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.