a new testament.

I didn't want to ask her about my magnesium levels, or how much more chemo I'd have. After she told me the cancer had not spread, and I felt reasonably confident that the death sentence had been lifted, I didn't care right then to know about my anemia, or about what will happen in the next two weeks, or three or four. I just wanted to ask my oncologist whether life would ever be right again. Whether it would always be just a little bit darker.

I know now that it will be right again. Life will not always be as dark as it has felt in these months with cancer.

The thing about the cancer is that it gives you memories of images you can't not see, and of sensations you can't not feel. Being told that you have Stage 3 cancer, and that there's a 40-50% chance that you won't live past 31 or 32. Waking up in the hospital at 2am, throwing up on yourself, in too much pain for the nurse to help you out of your own vomit, sobbing, and telling her that you can't do it anymore, you can't make it through much more. Crying on the bathroom floor where you fell because you almost passed out in the shower. Realizing that you're too weak to do the things you've always done. These are the things that have haunted me. (Obviously they're haunting--that's written, unintentionally, in second person.) And for awhile, I worried that they'd always haunt me. That they'd make everything wrong, and dark, and irredeemable.

But then, standing in worship, the truth. He makes beautiful things. He has made beautiful things in my own life. I've seen it. I've talked about it. I've cherished it, and praised Him for it, and lived the joy that comes from such beauty. And guess what?

 He will make beautiful things again. In the same way that He brought beauty from the ugliness of some of what I've lived, He will bring beauty from this. The hope in that is overwhelming. The excitement of seeing that beauty come to be is...mind-blowing. It's breathtaking. It's redemption worked out in front of me. It is exceptionally awesome.

So, I no longer want to ask my doctor about the darkness. There's no need. With regards to the images and the sensations--I may not understand why God allowed all of it, but I am positive that He has a plan for it. And now, for the next while, this blog might just be a testament to what happens when God's hope is found, when He redeems the wrong, and the dark.