Month: January 2021

I have found on my difficult journeys through life that so much of where I draw my strength from is the other people I meet along the way. It is within the people who are also walking on the hard road you find true grit, resilience, and enduring love. It is the people who are also deep in the water, fighting the battles, or walking through the fire who gives me the greatest hope and inspiration that we all can survive and make it to the other side, together. I am currently struggling with the emotions felt when some of us on the road reach what was hoped for, while others have to keep walking past us and continue their battle. I find myself in a place currently where I am in both spots.

I currently am in remission from cancer, feeling stronger and healthier all the time. My prayers and those of all my loved ones fighting alongside me are being answered. I am healing. In the same moment of my healing, I have other women in my cancer journey life who are having to battle longer and harder than me. They are hearing the beyond hard words like “relapse” and “stage 4” and “the road ahead isn’t clear on which treatment will work”. These are women just like me- they are health care workers, faithful believers, and mamas to multiple children. My soul hurts for them more than words can express. I pray for them throughout every day, I want their hope of healing to be realized, I want them to continue to be the light the world needs so much.

At the same time, we are on the other side with our son Uriah’s journey with Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. We are watching the miracles start to unfold for other boys, new and amazing advanced medical treatments become available for others, while Uriah can not receive them. We are doing all we can through prayer, medicine, therapy, fundraising for research, and traveling for doctor care to help Uriah. Despite our best efforts,  it has not resulted in our greatest hope for him to have a cure for his terminal disease.

How do we as believers continue to place our faith in God when so much of what unfolds on the journey still seems so hard? Even when some prayers are answered, some are not. Our souls feel heavy and sad because we are unable to see all of God’s plan. How do we praise and celebrate the miracles, when at the same moment there is hardship and pain in someone else’s similar journey? Is it truly possible to hold pain and joy at the same time?

I believe the answers are within the need to praise God in the hard and the beautiful moments. To trust he has a plan, even if the plan causes pain and suffering for the good God can only see right now. The cancer mamas I am praying for are using the phrase “testimony not a tragedy” when they share updates on their journey. I am clinging to this for all of us who are walking hard journeys through life full of pain and heartache. We are all testimonies for God’s strength and power, his hands and feet here on earth. So much can be gained by demonstrating our love and faith in God, especially during the tests and trials of life. Nonbelievers and believers alike are drawn to the faith of those who can continue to praise when hope is harder to cling to.

Why are you so downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my savior and my God (Psalm 42:5). This verse is my answer to the questions surrounding how do we hold pain and joy as we continue through life. Our hearts will feel broken sometimes. We will feel disturbed and sad when what we hope and pray so hard for doesn’t seem to be unfolding to our plan. Hope is what we need to continue to focus on. Hope is what gives us the strength to continue to rise and fight for what we want to happen. Hope is what heals our hearts so we can keep loving and helping others. Hope is what fuels our faith to believe in miracles yet to come. Hope keeps our eyes lifted and praising our savior and God when we are celebrating the miracles realized and the ones we are still waiting for. Hope reminds us that every hard journey when you walk with God has a beautiful finish, it just may not be the finish we hope for on Earth… but the finish in Heaven is the answered miracle for all of us.

It is easy to have faith when life is easy. We can all say statements such as God is always good, I trust in God’s plan, and God moves mountains when all is calm and bright. The faith so trusting in a good God becomes much harder to proclaim when the bottom drops out. I know, because I have felt the feeling of falling more than once and in just a short time.

My relationship with God developed by sort of a leapfrog method, jumping from stone to stone, led by people along my path. I did not grow up attending a church. My parents had both grown up that way and instead of forcing God and Church, they allowed us to find our own way to Him. God has shown in the lives of myself and my siblings it is still possible to be drawn near to Him even when not raised as a child learning weekly about his good works and love. For me, the stones I jumped to were a best friend and her family bringing me along to church after a Saturday night sleepover. My girl scout leader, who was also a pastor of a church. My high school fellowship of Christian athletes group that met before school to pray and discuss God. My college roommates, who gave me as Christmas gifts devotionals and Christian music CDs. A friend I stayed with during one of Luke’s deployments giving me the confidence to pray out loud to God. This same friend showed up again this year and invited me into a distance learning book study focusing on the power of our God-given feelings.

God has shown up in my life. Over and over. Calling to me. Using other people to speak to me and teach me all about Him. I developed an easy faith at first, believing in God and his goodness. I loved the idea of having someone I could always talk to in prayer about anything. I loved that He was ever-present. I was a good person, looked out for other people, loved hard, always gave my all, and started to believe being a good person sort of insured you to have a good life. Like a payment system, I guess. If you do good work, good things come to you. The bible does not say this, and no one ever directly told me this. Yet, I think this is the way many Christians believe. They live a good and faithful life. They place their trust in God’s plan for good things in their life because they are worshiping and praising and doing all the right things. They fail to understand nothing is promised by being good.

For the last 3 years, I have spent a lot of time in doctors’ offices waiting. Waiting for the exams. Waiting for surgeries. Waiting for the results. The first round started in May 2018, as we sat in the neuromuscular clinic at the University of Minnesota waiting to hear if our 2-year-old son had Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. The bottom dropped again when just short of 2 years later this same little boy was diagnosed with a developmental delay and non-verbal autism. The next month I was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, a blood cancer. Really God? That was the question I kept asking. How can this be happening to my family when we are good people and believe you are a good God? All of this happening was definitely not good. My faith had been chipped. Disease has a way of cracking a strong faith, testing its strength and endurance through hardship and pain.

