Cycle 1, Day 1

It is a strange feeling to watch a health professional hook bags of poison up to your child knowing that it is the only thing that can save him. Technically I know not all chemo is "poison" per se. This evening a very knowledgeable friend explained exactly what some of these medicines do. I couldn't repeat it if I tried... not the kind of knowledge that I play well with... but I do understand it. At the same time I'm watching chemicals that, while shrinking this tumor in my son's chest can also cause significant harm to him, slowly dripping into the central line that now comes out of his chest and I'm feeling rather convoluted.  On the one hand I am eager to begin, to see this disease defeated and to "move on" with life (whatever that means). At the same time I want to wait as long as possible to begin because I don't want my little boy to suffer. Yesterday evening and this morning I finally began to see my boy return with his playfulness and energy and now he's back to grumpy and lethargic... the roller coaster continues.

All that said Andrew did great with his first day of chemo. He was tired this evening and relatively grumpy but other than that no major side effects. I suppose the great news from today was just the fact that we will go home on Saturday evening. I'm not sure I've ever longed for home the way I do right now. I don't just mean my house, though sleeping in my bed is a plus, I mean my home. I want my home back where I wake up in the morning to a five year old coming down the stairs at an ungodly hour. I want my home back where right before I take the girls downstairs for breakfast we hear "Get me UUPPPP!!!" coming from Andrew's room. I want my home back where when I come home from work three little voices come running through the kitchen screaming "DADDY!!" I want my home back where my wife and I struggle with issues like potty training and discipline not white blood cell, hemoglobin, and platelet counts. I guess what I am longing for is the glory of the mundane, that same thing that at times can drive me crazy and yet feels like a warm blanket. Now I find myself wondering in darker places whether that glory will ever return.

I suppose there are two options you are faced with when you experience the disruption of the sanctity of your personal Eden; you can either despair and grow angry, covering yourself in cynicism which really is just the inbreeding of rage and paranoia, or you can see that this disruption should be pointing you toward an Eden too great for you to create. When I say I long for my home the reality is that I see that mundane now through glasses that are forever rose colored, like a stain that you can't quite get out. Life, pre-cancer (PC) will always be idyllic and serene, like a flip book of Hallmark cards or an endless gallery of Thomas Kinkade paintings. In reality though what I see through those glasses is not life as it was but life as I longed for it to be, life as I still long for it to be. I long for a life where love and fellowship within my family is not broken by my anger or my kids' selfishness, or my wife's fatigue, or cancer. I long for a life where relationship is always fulfilling and nourishing and where futility is nothing more than a Scrabble word. The problem is that I can't find that world by looking back, no matter how long I look through those glasses stained red by the pain of Andrew's cancer. I can only find that world by looking forward.

In saying that I don't mean that after Andrew's cancer is in remission that life will attain to some Platonic form, an ideal that surpasses all shadows here. What I mean is that when all hell breaks loose in your life, you finally realize that what you really have been longing for is a world remade. I guess that is why faith in Christ is such a comfort in the midst of this. It isn't because Jesus promises escape from the pain of the world... he didn't try to escape it and doesn't promise to take his followers from it. It is because he promises to come and renew the world, to remake it without futility, without death, without disease, without strife, without painful relationships, without unrealized longings, without tears. Our faith sustains us not because we have an assurance that Andrew will be healed but because we have an assurance that this disease will not have the last word, that even death is not the final equalizer that it claims. There will be a day when even death turns backwards because there has been a day when it did, when Jesus turned even death inside out. 

Cycle 1, Day 1 complete. Andrew is sleeping soundly. We are still clinging to Jesus. You decide which is the greater miracle.