A note from me!! This is the second entry in a series of (probably) three in which I will share some stories about my time with my husband, Chris, as he underwent radiation therapy to kill the malignant tumor in his brain. If you missed entry 1, you can click on the link, here to get to it quickly!

…All this to say, I’m glad we’re in the habit of reading a devotional with our boys every morning. We’re constantly learning and seeking how we’re supposed to do each day! That’s what its been like for me, anyway.

What have I done on 30 weekdays for six weeks but deliver the kids to school, come home, collect Chris and drive up to Denver for his radiation and come home? All the while gearing up to swing at and combat any number of enemy emotions that might come my way. And really, those 30 days have offered positives in abundance, but more on that later. My point is that so many days it’s like the devotional entry is written just for me in that instance or that moment of crisis, doubt, anger, fear, disappointment, regret, concern, worry…but also, joy, praise, love, happiness and blessing.

The thing that I kicked and screamed about and felt such dread over prior to beginning the radiation treatment at the end of January, to my surprise, had become rather a source of comfort for me. It’s something that we knew we were supposed to do in order to rid Chris’s brain of the tumor. We were in a pocket of “safety” for the time being. As his last appointment for treatment approached last week, I was thrilled at the prospect of being finished with it all, however, the anticipation of changing out of what had become our “normal” was a source of anxiety for me. It reminds me of leaving the hospital with my first newborn and experiencing the uneasy feeling of doing it all on my own, without the nurses to show me how.

At the end of treatment last week, we said good-bye to the ones who knew how to do it, as it were. Chris and I walked out of the cancer center and into a world that we haven’t seen in a while, one with him going back to work, one of me returning to Monday morning grocery runs, Tuesday morning volunteering in Eli’s kindergarten class, taking a yoga class here and there, getting more writing done…Normal.

It won’t ever be normal, though. We aren’t anymore. I say it’s OK, but I don’t really think that way everyday. And, I have to reassure myself that its alright to feel my feelings sometimes, actually, more than sometimes. The best way to heal is to let it all out. Jesus says, “You are blessed when you let your tears fall freely. Joy comes in the morning.”

Our future anticipates very frequent MRI scans and results, blood work and vision screenings. For the rest of Chris’s life these things will be scheduled on our calendars. This reality can be daunting at times, but then I have to remember that its really all in how I choose to look at it and to throw some perspective in. My husband is still with me. He’s healing. He has plans for our future. He is whole. He can love me. He can make me laugh and he can dance with me. He can tickle his children and tuck them into bed. He can take the trash out and go hiking on the weekends. He is uninhibited.

My world has gotten much bigger this second time around. I know that we have been blessed with all the things I just listed and more! But I am also sorrowfully aware that not everyone in Chris’s shoes is walking as high as he is. Or at all.

I met a couple of special women during my stint as a warm body in the waiting room. They taught me a lot about perspective and I feel like it wasn’t an accident that they were placed there with me every day during the same time slot….