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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.

There are many points of tension in our bodies. The shoulders and neck are familiar places we feel our external stress expressed within our muscles. All of us know the feeling, a stiff neck, tight shoulders, often accompanied by a dull headache. I recently lifted the backpack of a nursing student I work with and it transported me back to my days in pharmacy school, my backpack always crammed full of books, far too heavy to be carrying every day on my own. My dad was constantly lecturing me with concern to leave some of that heaviness behind, to not burden myself with so much baggage. He didn’t want me to get hurt carrying so much with me.

I am certain this is how God views our carrying around our burdens with us. We do not have visible backpacks though, these backpacks can not be seen, but are still very real. We load ourselves each day with all of our worries, stress, anxiety, and all we believe is needed to control what we may encounter. As we continue to allow stress and anxiety to rule our days, our backpacks get more full, and heavier, dragging us down, tensing our muscles, and creating an environment where it is hard to be our best selves. This is not what God has planned, He wants to help us shoulder the difficulties in our lives. Psalm 55:22 demonstrates this desire to support us in our times of need by saying “cast your burden on the Lord and he will sustain you”. My personal struggle with this concept is I am the type of person who likes to have control. Whenever you hand over something you are trying to manage to someone else, even if that someone is God, it means you are also giving up some or all of your control over it. Also interesting, I feel anxious whenever I have to burden someone else with my problems, also a symptom of wanting to have all of the control. The truth is, I want to be able to solve my own problems, it is not that I do not want help, it is that I have trouble with the idea of expecting or asking someone else to have to shoulder a burden I feel is mine to carry. I have trouble remembering God is infinitely powerful, always present, and desires to be close with me. I wonder if He feels insulted by my unwillingness to allow Him to help me when my backpack feels too heavy for me to carry and when I insist I am fine and can figure it out on my own.

Each day during my cancer journey, I have learned a little more about God and His willingness to help me. Cancer was a breaking point for my “carry it all yourself” attitude. It brought me to my weakest place physically, spiritually, and emotionally. I finally had to rely on God to help me carry my fears, doubts, and sickness. I couldn’t take care of myself or my family like I was accustomed to doing, I had to ask for and accept help from others. I learned to take the backpack off for a while and let someone else help me carry it. I now start the morning in prayer with God, asking for His help each step of the way, and handing over my backpack of burdens to Him before walking into the day. I am not perfect, and I have noticed that many days I end up taking back all the weight I gave to Him in the morning. It’s like throughout the day I slowly repack it back in, I take it out of God’s hands and put it back into my own until by the end of the day I am wearing the backpack full of all the stress, anxiety, worry, shame, and problems I had set down in the morning. I do believe this is a normal struggle many of us have. We are human, and with that comes free will and an instinct to feel we are in control. The ability to hand over our burdens and lose control is a skill we need to build within ourselves, it doesn’t come easy.

The goal for each of us daily should be to consciously release the heaviness we carry. To pray in the morning for the ability to allow God to enter into our day, shoulder our burdens, and help us find the solutions to the problems ahead. Giving God our backpack doesn’t make the burdens vanish immediately. Sometimes the answers take a long time to come, and the weight stays with us. What it does is allow us to breathe again. It allows God to be a part of the process of finding solutions. It helps us to ditch the anxiety and worry for a clearer mind, which frees us up to think creatively and be present in our hard situations. When we give our control over to God, He can do His best work.

Staring at the beige wall with a seemingly calming painting of a water landscape. Sitting in an uncomfortable chair in a room always a little too cold. There is no clock, no solid indication of how long you have been sitting in the small room, waiting. Clinics and hospitals even refer to it as the waiting room. You have had the lab testing done, the biopsy, the scans, the surgery, but have been left to live in a state of waiting. Waiting for the answers, the information which will help shape the paths you take, to write the story of your future. Waiting can turn minutes into hours, and hours into days. It seems to slow time down somehow. It can produce within us anxiety and worry surrounding the outcome of what we are waiting for and how it will impact our future going forward.

My body physically responds to this anxious waiting. I have trouble sleeping. My heart races and my stomach feels like I am on a rollercoaster. My brain can’t focus on normal activities as it instead fixates on solving all the potential problems the results may cause. It’s like I live on adrenaline, in fight or flight mode the entire time I am in this waiting period. Our lives are full of times of waiting, but waiting for results about my health has been the most difficult. Waiting often involves not yet having access to all of the information, causing us to obsess over all of the possible outcomes and scenarios. My battle during times of waiting is against all of the “what if” questions. I continuously research trying to find the answers, formulate a plan. I desperately seek to control what is uncontrollable. My default is to do the opposite of what the bible instructs us to do. Romans 8:5 tells us “but if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.” Instead of filling myself with God’s words of wisdom and turning to Him for hope, peace, and patience, my instinct has always been to find my own answers, depend on my own coping ability, and plan and prepare for all of the potential negative possible outcomes.

