Good News

I got the good news yesterday afternoon. I'm OK. The "mass" in my liver turned out to be something with a long name that just means a clump of blood vessels. No treatment necessary. Thank you God!

I am so grateful for all who were praying for me during this week of tests and waiting. I am so grateful to my husband who showed me nothing but strength, support and absolute faith in God. (Okay he now admits he may have been the teensiest bit worried, but kept it under his hat.)

There is a miracle here, but it's not that the mass turned out OK. The mass was always what it was. Oh I don't doubt that God could easily have changed it from cancer to not-cancer, because I believe he can do anything. But I don't think that's what happened here. No, the miracle in all this is that I wasn't scared. I'm not saying I didn't give it a thought. In truth, it was never very far from my mind. But I wasn't really scared. I've been in training for this for quite awhile. I have been exercising my faith muscles through the teaching of the Bible. I've learned from the writing of Norman Vincent Peale and Emmett Fox, among others, how to replace fear thoughts with faith thoughts that come straight from the Bible. When I did think about the unknown thing in my liver, I focused instead on God, and on Christ and on the promises that God will never leave me, and Jesus will be with me "even unto the end of the age." So many lessons I have been learning just jumped right in and became my first defense. This is my real miracle. It wasn't that I was sure the "thing" was nothing. I considered that it might indeed be something. And it was still OK. I slept at night. I thought not only about God's presence and very tangible power within me, I also thought about my grandparents back in 1919 during the deadly flu epidemic. Both deathly ill in bed, people "dropping like flies all around", as Grandma once told me. She was pregnant with my father. Outlook not good. But they both survived and just carried on. My mother with cirrhosis of the liver, just keeping on keeping on. And my husband, through countless cancer treatments, procedures, chemotherapy, and major surgeries, just keeping on living and working and being a man. So many heroes for me to draw strength from. You get what you get, you do what you can about it, and you keep going. And one day God takes you home and that's the best part.

It's really hard to put this into words, but it's words that sustained me. The word of God, and the words of people inspired by God.

So I got good news this time. This particular challenge is over. But there will not always be good news at the end of an ordeal. My miracle was that I was ready to hear bad news and depend on God to sustain me through it. I thank God for all of this. And I pray that he will keep teaching me and help me to let others know that his help is real and immediate. If God be for us, who can be against us? Even illness. Even bad news.