Into the cookie jar...

The irony of my last post and this new post sitting right here on the page together is not lost on me.  So much for living my life without cancer.  In His sovereignty, God has determined that indeed I will not live my life without cancer... not in this body.  Here's the good part:  I am so completely overcome with gratitude, I am hardly able to convey the deep richness of my internal experience!

All throughout my life - in church, at home, in relationships, on my own - I have said and sung true words about God and His goodness to me.  I have begged at times for His will to be made manifest in my life.  I have so many favorite worship hymns that declare these ideas...

...take my life and make it thine, it shall be no longer mine...
...use this ransomed life in any way You choose...
...all I have is Christ...Jesus is my life...
...Jesus is all the world to me...
...I will be still and know You are God...

I have no conscious memory of uttering these words with a deceitful heart, although in hindsight I see how my choices and attitudes along the way betray that fact.  It seems to me now that I have, with one hand lifted in praise, held onto my life, my desires, my plans for the future in a tight fist behind my back, like a child who will not give over that extra cookie she wasn't supposed to have; but had managed to grasp on her own. 

Of course I can only see that now.  I couldn't see it before...I have sincerely asked God to examine my heart and my motives along the way and to bend, change, transform them according to His will for me.  I have been frustrated when it seemed He was neither giving me what I wanted nor changing my appetite.  Do you ever get mad when God won't give you permission to eat that extra cookie; but He also won't pry it out of your sticky, chubby toddler hand?  I have.  I do.

The thing about metastatic disease is that it is like a splash of cold water in my slumbering, self-oriented face.  In one stark, tectonic moment everything changes and I realize that I don't need the cookies!  My months long prayer for a change of appetite and clarity of circumstance is answered in a shocking and unexpected way and I am recalibrated.