Do you ever have this feeling that if you could only get through this hard thing that you’re walking through right now, this one setback or season of uncertainty, that everything would be right in your life?
From the moment Adam made the first swipe through my hair with the clippers that Thursday afternoon in April of 2015, I was ready to be finished with being bald. As I watched my hair fall to the floor, I couldn’t wait to look at the calendar and figure out when my hair would start to grow back. I looked at survivors with long hair and counted back to could figure out how many years it would be before I had long hair again. I figured out which month that I would be able to have surgery, then radiation, and set an end date for all of this in my mind. I just needed to get through all of it and put it behind me. I just needed my body healed and my hair back. My happy ending.
Do you believe that if you got that one thing you’ve been waiting for – the healing, the baby, the ring, the acceptance letter – then you could finally sit back and enjoy your life and the people in it? I have to admit that I have felt this way so many different times in life, and especially when cancer was the mountain that I needed moved. I’ll also admit that often I have completely missed the mark with my attitude about these seasons. When I know that I have to wait, I first think about how long that may be and what I could possibly do to shorten that time just a little. Instead of submitting to God’s timing, my first step is to formulate a plan to get myself from Point A to Point B, with my goal being to rush through this season of waiting and arrive at the outcome as soon as possible. I’m ready to take control and make a to-do list of things I can do to make the house sell or get accepted to that university. Or get wrapped up in in my thoughts about how I can finally get that person to change or this relationship to be healed. Which leaves me frustrated and disappointed and exhausted.
As I share my journey through cancer now that four years have passed, the happy ending is not all that I want you to see.
I don’t want you to see the outcome – the physical healing – and to think that joy was waiting there like some pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. And don’t let my smiling face fool you into thinking that this was a year where I was able to choose joy in every moment, every day. Just hours after those pictures I was in tears, hanging a towel over the bathroom mirror so I wouldn’t have to look at myself when I walked by. And there were many days when I just wanted to walk outside in the parking lot at our apartment and scream how unfair all of this was. This middle part, the long season of waiting and pain and struggling,is what I don’t want you to miss. Because while I wanted nothing more than to detour around every part of it, that is where the refining and the true healing happened. And these places of waiting, though they don’t seem nearly as attractive as that place we’re heading, are indeed the exact places where God is continuing to stretch us and prepare us for all that we can’t yet see.
I learned in the wrestling that year that getting through it, getting to the other side of the vast ocean that cancer was, was not the point. And just as being cancer-free wasn’t the end goal or what he desired most for me, what he desires most for you may look different from that resolution that you are set on. There may be so much more that he is doing beyond what your perspective allows you to see. For me, in the middle – in the most painful and difficult days to walk through – is where my heart was being changed and my desires were being altered. This is where I was being set free from lies I’d believed and becoming aware of things about myself that needed to be stripped away. It was here that my heart was being softened, where I was coming to recognize how to extend things like grace and forgiveness, and here that I was coming to a deeper understanding of what it meant for him to truly be enough. None of that work could have been done in me if it would have been a quick sprint to the finish line.
Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.
Romans 5:3-4
Maybe you’re tempted to glaze over this verse because you’ve heard it so many times, but when you spend some time with it, you’ll realize how much it speaks to our waiting. Some waiting can feel like suffering, but even then we’re reminded that there is work going on behind the scenes. Work that we may never understand this side of heaven. Work that is developing perseverance and character. We can wait with hope, holding on to the promise that we can rejoice even then because none of it is meaningless.
I’m I think this was written just for me. I want it over with. I want to see the other side and be done with the pain. I want to get through it because if I can just get to the other side then I know for sure that there is another side and I don’t have to be content with where I am and to accept the other side may not come like I think it will. Thank you for reminding me that our Lord never leaves us no matter where we are in our journey! Thank you for pointing the way for me!