I love anniversaries. Weddings. Homecomings. Happenings. Historical events. You name it, any milestone or notable achievement, and I’m there to celebrate. Will probably throw a party or at least decorate something nearby. Y’all know me.
Most of the time they invite something wonderful and worth remembering.
However, anniversaries can also, unfortunately, invoke pain, panic, and some PTSD.
Today marks one year since learning my stage 4 diagnosis. One year. It’s hard to wrap my brain around that. Four seasons. Twelve months. 365 days of waking up each morning knowing I have this ugly business of incurable cancer mysteriously floating around in me.
Is this one year mark an achievement? Can we really call it that? I suppose it is at least notable. Or worrisome. Depending on how we want to look at time marked and measured. Regardless, I don’t look too closely. I stay in the day best I can. One foot in front of the other. One day at a time. The future, simply too much for me to consider most days.
We don’t understand that until someone tells us it isn’t guaranteed. I mean the future is not guaranteed for any of us. There. You’ve been told. But that doesn’t fully compute until we have been stamped with something serious. I promise you I would very much have claimed no assurance of my days prior to this diagnosis, but I also promise you I didn’t quite get what that meant one year and one day ago. Of course I knew it in my head, but it is an entirely different matter when you feel the very ungluing of it in your gut.
It is with different ears these days that I listen to the way we talk:
“Someday I’m going to travel to Spain and watch the bulls run.
Someday I’m going to organize all those old photos into albums.
Someday I’m going to hike the Appalachian Trail or canoe the Boundary Waters or climb Mt. Kilimanjaro or take a cruise on the Reine River or write a book or organize my Tupperware or be early to carpool or whatever!
We think we will always have it. This someday.
Elusive and ethereal as it is, we put it in our pocket. We feel quite secure it will stay safely there if we do all the right things and take all the right steps. On occasion, we peek in and we pat it knowingly. Confidently. Expectantly. We might say “God willing,” but we wink at it anyway.
This time. This treasure. This someday.
And I don’t want to change that thinking for you one bit. It is a beautiful, comfortable, luxurious kind of thing. But it changed for me a year ago and I am still learning to process. Kate Bowler said it best in her book “Everything Happens for a Reason,” when she wrote, “the future was like a language I couldn’t speak anymore.”
I’ve had a few people ask me what’s been the biggest thing this year. And, without a doubt, that is at least part of my answer — how I speak about the future.
And maybe even that is a luxury. I know some people are diagnosed and thrown immediately into the brutal pain of the right now: Hard treatments and surgeries and side effects. And where I’ve had all of those things this year, they haven’t altered my life too dramatically. Yes, I’ve had to give up some things, but not everything. Not all of it. I’m still me. I’m still living life. I am.
Yes, the physical has changed a bit, but it’s truly the mental which has been the biggest contender. There’s a battle within which—at least right now—wages more violent than the physical. And there aren’t enough mind numbing distractions to come close to combating it. Not enough Netflix series or trips to Target or suspense-filled novels or house improvement projects. There simply aren’t enough things. There’s no pretending. No spinning. No denying. No disillusionment. There’s no instagram filter which can make it look even one bit more lovely.
So at the end of my day I’m left with the task of wading through it. Wrestling with it. Wondering about it. And, yes, sometimes, weeping over it. And the only way I can do any of that is walking with Jesus in it. It’s the only way. Again, I thought I understood what that meant one year ago. I didn’t. And I probably don’t understand today what I will in one more year, God willing.
The only way to do this hard thing is walking with Jesus. There is nothing. NOTHING. Which you or I can bring to this level of worry and what-if. I’m not saying my walk looks super shiny these days. Somedays it’s pretty messy. I’m limping. I’m crawling. He’s carrying me. Somedays I sound like I’m hanging out with a big bunch of hooligans and heathens, certainly not the Most High. I’m irritable and anxious and on edge. I’m snippy and testy and tired and, I’m sure if you ask my family, tiresome.
But, crazy thing is, that’s when I know He’s calling me to come walk closer with him. To lean harder on Him. He doesn’t leave me sitting here in my mess. He doesn’t turn away. He doesn’t tell me to go get myself cleaned up and then come back to Him when I’m a better version of myself. He is there. He is right here washing my dirty face, wiping my tears, wrapping His arms around me and reminding me He’s in this battle with me. The physical. The mental. The spiritual. All of it. He’s with me.
So today’s anniversary doesn’t just mark my diagnosis, but, much more importantly, it marks the day I began drawing closer to Jesus and pressing harder into Him. It marks the day I learned more deeply about my dependence on Him. I’m never going to be able to stray to far from the fact that February 3rd is my diagnosis anniversary, but because I am determined to Reclaim February, I’m declaring this day my Dependence Day Anniversary.
“I depend on God alone; I put my hope in Him. He alone protects and sees me; His is my defender, and I shall never be defeated. My salvation and honor depend on God; He is my strong protector; He is my shelter. Trust in God at all times, my people. Tell Him all your troubles, for He is our refuge.” Psalm 62: 5-8
