My phone chirped with a new message. Finishing a chapter in the book I was reading, I put down my coffee and headed to my phone. It was a praise from my friend Whitney. Her friend Karen, who had been battling cancer that had originated in the spine and spread to her brain and liver, got a great report. No cancer in the spine or brain, and very little remained in the liver.
I was thrilled for this young mom that I hadn’t met! God DOES work miracles still! Then my mind immediately leaped to my own mom’s latest CAT scan, whose results we would hear the next day. Maybe God will heal her just like Karen!
As quickly as that thought burst in my mind, a new one quickly took its place. Not a half hour before, I had just written a piece for my Glory in the Garden devotional I’ll be self-publishing next month. The subject? How sometimes we watch others receive a full drenching of rain while our own soil is cracked with drought. I wrote:
Sometimes he withholds the proverbial rain to teach us to trust him in the drought. Other times it’s to spur us to press into him in prayer. And other times we may simply never know. But we do know we can trust him.
All of a sudden my hope that my mom would be healed miraculously like Karen was wobbling. Instead I had a feeling that it wasn’t by accident that I had just tapped those words on the keyboard.
Sure enough, the news we got today wasn’t good. The tumors in Mom’s lungs have grown larger and new ones have appeared. She will begin a stronger, weekly chemo regimen with the hopes of slowing their growth.
Though I’m not surprised, I’m still processing this new information. I vacillate between extreme sadness and hope in a God who doesn’t allow anything to happen to his beloved children by accident.
Like a lifeline in a torrential sea of doubt and fear, my mind clings to every verse of hope I can think of, specifically the verse that has been my companion in these 18 months since the diagnosis: “You will keep in perfect peace him whose mind is steadfast because he trusts in you.” (Isaiah 26:3)
I may not understand why God heals some and not others. But I can celebrate with Whitney and Karen while trusting God with my mom. His ways are higher than my ways. His thoughts are higher than my thoughts. Isaiah 55:8-9)
I can trust him. I WILL trust him. Rain or drought.