The Call You Never Want to Get

As soon as she said "I say this to everyone" my radar went up.

No, no, she doesn't.

No one has ever said that to me in the past 32 years.

"If everything is okay, they'll leave a message, otherwise, they'll tell you to call scheduling and set up further testing."

My birthday was Sunday and I had a great time having brunch and painting ceramics with a friend. When I went to bed that night, nothing was amiss.

But the next day, I retrieved a message. "Call scheduling."

I was nervous, but still, I had gone through a scare a number of years before. They thought they saw something on the x-ray that turned out to be a skin tag. Surely, this was just another one of those mistakes.

Except it wasn't.

A few days later, I went for a diagnostic x-ray. They told me to sit tight and wait to see if an ultrasound was needed.

It was.

The ground under my feet didn't feel too steady.

My nervousness was fast becoming annoyance that no one was saying what they saw or what they were looking for.

"Can you please clue me in on what's going on?"

"Sure" the radiologist responded. She flipped the screen around and pointed to something oval-shaped. "I think this is a fibroid tumor. See how it's not deep and the edges are defined? But this..." she moved the ultrasound ball to uncover a shadowy rectangle. "...this is deep and the edges aren't defined. It's very suspicious. You need to see a breast surgeon."

I ceased to hear what she said after that.

"Are you okay? Do you have any questions?"

"Yeah. I'm fine. No questions."

The truth is, I had a million questions. Not for her, but for God. "Why?" was chief among them.

Not so much why me - cancer is no respecter of persons, and loving God is no guarantee of a problem-free life. It was more like why now, why another cancer? I was still dealing with trying to get my brother on disability and still didn't know if my lymphoma from last year was in remission.

I didn't feel like I could handle another battle.

A verse I discovered about eight years ago when I was going through my divorce came to mind.

Exodus 14:14. The Lord Himself will fight for you, just stay calm (NLT). As so often happens when God wants me to hear Him, I began to see the verse in numerous places.

I sponsor a child through Compassion International. I opened a letter from her written just days later. In it, she shared her memory verse. Exodus 14:14.

A friend posted a picture of Jesus, shield up, filled with incoming arrows, protecting a woman lying at His feet - a brunette, like me. The caption? Exodus 14:14.

And then there was that discussion I wrote about in God Told Me You're Wrong. It was about choosing to meditate on the noun Presence instead of the verb Seek. Action wasn't required - only a state of being. Being calm. Being in His presence. Jesus had the verb covered. He will fight for me.

As the days have passed, there have been more tests, more doctors, more less than happy results. There's a battle up ahead, but I'm giving it to God. I'm trying to stay present in His presence.

Satan is unleashing every sneaky trick in his arsenal to upset me. He's not using the illness, but people in my life who trigger stress. I refuse to engage. No weapon formed against me can prosper because the Lord Himself is fighting for me.

It's easier for me to write about this than talk about it. There have been more than a few tears. It's new, raw, and in some ways still, not quite real. I'm not ready to answer a million well-meaning questions about the journey just started, but I felt like this much I could share.

I know I'm not alone in walking this road. Far too many have gotten the dreaded call and found their lives turned upside down with one word - cancer.

But as I read somewhere, cancer's not the Big C, Christ is.

This is my prayer for all of us...just stay calm, breathe in His presence. The Lord Himself - Maker of heaven and earth, King of Kings, Prince of Peace, Jehovah Rapha - is fighting on our behalf.

And if God is for us, who can be against us?


God I Look To You