Thoughts From Radiation

It was a busy week. Busy with all good things, but busy none the less. In addition to starting radiation treatment (which happens everyday, Monday through Friday, for 5 weeks), I attended the yearly 3-day practicum for our homeschool co-op. Because both were a bit of a hike to get to, I had hours of time in the car to reflect and realized that there were a lot of parallels between these two seemingly unrelated events. 

Going into my fourth (!?) year homeschooling, I will be a tutor for one of the classes in our group this year, so I attended additional training at practicum this week. Training, of course, is designed to prepare you for what comes next. We talked about the classical model of education, students’ cognitive developmental stages, classroom management tips, activity ideas - all the how-tos and philosophies behind them. It was great. The goal, again, was to help us succeed in this next chapter.

That is the same thing we do for our kids.... we teach them to tie their shoes, to write their letters, to identify numbers, to use the potty, to be a good friend, to recognize the difference between right and wrong, to obey, to question....all with the goal of preparing them for what comes next. 

(Preemptive disclaimer: I am not a theologian. I went to school for all the things I’ve shared above-education, I have had no formal training for what I will share below.)

But, I believe that just as a loving parent does all the things, including the hard things, to prepare their child for the next step, so also God prepares us, His children, for the futures we cannot see. 

In addition to our regular math curriculum, for the past 3 years we have been working on skip counting - counting by 2s, 3s, 4s, all the way up to 15s for seemingly no reason other than its a cool party trick to have your 5 year old count by 15s. It was work! Sometimes she didn’t want to do it (sometimes I didn’t want to do it), but then it was time to introduce multiplication...and it all came together. I spent verrrry little time teaching multiplication because it was so easy for her since she was already so proficient at skip counting. 

In a similar way, God has prepared me for both the mental and physical aspects of dealing with cancer. I’ve shared the mental aspects in previous posts, so I won’t go into all that here other than to say that He helped me cope with severe anxiety before, so I already had the tools and habits in place to deal with the kind of anxiety that cancer can bring. 

But in a more concrete way, He’s prepared me to do what I need to actually, physically do during my radiation treatments. Two years ago, the first practice I learned to head off a panic attack was deep breathing. When we are stressed/panicked we tend to take rapid shallow breaths that send our system into that flight or fight response. If you can control your breathing, you can control your body’s response. Anytime I felt the stress rising (or throughout the day preemptively), I would sit down, breathe in deeply through my nose for 4 seconds, hold it for 8 seconds, then breathe out slowly through my mouth for 12 seconds. I would do that maybe 3 times and move on. 

Guess what I have to do during my whole treatment each day....yep...breathe in, hold it (for 15-20 seconds) breathe out, repeat. Because my cancer was on the left side, this is a technique they use to basically push my heart out of the way while they are shooting invisible cancer-killing rays at my chest. Ya’ll, I could not have done this 3 years ago. I don’t even go under water in the pool because I hate hate hate holding my breath. But I’ve been doing this every day like a champ because God in His great love and grace allowed me to go through something hard in order to prepare me for what came next. 

The other great lesson I learned 2 years ago was how to be still (mentally, physically, with all of my being and intentions and emotions). It was a lesson so forceful and clear that I even got a tattoo just to make sure I’d never forget it. Guess what you have to do really well during radiation...BE STILL. 

Going back to the parallels in teaching my children... As they strive and struggle and succeed and fall, I am there with them the whole time. They are never alone in the struggle. I let them “fail” sometimes because that hard fall will teach them so much better than if I stepped in and fixed it for them. I don’t do this because I don’t care or I’m absent; I do this because I love them. And likewise, God doesn’t leave us to go through the hard things alone, He holds us through them. 

I don’t know why God let’s us go through hard things. Does He ever cause them? He’s all knowing, why doesn’t He prevent them? He’s all powerful, why doesn’t He always fix them? He doesn’t give us those answers. But that doesn’t mean He didn’t give us any answers. Like it would be hard for a 2 year old to understand why a parent may say “no” to touching the stove or running into the street...or why they may be put in their bed in the middle of the day, all alone (for a nap)...perhaps I, like a 2 year old, just can’t understand why God does things the way He does them because I am not Him - His ways are far higher and greater than what my human mental capacity is equipped to comprehend. It doesn’t mean He doesn’t love me, it just means that there are depths to His love that I can’t quite wrap my mind around yet.

So what do we do with that? As I’ve shared before, we focus on the light, on truth, on what we DO know rather than the dark and what we don’t know. My mantra I repeat in my head when I struggle is “You are Good, You are Loving, and you love Me.” And from there I proceed in faith, knowing these things to be true and trusting that they are true, even when what I see doesn’t make sense or seems to conflict. This is where you want to dive into the concrete of the Bible. Make a practice of seeking out truth in it. And then come up with a system to keep that in front of you so you don’t forget. 

People (in Christian world) are always talking about “God’s promises.” Unfortunately I haven’t found in the Bible where God says, “I solemnly swear to keep you from ever going through anything difficult. Never shall you know sickness or pain on earth. Your feelings will never get hurt, your house will always stay clean, your thighs will never collect fat and your face will never have wrinkles.” The silver lining for me with breast cancer is that now at least my boobs won’t sag. We live in a broken world...decay is the process we will absolutely experience on earth. BUT He has made some delightful promises about what comes after this. 

One last thought and analogy about what we, as spiritual children, can do when life gets tough. Think back to elementary school... if you or your friend got really hurt on the playground, what would you do? You’d go tell the teacher. Sure you could try to figure it out yourselves, but probably the teacher could help a lot more. Or when I found out I had cancer...I didn’t grab a knife from the kitchen and say, “hey Jake, would you be a dear and please cut the cancer out?” I went to a surgeon. Our tendency is to try to fix things when life gets to be too much, but much more effective would be going in prayer to the One who has much greater understanding and power than we do. 

To wrap it up, here are some verses God has used to encourage me through this next leg of the race. I know this is who God is, what He’s done throughout history in the past, and so I am praying He will apply these truths to me as well. 💜