In The Quiet

It’s the wee hours of the morning and I find myself awake. My thoughts are rolling through my mind fueled by the quiet of the night. In the quiet I sit pondering my life. It has been a year since I started on this journey of battling cancer. It’s hard to even grasp that as I lay here in the quiet. So much has happened and literally everything has changed.

It sometimes seems I feel equal parts frustration and happiness. When the frustration rears its ugly head I have to forcibly remind myself that though I am not where I want to be, there has been much victory. I would like to say that it is easy to be happy in the midst of this process but that would be a lie. It can be a battle to cling to the joy of what He has done.

I wish I could better explain how this battle feels but I don’t think I could ever find the words and even then it would only reflect my own experience as every cancer journey is different.  I sometimes get frustrated because people can forget that you are fighting for every day of life. It’s not just trying to feel better it is literally battling to live every day. I know that people don’t absorb that the same way the person in the battle does and most times for me it just rolls off my back like water off a duck but there are days. Some days as I deal with doctors, insurance and a never ending litany of medical conversations this can rear up. If I were to say that there weren’t times where I struggled that would be a lie.

I have been told many people that I am dealing with this battle well but I don’t see it that way sometimes. If I am it’s not because I am brave, or strong or because it doesn’t challenge me every moment of every day. It’s because it does. It’s because I am desperate and I need to cling to My Jesus. It’s because in these moments cloaked in the quiet I need to pour out the battle on the page and be real. I don’t want people to see this as easy because it would be a lie. I want people to see it as the battle that it is so that when they face a battle they know it is a choice. It can literally be live or die. That is my battle, every day but the even bigger battlefield is how I live. In truth, though I am facing a physical battle we all face this same struggle.. how do we live?

I sit in the quiet with the Holy Spirit refueling me to continue living for God. You see I now understand what Paul meant when he said “For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain.” (Phil 1:21). I may be facing this in a physical battle but we are all in fact facing this same choice every day. Do we choose to live in Him, for Him and because of Him or do we just coast through life until it is no more? It would be nice if we could just live peacefully but it would be a lie because we live in a battlefield.

It’s a battle because there is an enemy of our soul that is waiting around every corner to rob, kill and destroy. He wants us to despair and lose our focus on God’s goodness and love. He wants us to get weary and lose faith. I am here to tell you that even in those quiet weary moments, those times when we wonder if we can press on, when we feel alone in the battle..even there God is with us. Yes it’s true that we live in a battlefield but it is also true that He has already won the battle! Our job is to live that victory and show others the way to it.

So as I sit here in the quiet I smile because I have a God I can cling to who lifts me up and sets my feet on His strength. He clothes me with it, and I can rejoice because I know that He is all I need. I also allow these moments in the quiet to renew my strength so that I can choose to live that others may know how wide, high and deep is His love.

“For this reason I bow my knees to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, from whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named, that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with might through His Spirit in the inner man, that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height— to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.”

‭‭Ephesians‬ ‭3‬:‭14‬-‭19‬ ‭NKJV‬‬