann Graham from Make it Better, a non profit for osteosarcoma, she said, “I find that in marriages one person is the researcher and one is the hand holder.” It’s given us words for the way we respond to the situation mentally and emotionally. And even though it doesn’t apply spiritually, I think it helped us realize how to find words to describe the way we gift each other there, too.
Except in periods of darkness and depression, I have often heard so clearly from God in ways I didn’t even like to tell other people. I grew up culturally believing that we mostly discern through the Bible and there isn’t as much teaching about the role of women as there could be. So for me, as a woman, to hear from God so plainly through the Holy Spirit … I doubted that it would be accepted and frankly I doubted myself. But as the years went by and I recognized His voice and leading so much more clearly, I knew it was Him.
It is a gift and one that David wishes for sometimes. But he has a gifting of faithfulness and perspective that I long for. When God goes silent, I struggle so hard. Our period of infertility before Liam nearly crushed my soul while David calmly believed in faith that we would have a baby someday. Now again, when I sense what God is saying, He brings so much perspective about how God might carry that out while I start thinking about how I should make it work; and what he says often comes to pass.
Our opposite giftings are enormous strengths to us as a team. But anyone who has been in a relationship, knows that in periods of stress, it’s so easy to see our differences as wrong and hurtful. David and I talked about the way grief so often destroys marriages. We were not only looking at grief and loss, we were going to be so terribly, terribly busy and apart from each other so very much of the time. It’s one more thing to talk to God about.