Maybe it’s time we suffered together. Maybe it’s time we stopped wielding our privileges and started leveraging them for others.
This year my family has faced the most beautiful and painful season of our lives. My husband was diagnosed with stage four melanoma cancer in May. The news came like a sucker-punch to the gut, but it was no surprise to God. In the weeks that followed, we experienced God’s presence and provision in the most profound way and I began to understand how critical community is to our lives.
I write today for the children and mothers and wives and others who will find Father’s Day bittersweet.
This is the difficulty. We learn to edit. We start to look around and compare. We recognize other great artists, and we feel the weight of expectations. We squelch the creative for the practical.
God is a Master Artist. He reimagines and refashions and redesigns our most tragic life circumstances into His own masterpiece.
It’s time for us Christians to live and breathe and speak and act like we are Christmas people. We need to believe in the Hope brought by our Christ-King and fight for it.
Rather than a pat-myself-on-the-back moment, this was a stoop-lower opportunity. I was acutely aware that feeding Mary or offering someone dignity through a smile or learning their name or advocating for the homeless is really not about charity or me changing the world as much as it is about obedience to the gospel.
When I spoke my wedding vows, I never dreamed those words – “in sickness and health until death do us part” – would mean burying him 11 years later.
God had faithfully prepared me for that devastating season of losing my love, the daddy of my three daughters. I already had learned the transforming wonder of counting gifts.
Worship is an opportunity to make our day, our life into a prayer. What I discovered this month is that worship is not limited to formal choirs and Sunday singing. In fact, worship is so much more than music.
As humans, our nature is to avoid pain. But sometimes grief is about returning to the places where you laid your most precious memories and remembering…and then finding the grace and strength to forge new memories. It’s about wading through instead of marching around.
Little did I know that this single, 5-letter word would be the thing God would use to transform me, inspire me, lift me and carry me through the most difficult year of my life. This would be the beginning of tracing His “glory story” in the most unexpected narrative. God has shown me this past year that Glory is the very beginning of the story and also the grand finale.
I hardly remember what my husband said but I remember I stopped breathing. Results of biopsy. Melanoma in the lymph nodes. My healthy, athletic husband had cancer. At 40.
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