SHHHHH....
This is the first Christmas we will spend without our daddy at home. Our family has always been very close with lots of traditions that have maintained throughout our childhood and carried over to our adulthood. One tradition, that my dad started about the time me and my sisters were all able to think for ourselves (pretty young since we are all girls. haha), was the yearly questions. Dad was always good at asking questions at the dinner table or before bed, but the yearly questions were a bit tougher to answer. They always required thought and somehow a piece of yourself...questions about your future, your greatest victory, a time when you chose to forgive, a time when you should have, about making friends, or learning lessons. All questions that could transform your thought processes.
Every year I would spend time before Christmas Eve trying to figure out what the question was going to be that year. But inevitably, he would go a completely different direction than I was prepared to go. When 7pm on December 24th came around, after the nachos had been eaten and the Christmas story had been carefully read from Luke 2, the question was asked of each of us. We gave our answers, usually through teary eyes, and followed that time with sweet times of prayer for one another based on our answers. So, this year, dad will not be able to ask the questions, but I will sit beside him and share about the wonderful ways that he shaped our lives with the questions he did get to ask.
Thank you Jason for the pictures.
Here's Andi using her spoon all by herself. Fruity Cheerios in a Dora bowl. What could be better?
Andi got her first Christmas present early while her Gram and Papaw were in town for Thanksgiving. Her first baby doll stroller. No hesitation here. She knew just what to do with it.
Doesn't she look so big here? I didn't think girls learned how to hold that sassy stance until they were at least 10. Boy, do we have our work cut out for us. But with that sweet grin, it is worth every moment.
This is only picture I got before my camera battery died (and I've lost the charger - an issue for another day). Even still, you can see that we had some cute trick-or-treaters to send into the neighborhood.
1. Today it was cold in Tennessee. That means my kids get to wear their winter hats for the first time. Aren't they cute?!
Doctors released Joshua to come home today. His blood counts are still very low which means we are on restriction until they come back up. Joshua feels good despite these low counts so we will doing some creative entertaining. Thankfully we have a big backyard with tons of freshly fallen leaves. See you all on the other side of good counts.
October 18 marked the 2 year anniversary of Joshua's diagnosis with leukemia. He continues to do well, after a 2 year cycle of oral chemo everyday, intravenous chemo every 4 weeks, and a spinal tap every 12. There's only about 15 more of those 4 week cycles to go, as we will end treatment, God willing, before Christmas of next year.
Last year at this time, Jana and I posted some of the reflections we had over the first year. You can read that post if you're interested by clicking here and scrolling down a little bit to the entry from October 18.
To continue the tradition, here are some more reflections that have come as we finish this leg of the journey. If you've been reading the blog a while, some of these might sound familiar, but here goes:
1. God draws straight lines with crooked sticks. I once heard Harry Reeder say this, and it's proven to be true. I think it expresses the confidence that God has a clear purpose and direction in mind though the pathway is crooked. It's difficult. Faith is trusting in the one holding the stick, not in the apparent circumstances of the drawing.
2. Real community bears each other's burdens. As heavy as leukemia is, we look around us and see the shoulders of our friends and family drooping under its weight as well. They don't turn it on and off either; the carry it with us.
3. There's nothing like a plastic sword to help out a kid. Joshua and I bought a sword for 50 cents at a garage sale, and many a tough day has been made better by fighting off imaginary dragons in our living room.
4. Everybody medicates their pain somehow; some forms of medication are just more obvious. There's alcohol, drugs, and other substances we use to try and take us away from reality, but then there's also movies, music, and, yes, even church. These are all things we can lose ourselves in, all as a part of an effort to not face up to the reality of our circumstances.
5. I think people during moments of crisis come to church, but I don't think they come there looking for answers necessarily. Maybe this is where we go wrong sometimes. Instead, I think they come looking for an acknowledgment of struggle, that life is difficult and not quite as cut and dry as we might think.
6. In some ways, I think waiting rooms are the closest representations to heaven there is, simply because there are no petty divisions in waiting rooms. There's no black or white, rich or poor. There is only a group of people with a common linking that bonds them together. Such is the case with heaven. People aren't divided along racial or economic lines; they instead are bound together by one common thing—a pair of wooden beams nailed together.
7. Control is a myth. We strive and strive for it, but the reality is we are one moment away from life turning upside down. Insurance, 401K's, burglar alarms, seat belts - they're all fine things, so long as we don't fool ourselves into thinking we are really controlling anything.
8. There are alot of unsung heroes at the hospital, people like the care partners who take temperatures and change diapers with such skill that they don't even wake you up at night. Or the nurses who are willing to play in a pick up baseball game in the hallway. Those folks are rarely recognized but are vital for putting one foot in front of the other in this journey.
9. Those who walk deeply with the Lord are also those who have wrestled with Him. Indeed, I think a big part of our spiritual development and growth is our ability to process and embrace the pain that all of us have in our lives.
10. That being the case, most of us never do. We never think too much about it because it hurts, and so we find ourselves outwardly moving forward but inwardly stalled in the middle of our pain, resentment, and bitterness.
11. It's okay to acknowledge the difficulties we have with God; it's not okay to live there. At some point you've got to move forward in faith. That's what the psalmist did; so many of the psalms have a section of complaint against the Lord, but they don't end like that. They end with the psalmist making the choice to believe and to have hope. And it is a choice.
12. Is there a greater blessing from the Lord than kids? Don't think so - at least not today.
13. God is more interested in who we are than what we do. I have alot of questions about the future. Where will we go? What will I do? I know those questions are important, and I know God cares about answering them. But I think He cares more what's going on inside of me, knowing that the work in me will lead to work through me.
14. God is mysterious. That's all I have to say about that.
15. Faith is work. Some have argued throughout history that Christianity is a crutch for the weak-minded, for those who cannot accept that the universe hands out disease and blessing completely at random. I disagree. In the last 2 years if would have been much easier many days to stop believing. It's harder to believe, because believing means wrestling with the truths of God.
16. Finally this - I am convinced that the Lord loves us deeply. He's not mad at us. And He wants to walk with us intimately. That's good news.
Today is October 18, and 2 years ago today I was sitting in a doctor’s office. We had noticed a rash on Joshua’s stomach and I took him to his pediatrician to get him fixed up. The rash ended up being a symptom of a greater problem, caused by capillaries bursting below his skin because his white blood cell count was so high. His white blood cell count was so high because some 80% of his blood cells were affected by leukemia.
Today’s the anniversary, and today we have alot of hope in this situation as Joshua’s treatment continues to press on and go well. But it does feel strange to be grizzled veterans at this point, having done this stuff for 2 years. On the blog on Monday, I’ll be posting some reflections from year 2, but until then, thanks for reading and praying with us through this.
