Easter Expectations: Waiting to inhale.
(An email started the afternoon of Easter).
I saw Valenta this morning after
church. She came over to the car to say how happy she was to hear that I
did not have to go through chemo. Her smile was warm and radiant,
and I knew she was truly filled with joy for me.
Valenta lives a couple of houses
down from us, and is a good friend of Kate and Jonathan. Her husband,
Felix is a Ph.D student at the University of Michigan with
Jonathan. Valenta and I have become friends as we faced breast
cancer surgery and then the follow-up challenges of “treatment.”
She is about one month ahead of me in the process, and she has begun
chemo. Her prognosis is filled with difficult challenges and
projections. Mine is radiation.
As we pulled out of the parking
lot and headed for home, I felt sadly guilty and inward.
I wanted to keep inhaling the
great gulps of resurrection infusion that we had just been singing about,
yet I couldn’t seem to get a good breath. As the cherry blossoms
and dogwood flew by the windows I felt blurry and unfocused. Why did
I get off so easy? Why did Valenta have to face the “whole
enchilada?” And Valenta has a little one to raise. I got away
with just six weeks of radiation.
I was not engaged in the
conversation in the car. I kept my gaze outside;
distant. I reflected on an article I had recently read
(by John Piper). He said things I didn’t necessarily want to hear – but
made me think deeply about amazing grace. The article was called, “Don’t
Waste your Cancer.” Slowly I began to inhale. Here are my own
thoughts on not wasting my cancer:
1)
I will waste my cancer if I spend more time
thinking and reading about my cancer, than I spend reading and thinking about
God.
2)
I will waste my cancer if I let “cancer patient”
define me, instead of my true identity as a much-loved child and creation of
God
3)
I will waste my cancer if I do not use this gift
of being sidelined as a time for reflection, meditation, and
re-evaluation. What busy adult has not longed for time to read books
they’ve had to set aside, journal, write or do whatever hobby they enjoy.
This is my time. This is my time to sort through old pictures and catch
up with good friends. My time to think.
4)
I will waste my cancer if I do not see splashes
of grace and streams of life-giving light in each day
5)
I will waste my cancer if I do not intentionally
love the people around me as if my life depended on it. Because it does.
Still breathing. Still
inhaling each day’s new light. For as Thoreau said, “Only that day dawns
to which we are awake.” Radiation began yesterday: 6 weeks, 5
days a week, 1 hour a day . . .
Much love,
Lois
