“The doctor says I have a couple of swollen lymph nodes” my husband told me after his annual physical. “Probably due to a sinus infection but he wants to see me again if they don’t go away.”
So we waited. And they didn’t go away. So more tests. And more waiting. And more tests. And waiting.
Advent is the season of waiting for four weeks until the baby Jesus arrives on Christmas Eve. This felt longer than that. It was more like waiting for the second coming. Eternal waiting and wondering. Finally, on Good Friday morning, my husband called me to say that what we assumed was nothing, was actually a something, a malignant growth.
So there were more tests and more waiting. It was agony for an impatient planner like me. The happy news is that my husband’s cancer has a cure rate of 95% . The unhappy news is that they will “beat up his body” (that is a medical term that the doctors and nurses both use, said with love of course) before he is going to reach that cure. We expect the summer to be filled with some rough patches but that by fall we will be back into our regular patterns of life.
I will not pretend that I have really “processed” all of this spiritually and emotionally. There are moments of despair and vulnerability. And glimpses of the sheer goodness of life with this one I love so intensely. There are times when your pastor is just a person, as susceptible to heartbreak as anyone in the world. God’s love does not shield us from immersion in the human drama.
But even when my mind wanders to the worst case scenarios, I know that woven into the fabric of my life is a vast network of people who pray for us, who reveal God’s abstract love in myriad acts of compassionate kindness. So mostly, I am grateful, to travel this way with all of you.
