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Life Radically Changes

It’s crushing to hear your beautiful, courageous wife has stage IV breast cancer.

Two years ago our world stopped when she was first diagnosed. Now it feels like we are watching someone else’s life unfold, not ours. I WANT this to be someone else’s life. I want to wake up and realize this all one bad dream.

I know it’s impossible to make sense of something like this in the heat of the moment, but I can’t help but try. To question God, and to beg God to make this go away.

This week seeing the outpouring of emails, calls, Scripture and words of encouragement for Heidi, myself and our girls has been so uplifting and I am so grateful. I am humbled, I cannot express how much it means to me to have such a support network now in this very confusing time, and I thank you all, and ask for continued prayer for Heidi, myself and the girls.

All that being said this is the first time I have really been able to sit in my thoughts since we got the news last Tuesday. One of the things to come to the forefront in that time of reflection was the vast difference of my past personal pains/losses and this current storm. Specifically my teenage years, and how alone I felt in my pain and loss. I will give you the cliff notes version.

Midway through my seventh grade school year our family moved 80 miles north from Costa Mesa to Thousand Oaks, CA. Navigating this new town and school was tough, even tougher dealing with the usual brutal nature teenagers treat each other. Jump ahead three years to an intense one-year span that began with losing one of my few close friends to leukemia. That was followed by a bad concussion that knocked me out of school and kept me house-bound for two weeks, with lingering symptoms for about a year. That rough year was capped with the passing of my much-loved grandfather due to Alzheimers and lung cancer. In the midst of that intense year I felt so alone and I didn’t feel like I had anyone I could trust to share that pain with.

It took me all my college years and early post-college years to develop a community of friends to come to terms with the past struggles of loneliness and hurt and confront the fact that I had felt that God had abandoned me. I vividly remember the day when I had that moment of clarity, of realizing that God had been with me even in the midst of my lowest times.

Obviously the pains of life haven’t ceased but they seem much more bearable. Even reflecting on the past six years, they have been tough years, but to have a community of support in the midst of it all has been so encouraging.

I will be honest. It’s hard to see the silver-lining in this current storm, but I have the assurance that I am not alone in this.

Last week while on vacation in Colorado with Heidi and the girls we had this storm cloud lingering while we waited for an official diagnosis. I had this Andrew Peterson song rolling around in my head and couldn’t get it out. The context of the song doesn’t exactly fit our current circumstance, but the sentiment is there.

Here’s the lyrics if you want to read them.

And I do pray that God does ‘make a different way’ for our family.

I again thank everyone for all their prayers, words of encouragement and help that have already overflowed into our house. It is much appreciated.

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