What a gift it was! We mostly just camped on different beaches, talked, and read. I didn’t take many photos, but here’s a few:

(If you can’t see the slideshow above, click here)

This final surgery has been hard to decide to go forward with. It’s hard to decide to inflect Holly’s body with more scars when the last ones are just now healing. It’s hard to choose to have a surgery that’s not technically necessary, that just finishes the reconstructive process.

That said — we have peace this is what God has for us. I would have thought this surgery would have been easier, that this would be routine by now.

The truth is it’s never easy to step into pain. We are hard-wired to avoid it, and yet Jesus says things like,

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. (Mt 5:3-5)

I keep looking for the verse that says, “Blessed are those that push through,” or “Blessed are those that pretend it doesn’t hurt,” but I can’t find it.  Somehow it is blessed to have our spirits be poor, to mourn and be meek.

These last months we’ve been learning that these places of blessing are not things that happen to us, they are things we choose.  We have to choose to step into — feel — the pain of life and let it crush us a little bit.

It’s in that crushed place where Jesus meets us in new and fresh ways.  It’s there He blesses us with healing from pain, current and old pains all the same.

God has been so very good to us in the pain of cancer and recovery.  He has faithfully met us, healed us, and blessed us.  Please pray we will continue to let the pain break us to continue in the blessing.

Grace (n): the free and unmerited favor of God

It may seem strange to be talking about the favor of God at a time when we have just gone through radical surgery to remove cancer from Holly’s 33-year old body. But God’s favor is exactly what has been upon us lately.

Grace is not the absence of pain — it’s not an easy life. Grace is God stepping into your pain and showing His goodness by making a way out. Ephesians 2 says it like this:

And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience— among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved.

You see, without the death there would be no grace. Without cancer, we would have missed out on so many ways to see His unmerited favor in our lives.

Mary Ida as one of our team members tended to her wounds.

The second thing was visiting a clinic for HIV+ kids. The pediatrician explained that they advised the HIV+ moms to breastfeed their kids, knowing it would almost certainly lead to them contracting HIV as well. They did this because the alternative was the kids dying of malnutrition.

So to me, Grace is…

…living where the community cares if my wife lives or dies.

…having to make choices between reconstruction options, not HIV vs death by malnutrition.

…a free trip to Africa.

…world-class surgeons who work for 13 hours to not just get rid of all the cancer, but go to extremes to make you look the way you did before they started.

…God providing money to pay for it all.

…people we don’t even know bringing us amazing food everyday.

…family who drops everything to be by your side in a time of need.

…an endless stream of friends almost begging to be able to do something for us.

…God providing the strength to fly 25 hours back from Africa and have minimal jetlag so I can be there to care for my wife.

…two amazing kids who are excited Mommy is cancer free so we can start adopting.

…God stepping into our pain, and being more real to us than He ever has before.

There is nothing in me that merits me getting any of these things more than Mary Ida or the kids at the HIV clinic. I have no idea why Jesus would show us such favor — but thank you Jesus.

The cancer seems to be confined to the area where they originally biopsied. These results probably rule out option 2 below, and now we wait for the genetic test, which we may know results from by Friday.

There’s so little in this process that’s certain. Waiting on test results seems to stretch our faith more that even finding them out. The biggest fear seems to be uncertainty.

This whole process is tearing down our pride that thought we knew what tomorrow would look like. James 4:13-16 puts it this way:

Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit”— yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.” As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.

So today, we don’t boast in what tomorrow will hold. We do fight to do what it is “the right thing to do.” Today, that is celebrate Abbey’s 4th birthday.

Love you all and thanks for your prayers.

Today, after t-ball Grady came home and wrote this:

We are crazy proud of how great he is at writing even at age 5. For those of you who can’t exactly make it out, though it says:

“Oh how I love God because he first loved me.”

More than his writing we are very proud of his sweet heart.

It was the third time we had been at the Sue A. de Mille Women’s Diagnostic Center at Plano Presbyterian Hospital. Holly has has every test run that they offer there (except a bone density which she shouldn’t need for a long time). The staff has been amazing — a true blessing have been sent there by our doctor.

That said, the test was pretty scary. This MRI is louder than normal — lots of pounding, popping — all while you are facing face down. At least nothing needed cut open, and there were no big needles for this test.

We didn’t get any results from the MRI. Since it’s so specialized, only a few radiologists can read it. Also, it takes a lot more pictures than a normal MRI, so it takes a while to analyze. The end result is, we won’t know any more until Monday or Tuesday.

Emotionally, we are pretty raw. We find the grief comes in waves, caused by the most random things. It might be looking at the beautiful faces of our kids, or even trying to make the smallest plan for the future. we’re trying to take it one day (sometimes one hour, or one minute) at a time.

We’ve had great support from family, friends, and church. We don’t know what’s next but we do know God is good and that He has a great purpose in all this. A friend sent this, and it has been great comfort:

There is nothing—absolutely no circumstance, no trouble, no testing that can ever touch me until, first of all, it has gone past God and past Christ right through to me. If it has come that far, it has come with a great purpose which I may not understand at the moment. But as I refuse to become panicky, as I lift up my eyes to Him, and I accept it as coming from the throne of God for some great purpose of blessing to my own heart, no sorrow will ever disturb me, no trial will ever disarm me, no circumstance will cause me to fret, and I shall rest in the joy of what my Lord is. That is the rest of victory. –Dr. Alan Redpath