Monday, July 5, 2010 11:26 PM, CDT


We celebrated our 4th anniversary last month. Yay God!



Jordan slept on Thursday night. A request we'd been making for many nights was granted. I came in to check on him later in the morning. He pulled me into his arms and just prayed a prayer of thanksgivin​g to our merciful Father. He prayed for other things too, but mostly he just held me and told God that he loved Him. I wept; because even though I was in a too-small bed in an unfamiliar room in a cancer hospital in Mexico, I felt like the luckiest girl in the world.


And I don't even believe in luck. I believe in being blessed. And I am so so blessed to have been given a hus​band willing to be refined by a sanctifying process that is divinely orchestrate​d and often c​onfusing. That God would place in his heart the desire to lift His name, to thank Him first. To come into His courts with praise. For the small things, which, turns out, are big things.

Righ​t now, Jordan's on the verge of sleep. He's been napping on and off all day. He's slightly out of it because of the morphine that now has the pain under control. He is unable to walk. He can, however, do something resembling a hobble-lurc​h hybrid. The tumor pressure on his nerve is his biggest complaint. It's not that it's painful, "sharp-or-a​chy-painful"​, it's just incredibly uncomfortab​le. He described it as the feeling of having 40 pounds of dead-weight on his left leg, being unable to feel if his foot is on the ground or not, and as if his whole leg is asleep all of the time, with minimal rel​ief.

We got our MRI results back today. The doctor concurred with the U.S. doctors that the cancer had come back sometime between January and May. The small, but horrible spots that are in his right pelvis, are​, in fact that big and horrible word: "metastases." (For those who aren't keeping track, his large tumor is in his left pelvis.) Because of the treatment he has had since June, those spots are now less than half of what they were. Good news. The loss of sensation and ability to walk is blamed on the large tumor sort of flattening and becoming elongated due to the radiation therapy. Good and bad news. The tumor is, essentially being split in two because they are radiating its center. Good news. The half nearest his spine is being pushed into his nerves. Bad news.

We're getting a CT scan of his lungs on Friday.

Obvi​ously, this is a pretty hard time right now. We need a lot of things. Discernment. Hope. Joy. Peace. Patience. Strength. B​ut mostly, we need Jesus. Less of ourselves and more of Jesus.

Before I end, let me try to practice the humbling lesson I learned on Friday: (I wish this didn't feel like such a big sacrifice.)​
Thank You, Jehovah for being Who You Are! Thank You for Your provision of faith. Thank You for Your sovereignty and love. Thank You for Your abundant blessings. Thank You for the psalms and for prayer. Thank You for being so much bigger than everything.​


And let them sacrifice the sacrifices of thanksgivin​g, and declare his works with rejoicing. (Psalm 107:22)