He’s in the Waiting

He’s in the Waiting

In June, my husband was due for a scan, but not feeling any urgency, we pushed it off until mid-July. He had an MRI done here in town, and the scans were snail-mailed to his neurosurgeon at Mayo Clinic. Then the scans got lost, and my husband called the local clinic, and they sent them again. In the meantime, however, the doctor who’d read the MRI locally, informed my husband that he believed his benign brain tumor could be growing back. He emailed him the scans, so he could see for himself.

Right now, we’re living in an apartment that runs parallel to the warehouse my husband uses for his business. Therefore, I walked out of my kitchen, through the breezeway, and into his office. I stared at his computer screen, which depicted an image of his brain.

A white spot was there, at the back of his skull; the same as it had been before.

Until that point, I’d been fine. My husband is in great shape and has not had any symptoms. But after I saw that white spot, I had the hardest week since his emergency surgery in 2014. Life is just life, ya know? And in addition to this excruciating waiting period, our year-old washer and fridge stopped working within days of each other, and my five-year-old decided she did not like K-5.

What this waiting period showed me the most is that I have an anger/trust problem, which I thought surgery had eradicated the first time around, but, just like the tumor, a few slow-growing cells remained. At my lowest point, I stood in the warehouse, simultaneously crying and railing at my husband. My five-year-old was at school, but my two-year-old heard me.

She said, “Why’d you say that?”

Stacking baskets of laundry into the minivan, I wiped my face and said, “Because Mommy’s scared.”

But just as my husband and I hope and pray that this experience with his brain tumor will not resemble the last, I hope and pray that my reaction to this tumor will not resemble the last. On Saturday, Mayo Clinic confirmed the tumor’s growth through a letter, and I was in no mood to go to church on Sunday or to act like everything was fine. My sister-in-law recently joined the worship team, and she texted me about a song that the worship leader had selected for the first time, and how it screamed to her heart that Jesus saw what we were going through.

For some reason, I misread her text and, during worship, listened closely to the first song, expecting a message to be hidden somewhere. There was nothing. But then they began to play the second song, “Forever” by Kari Jobe, which I’d played over and over after my husband’s surgery, particularly during an icy drive from our farm back to the hospital, when I interceded and cried as so much remained unknown.

And, just like that, as my sister-in-law and the worship team sang, the anger from my lack of trust fell away and I sat with my baby on my lap as tears poured down my face.

Less than three years since that icy drive and here I am on a similar journey into the unknown, but while I wait, I am going to remember what I saw.

On Wednesday of last week, I was carefully driving in the rain as four rambunctious five and six year olds hollered and squealed in the back of our minivan. I was almost to their school when I looked and saw a father standing at the end of the driveway with his young daughter. She was wearing a backpack that was nearly bigger than she was, and he held a rainbow-colored umbrella over her head.

I glanced at the wet road and at my windshield wipers, which were going back and forth, back and forth as the deluge fell, and I could suddenly see myself as that young girl: standing in the middle of a rainstorm with a load on my back that sometimes feels too heavy to carry. And yet, in the middle of it, my Heavenly Father remains, shielding me from the deluge.

Though the rain will continue to fall, though the pack I will still have to carry, my Heavenly Father is there, with me in the rain, holding that rainbow-colored umbrella over my head, which is a promise that He will take care of me and my family, regardless of what may befall.

How has your heavenly father carried you through a storm? Please share an uplifting story.