everlasting arms

***This post was NOT edited for grammatical correctness. Or even to sound good. Sorry. This is my brain plopped on paper.

This summer I started having night sweats, sporadically. Somethimes worse than others. Which NEVER happens to me. I just tucked it away in my little notes folder on my iphone. Don’t worry, im not a hypochondriac. I just always go blank when my doctors ask me my symptoms. I tuck them away and then tell them to my oncologist every six months. No biggie. So anyways when I came home from Portland, I had a bad sinus and ear infection. I also felt horrible. Like barely get out of bed for a week bad. So I went to my primary care (shout out patient first) and the lady said all my lymph nodes were swollen. She told me I needed to see my oncologist, like,now. I said I had an appt on the 14^th of December (it was now end of nov.) she said I needed to get in sooner. A little panic. Then she said to go thru the er if I had to. I asked if i was being dramatic for coming in and she said no. she said, after all the things she’d checked and knowing my history, malignance could be the cause. Just fyi, doctors don’t say that all willy nilly. They only do if they really have to. So, a bit of panic. But this will all just be a big misunderstanding and ill soar thru it with flying faith colors like all the other times.

So get appt for that Monday. My original onc is back from asia (military hospital, you know). She feels them all says they’re swollen but also that im super skinny. She gets some blood work done and gets a chest xray. “it could be lymphoma” she says. Not dramatically. Just there. And she keeps my regular 6 mos appt to get abdominal mri that happened to fall on the 6^th of December. So we get all the things done. Talk to insurance people. Long day at the hospital. I’m waiting by a young wife whose husband is getting xrayed and biopsied for cancer. She’s all teary, her world seems to be coming apart before her eyes (literally. They were wheeling him back and forth in front of us. To xray, to biopsy. Etc.) I catch eyes with him. He had this beautiful radiant confidence. I used to have that with all this. But now im just tired. Go home. Put on my parka and uggs and big winter scarf and curl up in bed. (all that bc im really cold). Wait on call wait on call wait on call. Still feel horrible physically, but less so. And I was taking heart because no news is good news in the medical world. If there was something seriously wrong I would have been back in that hospital by that night. But still, wanted to get the all clear.

Doc finally calls. She doesn’t want to move forward with biopsy. She says scans clear. 

But that I do have mono. (I already had it, but yeah, cause it’s a virus you can get it again). 

So im here. Im still in pain (less). And I try to be strong, but can I tell you something?

 Im not. Im not strong or brave. God is. Im not. And this whole ordeal showed me that I really

 am scared that the cancer will come back. And ive read case studies on this type of carcinoma. 

(again, not a hypochondriac, just curious about what grew inside of me for months and months)

 its not good when it comes back. Anyways, I am scared. I cant be whipped back and forth like 

this. I feel like my life gets torn at the seams from all the spinning. But I read an interesting take 

on the word “compels/controls/constraineth” in 2 cor. 5:14… “For the love of Christ controls us,

 because we have concluded this: that one died for all, therefore all have died…” I have always read this and studied this
in terms of being moved and compelled by the love of God to serve and live out
a godly life. But Kelly Minter wrote this phrase about it… “sense the love of
jesus constraining you, actually holding you together” and then the Deuteronomy
33:27 everlasting arms have kept coming up… “The eternal God is your dwelling
place, and underneath are the everlasting arms. And he thrust out the enemy
before you and said, ‘Destroy.’” I went to chatbible to study the word
translated at control (ESV) in 2 cor. 5:14. One of the translations for the
greek word sunecho is this: “1) to
hold together 1a) any whole, lest it fall to pieces or something fall away from
it.” I don’t want to take this scripture out of context. Im no theologian nor
am I an expert on biblical greek. But for a moment, I needed to see this picture.
My life seemingly spinning out of control but God not letting one piece of me
fall away. I don’t know. Cool water flowed over me. Through me. It will be
okay. Im still in pain, and perhaps this fear will loom over me the rest of my
life. And I wont ignore it, and I wont deny that it scares me. But I will rest.
The everlasting arms aren’t going anywhere.

