Trust God For The Results

As the leaves turn, and I pray each and every day, way more than once per day, in the wee hours, in the car, in the quiet of my home, in traffic, even in the grocery store (not out loud, of course:), I pray to God that He is going to get me through the moments that I tend to relive the circumstances that led up to the day we were told cancer was to be part of our journey. Lately, I literally cannot breathe, and I wonder, does my breathlessness have to do with the reminder that the physical toll was taking place in these weeks, days before the mid-October phone call from Allison, signifying trouble? Am I breathing heavy because she herself could barely get her breath, just to walk the short distance to the train which would transport her to classes that she had begun to miss all too frequently? Or does the lack of air come with the changing of the trees, reminding me of the longest ride of my life, the car rolling along the highway as fast as we could get there, to our youngest daughter, lying in a hospital bed, strong but weary, and oh so ill? Do I lose my breath when I think about what my last month of innocence represents, a mother/wife/sister/school principal who was going about normal life, only to discover that the world was about to be shattered in just one phone call? For many reasons, I am breathless, my eyes brim with tears, and still, I know, we are only infancy stages of comprehending the magnitude of loss. God has shown me that there is no time frame, and since the moment of diagnosis, our course has been to learn to trust Him with the results.

Trusting Him with the outcome was something that happened early on...yes, we all arrived to that destination at different milestones. For weeks, I suppose, I thought as her mother, I could make it all go away, that this was not going to impact her, us, for more than a year or two. I thought I had some control, after all, I had birthed her, felt her heartbeat under mine, felt her first turn, the first time she rolled over, and the first time she kicked. And while Joe, Jen and I go hand in hand in the journey, still, we have found that trusting God for the results comes in different stages in our own time frame. When we all reached that point together, including Allison, there was nothing but beauty and peace. That did not mean that the pain was gone, the desires alleviated, the wish for her to outlive the cancer so profoundly strong that we would have given our own lives for it to be us in that bed, in that hospital, shaving our head, shopping for a wig, weary and weak, unable to roll over in bed, or take a private bath. We begged God to let it be one of us, we had a good life, hers was just beginning. Didn't He know what she was to become? Didn't He know she had plans to teach and live in a big city and marry and have children? Didn't He know that a part of our future as a family was destroyed the minute she left? Didn't He know that a sister was left to be the only child, with no one to share history or memories with...Didn't He know?

He did know and He did not give her cancer, this we knew. It was never a question of His acts, of Him sending cancer into a body, taking her breath away, making her endure procedure after procedure, injections and shots and treatments that simply sustained, and only for a very short time. But it was a question of how we find our way, how she did, and how to trust Him with the future, with the outcome. And in spite of the pain, the relentless grief that still consumes, He worked it out according to His plan. Now we must find our way through the anniversaries, the remembrances, the seasons, the holidays, the milestones. And as we did, and as He brought us together, we must now trust Him once again, still, for the results. He is providing the answers, the stamina, the determination, the willpower, the spirit to keep keeping on! It is only by His grace that I can be here this day, to seize it, and to welcome it, and to live it.

I surely hear stories each and every day of people who lose and walk paths that I cannot imagine. I wouldn't want to trade places for anything. And I recognize that others would not want to trade with us. But this is our road to travel, it is still winding, and uncharted, and filled with pain. But it is also an opportunity that I would have never suspected, to see and hear things that would never have been known to me, had God not chosen Allison to go to eternal rest so early in her life. I can fight it, deny it, let it consume me, but instead, I know that as I trust Him for the results, they will come and they will be of His desires and His timing. That is all I need for today, one day at a time.