Two weeks ago now, my third child was diagnosed with a very rare, very aggressive malignant cancer.
Do you know what I spent this morning doing? The same thing I have spent so many mornings doing since he came into this world…tracking Chase, keeping him out of disastrous trouble, and praying silently for control over my impatient frustration that is almost always right under the surface with my high maintenance (but adorable and precious) child.
Real talk.
Teams of doctors literally surround us with prognoses and numbers and yet it’s scarily like every other day…only he has a central line and IV fluids and we are in a hospital, not our home.
How shockingly fast our circumstances become mundane. There is nothing mundane about this situation, and yet, already, I feel my mind and emotions coming around to it in a sort of attempt to deal with our new reality.
I guess what I’m trying to get at is this…my moment by moment grace today is in asking the Lord to keep the swift and fleeting nature of our lives in front of me. …never in an overwhelming sense, but rather in the sense that every second is meaningful, precious, and an opportunity to point ourselves and our children to the cross.
Because it is all too easy to consider a terminal illness on one day and be thinking about the laundry on the next. Trust me. I know.
“Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.” Hebrews 12:1-2 (ESV)
