2 down, 4 to go

I've made intentional effort in my life to not wish it away. To not wish things to be over before I've lived them fully. Dealing with chemotherapy is one thing that is very difficult to not just want to be done with, to wish it away.

I'm giving tremendous thanks that so far this last round has been difficult but vastly different than round one. It has been sufferable instead of torturous. Chemo is a lot like delivering a child, you really have to have done it to understand, there is really no way to explain it all. I've joined a club I never wanted to enter. Yet like delivering a baby, each is different and unique. Last summer when recovering from my bike accident I had to deal with feelings of uselessness and this makes that feel like child's play. I feel like I have been rendered entirely helpless. Yet, yesterday on my birthday I was overwhelmed with the grace that abounds in the love that surrounded me. So many people reached out in so many ways and I don't believe I've ever felt so loved...even in a place of total weakness. Even though I have known intellectually that "God's strength is made perfect in weakness", it is just an intellectual fact until we have sat in that place of being utterly undone and helpless. Which is a place none of us desires to go, especially me. These are those hummingbird sightings, real and figuratively that I am living through. Yet, I am seeing God in it. He is living through each of you who have so sacrificially extended yourselves to remind me that I am not forgotten, I am not useless and that even in this valley of the shadow of death there is life and love and joy to be found.

My dearest husband, quietly serving me, waking in the night to lay a hand on me and pray for healing again, loving me in every way imaginable and in many we could not have imagined. I am deeply humbled. I wouldn't have asked for this, yet even now I can give thanks for the gifts of cancer. Gifts that in the rush of our busy lives we often neglect to mention to one another. The gifts of expressing what is always in our hearts but has a way of being smothered by the noise of everyday life. I guess that we don't ever like to admit that what we most hold dear could be snatched away without warning. Cancer has a way of stripping life to the important things, the things that matter, the love of family and friends and the simple pleasures of life.

Thank you for loving me in this journey and reminding me I'm not alone.