When your heart cries...

I've wanted to write this post for a while now but I haven't really been able to form my thoughts well enough to put pen to paper - or so to speak.

My heart has been heavy but I haven't been able to communicate the depth of the weight.  Maybe it's because I haven't really been able to understand all I want to say; maybe because my heart understands it, but in my head it is incomprehensible. 

Some days I think I finally have the words I want to share, other days I sit and stare at my keyboard unable to say what I need to say.  When your heart cries, there aren't visible tears.  When your heart cries, the sobs are inaudible.  When your heart cries, others don't know you're crying.  When your heart cries, sometimes there just are no words.

What I'm going to say could so easily be misconstrued as judgment, and I don't mean it to be.  That is why it's been so hard to write this post.  It's not a judgment.  It's more of a sadness, a heart cry.

Do you know how you feel when someone deeply hurts your feelings?  That is how this feels, only it's not my feelings that have been hurt.  I feel as if my spirit has been wounded.

The whole time I was fighting cancer I kept one very important thought in mind.  "The attacks we face are not attacks against us, but rather they are attacks on God's glory."  Every time I faced a new obstacle, a questionable scan, a negative report, my soul would say, "whether I live or die, please do not let this go in vain."

From November to April, five very long months, I prayed not only for God to heal me, but moreover for his will to be done.  It is the hardest prayer in the world to pray.  When faced with a very real foe, one you know has the power to take your very life, to utter the words, "Not my will but thine be done."  It is the hardest prayer to pray when watching your children open their gifts on Christmas morning, "Lord let me stay, not my will but thine be done."  It is the hardest prayer to pray while watching your husband do the best he can do to hold it all together, "Lord, don't let me leave him, not my will but thine be done."  As sad and as difficult as those prayers were, and still are, the underlying outcry of my heart was that all of this would be for His glory.  

Recently I was at a large gathering of people, many of them I knew on a personal level, many of them only in passing.  Most of them either knew about my cancer because they know our family, or they knew by way of this blog.  A few, however, didn't know at all.  

One sweet lady I've known casually for a number of years stopped my and said, "I love your short haircut!  It's adorable."  I should have said "thank you" and moved on.  But as we chatted for a few more minutes, I told her of the journey our family has been on this past year.  You could see the shock and surprise on her face.  The reactions are always the same, "But you're so young," or "But you're so healthy," or "But that's not a women's cancer."

As the event continued four more people stopped to comment about my hair, if I knew them well I could share with them, if I didn't I would smile and say thank you.  

Over the last three weeks this has continued to happen to me.  People will say, "You look like you've lost weight," or "I love your hair cut, I wish I could pull that off."  At first I was willing to share our story with them, but something shifted inside of me starting at the back to school event that I've carried with me since then.

You see, during my cancer treatment, the response was always, always, "I'll pray for you."  But the response somehow changed after I was cancer free - and here's where all of this is leading -- the response shifted and people weren't Godward anymore.  People began to say things like, "So the chemotherapy worked," or "You must had had a great team of doctors."  

I didn't recognize it at the time, but it was soul-crushing to me, it is soul-crushing to me, that every day of our journey was fashioned by our Heavenly Father, every day we were held in his loving hand, every day we were carried because we could not possibly walk this road on our own, and now people were saying "Oh it was the medication," "oh it was the treatment," or "oh it was your team of doctors."

Don't get me wrong, I am thankful for the medications.  I am ever-thankful for the chemotherapy, that God-aweful drug that kills your body in order to save it.  I am forever indebted to the doctors and surgeons that worked so diligently to find a solution to my problem.  

But my heart cries, weeps, at the thought that people, Christian people, are so eager to give credit to modern medicine rather than to the creator of our very lives.  When my friend said to me, "So the chemotherapy worked," it wasn't that it hurt my feelings, it was my soul that was wounded.  If all of this was for God's glory, why wasn't he receiving the glory?  

If this wasn't about me, wasn't about a life-stealing disease called cancer, wasn't about fear of death, wasn't about sickness, but rather about the one who bore our sins and wore stripes for our healing, why isn't He getting the glory?  

I've carried this with me for weeks because I honestly do not know how to respond well to these reactions.  I don't know how to politely, "No.  It wasn't just the chemotherapy.  God touched my body!"  I want them to desperately know that I had a 22-33% chance of survival.  I want them to know that the tumor inside of me was black and oozing to the point the doctors couldn't even take a biopsy of it.  I want them to know that it took 2/3 - 3/4 of my bladder and that it had started to invade muscle wall.  I want them to know the look on my doctor's face and see the tears streaming down his cheeks as he told us that this cancer was "aggressive" and "high grade," meaning "your chances of beating this are slim."

I want them to see his face five months later when we walked back into my hospital room, tears filling his eyes again.  I want them to see the look of wonder and lack of understanding as he delivered the pathology reports to us.  I want them to hear him as he kissed me on the top of the head and said, "Honey, this is nothing short of a miracle."

I know that my God spared my life.  I know the mountain I faced; the mountain God so graciously removed.  I know the probability of certain death; the life-saving grace He bestowed upon me and my family.

Yes, I am thankful for modern medicine, but I know that none of it would have worked without the merciful touch of my Heavenly Father.  And my heart cries to know that people are overlooking His hand in this.

I heard someone say recently, "I'm so sick of hearing about grace."  My heart wept within me, because I now understand the meaning of His grace.  Once you experience grace in this way you can never go back to the former ways of thinking.  

I guess I just want to say for the record that I give God all the glory for my recovery.  I know there were many human hands involved to get me where I am today.  But I also know that my chances were slim, my options were few and my human hope was minimal.  When I sign off each post I say, "Only by His Grace."  Please understand that I mean those words desperately.  Every day, every moment, every second of my life, every diagnosis, every cure, every blessing is and will always be...

Only By His Grace,

Billie