Day 1: When you have lost your hope….

I remember hearing my husband’s voice over the phone….”they think it’s cancer…”   I went to bed that night unconcerned.  Surely God would not allow my husband to walk that road twice, after all he had already lost a wife…wasn’t that enough?
But it was cancer.  Suddenly God seemed a very strange, dangerous thing.  If you couldn’t trust him to keep your children safe…what exactly could you trust him for?  For the moment the fear almost overwhelmed me….we are, none of us, safe…
Yet, here I was…3 months pregnant, with all my children, not to mention a toddler and an infant just over 6 months old.   Several times a week I left them home to drive to a town an hour away with a boy much braver than I, hoping they would save his life.
We prayed and prayed and prayed.  God said no over and over and over.  I lost hope.   In that desperate place of wishing and wanting I became angry with God.  I railed at Him for letting us down.  
Why am I telling you this?   Because I want you to know if you are in that same dark place, I understand.   And because, I want you to know that you can hope again.
My son was not healed from cancer… but God did not forget us.  He renewed our hope and revealed Himself to us in ways that I am not sure we could have comprehended any other way.   Where I once placed my hope in medicine, prognoses, and percentages I now place my hope solely Him.  It didn’t happen overnight and it wasn’t always pretty but I am convinced that when we stand before Him face to face it will be the times of wounding that we will be most grateful for, because it was in those times that He showed us Himself, hope incarnate. 
 Now hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who was given to us.  Romans 5:5