I have been learning so much about God while traveling these journeys of disease. We will never know in this life exactly why a good God allows bad things to happen to us, but I do have my own thoughts on it. My main conclusion allowing my faith to be strengthened instead of shattered is that the bad things are not God’s fault. He did not “choose me” to walk this hard walk. He did not give my son Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy or myself cancer. It is not a punishment for not being good enough or a test because He knows I can handle it. The bad things are just that, bad things. We live in a world where God allows it to not be paradise, where bad things happen to good people because bad things can happen to everyone equally.

Where God enters is not at the bad thing itself… but in the journey. He is walking along the hard road with us. He is intervening, holding our hand, helping us up when we stumble and fall, wiping our tears, bandaging our hurts. For me, looking back on my journey so far, there are so many moments where He has been there. He was there at the Parent Project Muscular Dystrophy conference a month after Uriah’s diagnosis, bringing us into a room with other families to connect with, hug, and learn from. These are friends I still have to travel this hard road with that lighten the heavy load. He was there in the pharmacy staff and customers who brought me tea, flowers, hugs, and prayers at work during the days I was forced to live in the unknown, waiting for a diagnosis. These same people helped me get back on my feet after treatment was over, cheering me on and giving me hope I could still be a great pharmacist. He was there in the friend who invited Luke into a men’s bible study during my treatment, giving him a community of believers. They supported him, brought us meals, and reminded us of God’s goodness during a really hard time. He was there in the radiation room when the nurse sensing my fears held my hand and prayed with me, reminding me even in the darkest times God can shine a bright beacon of light and hope.

Disease chipped my faith. Caused me to question all I believed about God. Made me stumble and lose some of my trust. I had many days of tearful, angry, confused prayer to God. Trying to grasp onto His love, but feeling so afraid of the unknown. I realize now, able to reflect with some hindsight of the journey behind me, what I never lost was hope. Hope is the rope we cling to at the bottom and use to climb back up. Hope brings our eyes to the light, helping us find our way in the darkness. Hope is the fight within us to get back up again when we fall.

During my treatment, Uriah ended up getting his little destructive hands on one of my favorite coffee mugs. The one that says faith. I expected it to be busted into many pieces… but it survived with only a couple of chips missing. It was broken, but not destroyed. I saved it and keep it on the window sill in my kitchen. A daily reminder we can be banged around by life, fall and get hurt, have bad things happen while keeping our faith intact. It is possible for faith to not only survive the hardship but be strengthened by it.

I have always loved the start of a new year. I am an achiever by nature and I LOVE setting new goals, to see a new blank page laid out before me to fill however I choose to. It is exciting and motivating. It fills me with hope about all the possibilities of what adventures are on the horizon. So, I was surprised this year as 2021 dawned bright and shiny and new, I actually felt anxiety surface. Throughout the day instead of excitement, I felt the bubbling up of fear. I did not expect this reaction, although I feel I am likely not alone. Last year was a very hard year for so many people. So many of us faced mountains to climb, valleys to cross, and waves to withstand. Mine involved a diagnosis with cancer for myself, and of autism for my son who already has Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. My mountains likely do not have the same name as yours, but the hardship and fear felt as the trials were endured this year are universal feelings by all of us. Although the year was so very hard in some ways, we all also gained many blessings through the process. We learned to choose joy even where there is every reason to remain sad and angry. We learned communities are full of wonderful and caring people as they delivered meals to those who had to remain at home and created new ways to remain connected to one another. We learned God is present in all moments, even the hardest ones if we leave space for him to enter to support and love us.

Entering into 2021 should be an exciting shift, new hope for good things combined with the strength and resilience we gained from making it through 2020. This is what I expected to feel. I did feel some of this until my anxiety kicked in without my opening the door for it. It just barged right in yesterday whispering the reminders to me of how many bad and unexpected things entered my life last year. I never saw the cancer diagnosis and journey for my family as I made all of my hopeful plans as 2019 came to a close. It hit us like a freight train and knocked us completely off course. With it came the lasting fear of how unknown the future truly is. Cancer was not the only thing we endured throughout this past year. Like so many of you, there were trips canceled, plans changed, dreams dashed, and hope lost. I have become so good at finding the silver linings and blessings and God moments that bring light to the darkness, but the darkness is always there. I can feel both the light and the darkness, and my anxiety is heightened when the darkness begins to overshadow the light. Last year showed me how much control I do not have over what happens to me and my family. In a lot of ways, it is a terrifying realization. One that is haunting me as I begin a new year. If I do not have control, how can I prevent the bad things from happening? If I can’t prevent them, how do I remain hopeful for all the wonderful things that are also possible?

My plan is to continue to place my trust in God. I do not have control over how this new year plays out, but He does. If I sit and reflect on each fear and struggle over this past year, I can also come up with a counteracting blessing that pulled me through. We can not control all of what will enter into our lives this next year, but we can control some things. We can control the love we share with others. We can control how we react to fear and pain, choosing to find the joy and gratitude in those moments and holding tightly to the hope they provide. We can control our ability to continue to rise back up when we get knocked down, never giving up in the face of defeat. We can control continuing to walk in God’s light, searching for Him and his love in the rough patches, praising Him during the moments of easy peace and happiness we also find ourselves in.

2021 is full of newness. New goals, new paths, new strength, determination, and resilience to chase our dreams. This is what hope is made of, and I choose to fill my life with it this year no matter what is up ahead. My hope is bigger than my fear. I pray yours is too. Let us all kick our anxiety to the curb, there is work to do and we do not need its negativity messing up our hope.