Messy Underneath but Pretty on Top

Still feeling like I am getting physically and mentally ready for a long run. It might hurt a lot, or it might be very endurable, who knows. Very well meaning people assure me that feeling angry, or desperate to regain control of my life are very normal feelings and I shouldn't feel bad. Problem is I don't feel that way, at all. From the moment I heard  I knew this was the next brick on the yellow brick road. I would welcome a miraculous healing, but as I try very hard to listen to the still small voice of God, I'm not hearing anything about that. If you are praying with me,  then how about those stray cells that may have spread to places where they can't be seen...may chemo and radiation get every single last one. And while you are at it, please pray for my friend Kirsten who started this race a few months ahead of me and chemo is already hunting them down in her body.

I totally messed up my ultra sound appointment today. I have something on my liver that has to be checked out because of what is going on, and you can't eat for 6 hours before, which I only remembered after I had been driving for 20 minutes to get there and was thinking about how full I felt from lunch. Oh well, rescheduled.  I'm really looking forward to talking to the oncologist for the first time tomorrow. I'm expecting to get the last puzzle peace of the treatment plan from him and some more details about what will be taken out. (I hate to say the C word.) I will definitely post tomorrow with that news.

I can really appreciate the story Karla posted on the Facebook website about a poor man with an expensive white horse that runs away.  I remember the one that got away. At the time I learned what a broken heart feels like...and it did hurt with an ache I had never felt before. But looking back, had I not felt it then I certainly would have many times over in the years that followed, and as it stands, I've NEVER felt it again.

 The man who was lame from birth so that God would receive glory for his miraculous healing as an adult...who could have known?  The God man who got nailed to a cross so that all of mankind could benefit from his substitutionary death...who would have guessed? The girl whose body failed to fight of mutated invaders so that....well...I don't know the other side of that one. What I do know is that I have been asked to suffer so little compared to others, and I know that suffering is often like the underside of a needlepoint project; not much to look at itself but absolutely necessary for the beauty on top. That gives me peace.