My journey with waiting for results involved 3 months of testing. Each test was followed by 2 weeks of waiting for the result, only to find out that the result would lead to yet another test, another waiting period. I was waiting to see if I would be diagnosed with cancer. It was the longest 3 months of my life. I wasted so many hours crying, worrying, filled with anxiety as I thought about what would happen if I did have cancer. How would I tell my children? How would I take the time off work for treatment? What type of cancer would it be? What are the treatments? What damage could the treatments cause? On and on my mind was always on this cycle of questions, and filled with fear. I tried and struggled to find joy each day, to focus on gratitude and make each moment count, but I was still relying only on myself to get through the days of waiting. I was always trying to find a footing where I still had control.

This is emotionally exhausting work. It is work that does not need to be done. God does not intend for us to depend on ourselves to endure hard times, we are supposed to turn to Him to find peace and comfort. We need to turn to hope to be better equipped to cope. To lean into God’s ability to bring peace into our hearts, especially during times filled with unknown, times of waiting. Around the half way point of this pause in my life, this waiting period, I changed my coping strategies. One evening, while crying about waiting and all my worries to my husband, he looked at me and gently asked why I was continuing to pay on a debt I didn’t know if I owed. Said another way, why was I worried about the possible outcomes before I knew what the outcome was. Why was I investing all this energy, emotion, and time into results I didn’t know. He said we can try to find the answers once we know the problem until then we should hope for the best possible outcome… and if it is the worst outcome we will still figure out what to do if that time comes. We should be focusing our energy and mind on hope. It is within hope we find peace and the patience to endure the hard times. It is with God we can put down our anxiety and fear and pick up instead comfort and grace. I began to live in a place of acceptance of what may come, knowing my family would be taken care of and the solutions to whatever the test results showed would be provided when needed. I let go, and let God take over. I chose faith over fear. It wasn’t perfect, there were still tears and fears, but I continued to come back to the promises of God and His ability to not waste any hardship and to bring good back into our lives.

I did end up having cancer. My worst fears were realized and I had to face all that diagnosis brought into my life. Trusting God and placing my life into His hands did not bring instant healing or the avoidance of hardship. What it brought me was the hope of healing. I was given peace in my heart and patience to endure whatever was ahead. I had an understanding and trust of the best was yet to come. I stopped wasting my days worrying and instead spent time worshiping and finding the places of gratitude within the journey. I learned filling my days with worship instead of worry didn’t change the outcome of the results, but I was in a better space emotionally and spiritually to handle them.

Smiling Eyes

Yesterday as I was swinging my son in our backyard hammock, I watched him smile. This boy’s smile can light up a room. When he smiles, he smiles with his entire being. His eyes. His body. He radiates vibrant energy I wish I could capture, bottle it up, and save it for when I need a surge of hope and love. As I watched him giggle and smile over and over, I paid the closest attention to his eyes. I have been noticing people’s eyes more than ever before. With all our smiles hidden behind masks currently, our eyes are what we use to communicate with others. What are our eyes saying? I used to love watching America’s next top model with Tyra Banks as the host. She would always coach the models to learn to “smize”, meaning smile with their eyes.

Our eyes are so expressive and often referred to as the window to our soul. We used to be able to hide behind our smiles, to pretend everything was happy and fine by giving a smile, even if it was not genuine. Now, with our smiles hidden behind masks, all we can see is the eyes. The eyes I am seeing are tired. They are weary. They are sad. Now that I am back working in the pharmacy, I am feeling burdened by what I can see in the eyes of the people coming to me. I am struggling with wanting to help, to get close to them, to give them a Midwest hug when I know they are hurting… but instead I am wearing a mask covering my warm smile I so desperately want them to see. I am forced to stand behind plexiglass to protect them from my possible germs. To protect me from the people I want to help. I want to give them more than their prescription for medicine. I want to give them hope. I want to give them encouragement. I want to give them love. So, I am doing all I can to dispense more than medicine from my place in the pharmacy. I am withsmizing with intention. Ihope I have deep wrinkles after this pandemic around my eyes from using them so hard to share a smile with others. I want my eyes to tell the story my heart is saying. I want people to be able to see how much I care. How happy I am to see them. How I am present and available to listen and share not only my love but God’s love with them if needed.

This pandemic is lasting so much longer than most of us imagined. We will continue to be asked to hide our smiles behind masks. We are going to remain distanced from others in a way that limits our ability to comfort and express love. We do not have to let it limit us from connecting with others though. We can still say hello as we pass a stranger while grocery shopping. Even if your smile is hidden, your eyes can still speak and show you care. Do not shut down and stop trying to share your love just because there are barriers. Smile anyway. Have smiling eyes.

