Journey with Jen: Church of The Cancer Center

Two months into 2021 and I am still trying to gain my footing from the thrashing 2020 handed me.

I know I am not the only one who is still scratching her head and trying to figure out just how 12 months held 19 years of trials. We all experienced so much life while being quarantined. On top of all that 2020 held for us as a nation and as a people, I was dealt the hand of battling cancer in a pandemic, and like everything else I do, I could not just do the thing halfway. No, I found out January 7, 2020 that I had what would be classified as stage 4 cancer.

That would be hard in a “normal” year, but it was devastating in a year where it also catapulted me into a very select group, the 1% who were not expected to survive if the pandemic crossed their threshold.

It was a lot.

It broke me and not in a good way.

There was pain in the way people around me responded to the need of greater care in interacting. There was hurt in the way I had to isolate and miss things I valued as a mother, wife, daughter, sister, and friend. There was fear, so much fear.

It has been a very long time since I have felt so completely alone in a battle, and that is important in a way that was so unexpected to me.

I have a community and a support network. I have people who love me and help me often.

I heard of all kinds of wonderful networks for people in the midst of the same battle that held meetings, grabbed coffee together, and just supported one another. Because of the pandemic, none of those things were consistently available. My world was very small, but what happened when my world was stripped bare of the helpers was very eye opening to me.

I was forced to rely on the One who I should have been leaning in to all along.

I have experienced a shattering of self before, so you would think that I might recognize the signs of it coming. Blinded by feelings that waffled between fearless and fearful, I was so caught up in the what-might-be that I was missing what it was.

As I sat quietly exhausted in my home, God was tugging strongly at my heart. As I cried while trying to eat something unsuccessfully for the 14th time that day, God was tugging strongly at my heart. I prayed a lot. I think as we struggle, oftentimes we do a lot more asking than listening- or at least I do. I used that time to ask for healing and told God just what I wanted that to look like.

I had not spent a lot of time asking God what it was that He wanted me to get out of this journey. I was strong because it was the only choice I felt like I had. Rarely did I share the terror that crept into my mind as I sat “safely” tucked in my four walls… always ushered in by the phrase what if? But looking back at my journey I am reminded again that,

I do not serve a God of what ifs. I serve a God who already knows my steps and has them numbered for His glory.

Interestingly enough, those numbered steps lead me to the lobby at the Cancer Center anxiously waiting for my name to be called for the first of 33 radiation appointments. God showed up and sat with me. He nudged me to sit in a corner within earshot of a couple of fellas I called Coach and the Pilot until I later learned their names. You see, Coach and the Pilot were talking, and to be fully transparent, I was sort of eavesdropping. At first, it was normal waiting room talk, but it did not take long for the conversation to shift much deeper.

Something I would learn as I spent more time with the folks in the cancer center is that time, being such a great commodity to people fighting for their lives, was not wasted.

Another thing I would learn as I continued my journey was that God was ever present in conversations and situations, just like the one I unknowingly invited myself into with Coach and the Pilot. I was listening in and trying to think about anything other than the fear that was slowly strangling my ability to breath and certainly was prodding me to get up and take off at a dead run towards my truck. What I heard was the Pilot telling a story about a young lady who he had witnessed to when she was young and how that one conversation had changed the course of her life.

Any guesses how, even though I was eavesdropping, this one conversation changed the course of my life?

Just like that, my fear subsided.

I just had this reminder that God was there, even in the hard and the heavy, there was still the holy.

Thankfully, my name was called and I saved an entire waiting room of folks from seeing the tears of sheer relief that escaped on me as I walked back towards the first of my planning scans. I needed that reminder more than I even knew- for the journey I knew was ahead and for the things that would continue to arise as I counted each treatment day.

I felt God in that waiting room on day 1 of 33, but the most beautiful part was the way that He continued to show up days 2 through 33.

The day after my first appointment at the Church of the Cancer Center, I saw the gentleman who later introduced himself as Coach Terry and felt the nudge to tell him the blessing he was to me on my first day of treatment.

I chickened out.

I kept thinking that I did not want to bother him. He was there for treatment, just like me. Not to have some random lady tell him that she was eavesdropping on his conversation the day before. I went to my treatment and then back home, all the while kicking myself for missing the chance to say thank you.

The next day, I see Coach again as he checks in at the desk.

As I am leaving, I make a connection that:

a) We come at the same time every weekday and

b) God is going to stop with the gentle nudges and smack me right over the head if I did not say something.

So, I decided I better just go ahead and tell him thanks (and admit that I had been eavesdropping).

Listening to that nudge, and telling Coach what a blessing it was for me to hear him and the Pilot talking about how God had touched their lives on my first day, brought into my life something that absolutely only God could have constructed.

You see, the next day, (day 3 of treatment if you are counting), Coach told his buddy Jim (aka the Pilot) and his wife, Ashley, about our conversation, and it wasn’t any time at all before we all became fast friends.

Right after that, something shifted in me.

We started counting down treatments and counting up our daily blessings.

Instead of dreading those daily sessions because of the pain they caused, I looked forward to going to treatment because it was a place where I found a community of believers and we had church right there in that waiting room. We shared successes, talked about how God had touched our lives, and how He was using our journeys for His glory. I did not realize how much I needed that connection to battle off all of the lies of the enemy. I did not realize how even in praying and studying my Bible that I needed to hear about the love of God in action in each of our lives. Those mornings wound us through all the major holidays and some major events in the history of our country at the end of the year. When the rest of the world was attacking verbally and evil was fighting so hard to rise up, I was poured into spiritually at the Church of the Cancer Center.

Those visits brought each one of us to the day we got to ring the bell signifying the end of our treatment, cheering joyously for one another as God claimed another victory not just over cancer, but also over the way the enemy tries to ostracize and shrink the world of each believer with trials and challenges. The enemy wants you alone and scared, because his lies are easier to believe when you aren’t hearing the Voice of Truth as the loudest sound in the room.

My daily visits got me to my bell ringing day, but most importantly, those visits brought me closer to God and allowed me to feel so much less alone in my battle.

And to think I almost chickened out. Listen to those nudges, friend. You just never know where God wants you to hold church.