winter and babies

Sometimes, I’m taken back to memories of hospitals. The weirdest things bring my mind back. Often it’s the smell of certain types of handsoaps. I have most of my classes in Mcbryde(VT) and the hand soap there smells like hospital disinfectant. It is oddly comforting because it always reminded me of the why. Why I should give everything to Jesus. Something that period of my life taught me but I often forget. Other times, I hear a loud noise and I weep. I can’t help but cry as I type this. Motorcycles do it to me a lot.  My friends don’t really know what to do when I start crying randomly. I wouldn’t either. I’m instantly back in a waiting room or in a hospital bed, bruises up my hands and arms from IVs. And I can feel the ghost of pain. I’m not scared of it. It just halts me for a moment. I have to feel it. The other night, it was the scattegories buzzer that reminded me of all the noises a hospital room makes. People tell me that I stare vacantly a lot. I do. I’m just remembering. But sometimes, I can’t stop crying. Because I think of all the children whose life this actually is. Year in and year out. Pain, noise, fluorescent lights, uncertainty. I remember the day we found the tumor at chkd, we were waiting in a small room when a mom brought her two, twin babies in. They weren’t more than three years old. In wheel chairs. And one of the brothers started screaming and crying. It was horrible. Horrible. I couldn’t do anything because I was whisked away to the big hospital. I have never forgotten that boy. I never want a child to feel that way. I would do it for them if I could. I cant.

I know I’m supposed to say something that turns this post around. Something about Jesus. I know God is still good. Suffering, pain, these are not God’s will. But sometimes I don’t think we need to promote sweet-sounding Christian platitudes when we’re sad. We can acknowledge the pain without excusing it.

Winter is my favorite season. People look at me funny when I say that. I just spent my first winter in the mountains. I love the bitter cold, the long nights. To me, all the hope is in winter. Once December 21 rolls around, we know the days get longer and longer. We anticipate what the glory of spring will hold. I like the barrenness of winter because we get to really see. What is worth it. What do we need. And what is the actual longing of our hearts. I can’t take the pain for every child in this world. But Jesus did do something profoundly more impactful and loving. He took the eternal pain. The Dayspring is coming. There is an eternal dawn. Praise him.

mental health and christianity

I don’t know. I don’t know a lot about a lot. I’ve been thinking about how we think we know a lot about a lot. But I think even the wisest people… still don’t know. The rich, deep mystery into which we were born—a fallen cosmos—well… there are a lot of things we just don’t know. We can explain some mechanical functions of the universe—social laws, natural laws… but we can’t fully understand the implications, the why, the how, of original sin and redemption and the working out of our salvation. It is sometimes more “great, availing mystery” than we’d like it to be.

C.S. Lewis had some thoughts on this. In The Great Divorce, he writes:

“Ye cannot in your present state understand eternity… That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, ‘No future bliss can make up for this,’ not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backward and turn even that agony into a glory... The good man’s past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of heaven… And that is why the Blessed will say, ‘We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven.’”

One thing I long to ask God about is the sometimes inexplicable madness of our minds. Mental health. I think you could read every secular source on the topic, sit under the most spiritually adept theologian, and still not come close to comprehending the complexities of sin and nature and truth and forgiveness. 42¹ just doesn’t cut it. And that’s okay. This is meant to be no polemic against the noble pursuit of understanding, healing, loving… The compelling to attain to the full stature of Christ Jesus must go on! We must forge ahead into the deepest, darkest questions of the universe in Spirit and in truth. But this is to you who feel like you are going insane. Do not lose the hope and joy of your salvation because you do not fit into the scholar’s boxes or the theologian’s parapets. And if you have not accepted Christ Jesus as your Lord, your Love, do not let this keep you from him.

Mental health, the physical and the soulish, we will never fully understand while we labor in the pangs of childbirth. That’s okay. Pray. Seek medical attention. Lean not on your own understanding. It’s okay if you still don’t understand. I don’t. But I still believe in the goodness, the goodness, of the Lord. And one day, in the near and coming future, we will see his face and have the answer to all we never knew.

¹ In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything