The Year We Hung On
It’s been one year since we discovered I had a Cancerous tumor the size of a peach in my liver. I had six months of chemotherapy. Nine hours of surgery in March followed by a 2nd round of chemo/immunotherapy. Last week there was a new genetic profile blood test and CT scan.
The news was good – no sign of cancer in my blood, and the CT shows continued recovery from the surgery and no areas of concern. I am done with chemotherapy for now; I will only continue another three months of immunotherapy according to plan. Just a one-hour infusion once every three weeks, then we do another scan in October to see the next step. We are very grateful for the healing God is continuing to provide, the wisdom of my medical team, and the support and prayers of family and friends.
This year has been one where we have been hanging on – holding on to each other, to hope, and to God. We have had so many ups and downs. Truly, it’s been the hardest year of my life in many ways. This year of facing cancer, trying to love and lead my family through the uncertainty and fear, and honestly not always doing it well, has left us all hanging on.
While we may have felt like we were just barely hanging on, God was holding us securely in his hands. If you take that as an objective truth, the subjective feelings of fear have bulwark of hope to crash into. Every step of the past year was taken according to the plan of an all-knowing, merciful and loving father. Peace is not based on an understanding of our circumstances, but by faith in the character of God. The scriptures are really a thousand-year story of God laying out His character against the ever-changing circumstances of a family, turned into a tribe, turned into a nation, and finally a way of salvation that transformed kingdoms and empires. My single year of struggle for my life is a small matter indeed when weighed against the ten thousand years of God stringing threads of his will through all of human civilization. We feel like we hang on by a thread, but He holds all things completely and comfortably.
We recently were able to take out our trailer and go camping for the first time in over a year. We ended up at a place called Cloudland Canyon in Georgia. It’s a beautiful park, with one of the nicest campgrounds I have been to. It’s part of the long plateau of Lookout Mountain, and it’s stretched above Chattanooga and the Chickamauga Civil War battlefield. The canyons there were lush and green, and there is a 600-step staircase leading down the canyon to a rushing creek and waterfall. Tucked down along the rim of the canyon wall, near the waterfall, where my boys were wading in the cool waters and skipping rocks, Brenden reached down and picked out a little wedge of broken stone. He looked at it closely, and realized he found something special and brought it to me. I looked down at the sliver of rock in his small hand and realized he had found an arrowhead. I inspected it closely to be sure – it had the clear triangular shape, the tap-sharpened edges, and the notches to hold the ties onto an arrow. Brenden was thrilled with his find. I wondered at the timing and placement of this little treasure. I am sure that tens of thousands of campers and hikers had been in that little wading pool beneath the splashing waterfall and tramped all around that little piece of history. It may have been laying there for hundreds of years, season after season, until my boy reached down to pick it up, and had the insight to recognize what he had grasped.
For the Christian, we are all artifacts traveling in time. We may feel stuck or lost, and it may get cold and dark, season after season. But sooner or later, God reaches down and picks us up, and we find our value in his hand.