Some days it’s all fog. When you find that lump and the fear rolls in and you think, I don’t have the money for this.

The time for this.

The strength for this. 

Cancer costs too much.

And you realize melanoma cost you not only a chunk of your flesh, but a chunk of your faith. Because you stumbled through it in a fog, some moments feeling like a woman without God. Because God didn’t just take it away. Because He kept you going to that skin doctor, and that skin doctor kept saying you were fine, but you knew that mole you got while pregnant wasn’t fine. And finally, nearly two years of praying– while having a baby, nursing a baby, and a handful of trips to the skin doctor later, you insisted that darkening mole wasn’t fine. 

So you went to that Catholic prayer retreat–the one you prayed at the years before for other people when you were full of faith– and now you’re surrounded by Catholic believers your Protestant friends don’t understand– these Catholics blazing with faith when your faith feels so small. 

Small.

Small, like all human beings are small without God.

“Little dust people,” Pauline always says. And your Bible study this week is all about walking through the valley of the shadow of death.Great! Perfect timing! And you sit there with that lump in your breast with women forty years older than you and you think age doesn’t promise you a future. You’ve lost friends in their forties. Beautiful friends eaten away before your very eyes by cancer. You’ve begged at their bedsides and cried at their funerals and fear raises its hackles and bears its fangs like a junkyard dog snarling at your faith.

And your faith feels so small.

So you read your Bible. Again. And you do your best to put your hope in God’s word. Again. And you wait. Again.

And the lump waits, too.

Finally, you paddle on, claiming more of God’s good promises, putting your trust in your Savior, even though the shore of healing remains elusive, and your situation doesn’t clear.

Six months ago your mammogram was questionable and they’ve been watching you. Doctors watching. God watching. And you’ve been down this “watching” road before. Previous biopsies that turned out benign, but that was in your early thirties before you buried those three friends. Before your cousin–that first cousin younger than you, like a sister to you, fought breast cancer and you pleaded with God for mercy and your cousin’s doing fine. She’s in remission– all this before your melanoma and your breakdown.

Before you realized what a little dust person you really are.

So you row harder. You pray on your face, spread eagle before God, pleading his promises: With long life will I satisfy you and show you my salvation. Psalm 91:16. And your tears drench the carpet of your bedroom floor because you know what you must do.

Surrender. 

If it brings you glory, bring on cancer. Take my life and let it be, I say to Jesus with my heart breaking open. Because I want to live. I want to raise my boys and write and farm and live. But more than that, I want to do the will of my God.

For a moment on my bedroom floor with God, I’m in the Garden of Gethsemane with the cup in my hand…

And after this surrender comes peace.

I rise from the carpet and turn on my Daily Audio Bible and the psalm for the day is Psalm 91. Great! Perfect timing! The psalm of protection. The psalm I prayed on my face fifteen minutes earlier, sobbing into the carpet. Psalm 91. Just what I need to chase away that junkyard dog of fear today.

My mammogram later brings okay news. It doesn’t look like big, bad, ugly cancer. The lump is there. The fog is still there. The next step an ultrasound to examine things further, but I’ve found my stride.

My God is faithful.