A Race to finish
So I haven’t blogged in four months. For those of you who were paying attention, I was silent for all of Africa and it wasn’t for lack of having anything to say.
I had a wealth of fear, and no way to express it.
You see ten days after I began my World Race journey in Thailand, my mom found out that the breast cancer she fought all of last year had metastasized into her lungs. She would begin yet another chemo journey and this time I wouldn’t be there.
Despite my immediate offer to come home she refused. The timing of her results was too divine for either of us to miss, and as difficult as it would be we both knew that this was the time for other members of my family to step up and shoulder responsibility that had been mine previously.
I had asked God to grow me in trusting Him this year, and the first lesson was a test I never could have imagined Him asking of me. I could also say it is the only test I have been given so far. Her illness has colored this year for me in so many ways that I cannot separate what my challenges were on the field from the challenge of being separated from what was going on at home.
Prior to leaving home I had also given all of my worries and concerns for my mom over to God, knowing that He loved her more than I did and that He would hold and keep her in whatever the coming year would bring, little knowing how different reality would be from my expectations for her.
I didn’t realize until recently that the godly trust that I thought was without stipulations was really just my way of telling God what I wanted and that I trusted Him to make sure it happened.
I trusted God for healing. I trusted Him for deliverance. I trusted that there was a purpose that I could see in this trial. I prayed prayers, not open to what His answers may be, but only wanting my answers given.
You see my mom was healed. She was delivered. There was a purpose in that trial, but not one I can see now, not one I may ever truly see.
My mom died.
To the world it would seem that nothing that was prayed for was given, even some Christians would say that my prayers were unanswered. But as fear began to grow inside me that her road would not end where I thought it would, where I wanted it to, alongside that fear grew a knowledge that there is a healing in this world that is not the physical wholeness we are taught to pray for, but is a deliverance from this life into the next.
I had to learn the hardest way imaginable to pray “Thy will be done” with no selfish goal in mind.
I left the mission field to be with her at the end, and being able to sit at her bedside for her last week was just one of her her last, memorable gifts to me. She saw such purpose and importance in this trip for me and was always reluctant to tell me how she was really feeling because she did not want me to come home.
I could have easily stayed home and watched the rest of my squad finish something that I started with them eight months ago. Everyone would have understood, no one would have asked any questions.
But in the midst of being at home under circumstances that were nothing like what I imagined my homecoming to be, I found myself existing in two places simultaneously. While being overwhelmed with the process of grieving the loss of someone I literally could not imagine life without, I also ached to know what the rest of my squad was seeing and experiencing. To be able to walk alongside them through the challenges and joys that are this crazy journey.
Returning to the race is not only something I feel called back to, it is also one of the ways I have left to honor her memory. Not finishing this journey would have been the last thing she wanted for me.
Guatemala, Belize and the US look out, I have a race to finish!
my last photo with Mom, plus sisters and niece all squad photo with our Lesotho ministry staff