We hold onto things so tightly in this world, as though we get to take it with us when we leave. We try to control what is uncontrollable. We fear loss and change, even though it is the only thing constant in our lives. For me, these feelings resonate most with my children. If I were to name my two biggest fears since having children, they would be losing one of them and them losing me. I am certain I am not alone in this fear. As a mother, I am sure many women want nothing more than to have their children grow to be old and happy and to be able to guide them through their lives until we are also old and happy, having lived a fulfilling life. I do not know if this dream will be a reality for me. I have had to walk into both of these greatest mother fears and face them head-on. My constant battle is to work with God to ensure I do not get sucked into the darkness of my fears, to keep turning toward the light and choosing faith over the fear. To admit to myself I am not in control of this. 

First came the fear of losing one of my children as we learned my then 2-year-old son has the genetic disease Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. It is progressive. It will affect all of his muscles through his body. It is currently incurable and will end his life at some point far too early. Learning your perfect and beloved child is sick and you can not fix it or stop it has to be one of the hardest blows to a mother’s heart. All we want to do is to love and protect our babies, and we think we have this almost divine power to do whatever is necessary to prevent them from being hurt. Having that perceived control stripped away leaves us feeling powerless. I have done everything possible to gain back power and control. In the past two years since the diagnosis, I have advocated for awareness for this disease I had never heard of until my son was diagnosed. I have attended conferences and listened to researchers explain the clinical trials they have ongoing trying to find the answers and the treatments to help my son. I have run 2 marathons alongside my husband in the magical land of Disney World to raise money for that research. I have flown and driven to other states to bring my boy to the best doctors. I have been participating in a clinical trial to provide information on how this damaged gene I also have in my body is affecting me, how it could be affecting other moms. The fact that my son has this disease because of receiving the damaged gene from me just adds to the pain in my heart. I am doing everything possible to control and change the outcome of his disease, battling and fighting against reality. I am not in control of this. 

Then came the fear of my children losing me as I was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, a type of blood cell cancer, this year. My very first thought when I learned of the tumor in my chest, near my heart, was I can not leave my children. They need me. My heart, my soul, aches at the thought of not being here for my babies. It causes physical reactions for me- tears, racing heart, trouble breathing. I hold on too tightly to them, and so the thought of leaving them causes my body to feel like it is in a vice, the anxiety and fear crushing me. Somehow this fear is even worse than losing one of my children. I think it’s because the loss of them would hurt me, but losing me would hurt them. Circle back to as a mom, I feel I have the power to prevent them from being hurt. In dealing with cancer, I have also done everything possible to gain back power and control. I have switched my diet to plant-based. I have undergone surgery to identify the type of cancer and have a port placed to deliver medication. I have endured 8 chemotherapy treatments over 4 months. I have undergone 15 radiation treatments to my chest. I am doing everything possible to control and change the outcome of my cancer, battling and fighting against reality. I am not in control of this. 

The problem is, I need to have control. I crave it. It helps me feel safe. If I can not control losing my children, or them losing me, how can I breathe? How can I wake up each day knowing I am living my worst fears and still do my work as a pharmacist? How can I go about a normal day making school lunches, walking children to school, folding laundry, knowing the only thing certain is I do not have actual control over my fears for my children? What I am learning through this hard journey facing fears is that what helps me the most is admitting to myself I am not in control of this. 

I do not know what exact fears you are facing in your life, or how to help you learn to cope with them daily. What I can tell you is most fear stems from believing we have control we do not possess. We think we can force life to go the way we plan, desire, hope, and dream… but mostly our feeling of having control is a facade. The reality is we can not control outcomes to all things. What is controllable is the fact that we can accept we do not have control. For me, I am working daily to lean instead on power stronger than my own, God. I am releasing my need for control to the one who created me. To the one who created everything. I am seeking words of wisdom daily from my bible, clinging to verses like 1 Peter 5:6-7. Humble yourselves, therefore, under God’s mighty hand, that he may lift you up in due time. Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you. Letting go of control is not easy it is very very hard. I think this is part of being human, how we were created. God gave us the blessing of free will, to think for ourselves, and to decide the actions of our lives. The toxic version of this free will is believing we therefore can control everything. Instead, I am learning true freedom comes from realizing we control our thoughts, our responses, and actions to life, not life itself. Choosing to give my fears to God allows me to breathe again. I believe even though I do not have control over how long my family remains together, our love and God’s love stretches from this life into eternity. My healing is coming from prayers to God, telling him I am not in control of this. You are, and I trust you.