When Easy Is A Lie

Two years and a lifetime ago…

It was in the middle of a vortex of cold air sweeping through the January winter, the days dark and frigid, when we got the news. The results of the biopsy were in.

It was cancer. 

Again. 

In those first minutes, we reeled even though in a strange way, we had been expecting it. And in those first weeks, we heard one sentence stated a dozen ways and we believed it:

“This is the easy cancer”. 

In a way, this is a clinically supportable thought. The sheer number of days spent in the hospital, the number of moments we walked to the edge of life and back when Chase was two and fighting brain cancer – it doesn’t even compare. And yet…

Today is the second anniversary of Chase’s second cancer – a cancer that still sits in his body, making it outlast the actual time his brain cancer sat throughout his body by a good eight months. And these two years have been heartbreaking and complicated in so many unexpected ways.

You see, the problem with the word “easy” is that it is an immeasurable concept. There is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to the complicated complexities put before each of us. And the use of those types of words always end up pushing me down and hollowing me out. 

If it was supposed to be easy and it doesn’t feel that way, then there must be something wrong with me, right? 

And then I take those wrong, hard thoughts into the day with me and I walk into the processing, the tears and the pain not only unprepared, but feeling inadequate in all ways – because it wasn’t supposed to be this way. It was supposed to be “easy”.

And perhaps that’s the true cruelty of that word – “easy” – when life isn’t (and it almost never is), then my focus invariably turns to that second phrase:

“it wasn’t supposed to be this way”. 

But very few things from the start of the world were ever supposed to be this way .

“Easy” makes us sit with our doubts.

“Easy” is ripe ground for seeds of discontentment.

“Easy” is sorrow incarnate when it comes to the table of suffering.

There is no easy. 

Dear ones, I believe with my whole heart there is only ordained.

And it’s in relinquishing the “easy” word that I find peace. …not in this life, to be sure, but in hope. 

With hope, the hard melts and reshapes. It never disappears. Life is hard and broken and will be until I see Jesus with my own eyes. But hope is the banquet at the table of suffering.

Hope is rich and beautiful even when the tears are rolling down my face and my heart is crying out “two years of this that was supposed to be easy…?!” 

Hope holds me up when I weaken.

Hope comforts me when I weep. 

Hope means purpose even in cancer … and second cancers.

So throw out the thoughts of “easy” with all its frustration and futility and “What’s wrong with me?” questions.

And hold on to hope with all of it’s “God is good even here” truths. It won’t be easy, but then again, “easy” was never a part of the story. And what a story it is…

Moment by moment.

“Why am I discouraged? Why is my heart so sad? I will put my hope in God…”

“…each day the Lord pours his unfailing love upon me.”

Psalm 43:5a, 42:8a