Again...

Six years ago...well okay five years and a couple of weeks, Joyce and I spent a month at University Hospital in Morgantown WV.  I spent the days in the ICU waiting room, and the Nights in a chair by her bed.  If you want to know more you can look it up on the blog, quite extensively documented, sometimes more than once a day.

Today I sit in a surgical waiting room, tweeting, texting and hoot suiting updates on the cancer surgery that we knew was coming, just like a train that starts down a track, moving from point a to point b, it will get there and you really can't stop it,  even when you wish you could, even when you say, as J did last night, I don't want to do this.  We don't want to do this, and didn't want to do it.  Doesn't matter though, this is where we are.

J is in the last of three procedures, the first two went well,  if knocking someone out with drugs and cutting and removing things can be seen as going "well," still if this lets us continue to do life together then this is what we do.

23 years ago I will or was it I do?  We talked about better and worse, richer and poorer,  sick and healthy.  It's safe to say that we've been through all of those things.  J has stuck  beside me through worse and worse, we have weathered some serious storms, had times of intense joy and excitement, done amazing ministry.  We have felt success, failure, fear, loss.  Pretty much everything people feel when they do life together.

I never thought that J would be the one that was in hospitals,  I always thought that would be me, and I always thought it would be at least 2o years away.  That's not how it worked out though.  We are here, walking through cancer, just like we walked through everything else and will keep walking through things.

You learn so much when you go through these things, you learn about yourself, you learn about the people around you.   You learn and grow and change and sometimes it's a good thing, and sometimes it's a sad thing, and sometimes it's just hard.  The important thing isn't which of those adjectives it is, the important part is the learning, the internalization of the things you find out about life and how you are doing or have been doing it and what you do from then on.

The final doctor came out.  He said everything went well, we will get to go to recovery soon, get to see her and be with her.   Thank you for praying, for standing in that space that it's been hard for me to stand in lately.  The space between faith and doubt, belief and denial, trust and anger.  Please keep doing so.  I know it's selfish, but we need it now more than you know.  The journey is not over, there is still much to do, more steps to take, more things to deal with, more conversations, more, more, more.  You all being strong when we are not really does help.