Chemo Round 4. Day 4.

Walking the beach this morning, I found myself thinking about test results I received this week. The numbers, the unknowns, the questions that hover just beneath the surface — they all came with me to Wrightsville Beach. And as I walked, an idea I heard on a podcast earlier this week kept coming to my mind: “Get comfortable with being uncomfortable. Garner a healthy respect for uncertainty.”

There is something strangely freeing about accepting the reality that life is unpredictable and not within my control.  And yet, there is peace. Haiti has been my best teacher of this reality.

People have asked me how I can be at peace with everything happening in my life right now. The answer sounds simple — maybe even cliché — but this is the truest thing I know: My mind is fixed on Him. That doesn’t mean I never wrestle with my thoughts. I do.

But more than 14 years of loving Haiti have taught me many crucial lessons.  And I’ve had over seven years since the initial diagnosis of GCT to practice this discipline, more than nine years since the first symptoms whispered that something was definitely wrong. Years of learning, slowly and imperfectly, how to lift my eyes above the circumstances and fix them on the One who does not change.

Peace didn’t arrive all at once. It was shaped in the crucible — in the waiting rooms, in the hard days of Haiti, through the unanswered questions of life, in the slow unfolding of difficult truths. Over time, I’ve grown in my ability to set my thoughts on things above. It’s a discipline, a daily exercise, a muscle strengthened through repetition.

And today, like every day, I have to ask myself the same questions that helped shape my work in Haiti, as well as my approach to my health care:

Is this a tragedy or an inconvenience?  How much emotional energy am I willing to give to this issue?

These questions don’t minimize the hard things. They simply help me steward my heart. They help me remember that not everything deserves the same weight. They help anchor me to what is eternal rather than being swept away by what is immediate.

Uncertainty will always be part of my story, but so is God’s faithfulness. And His faithfulness is the louder truth.