My sweet Baby Jay was five months into treatment for brain cancer and relapsed. The cancer cells in his brain were causing life-threatening seizures and we spent two weeks in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit at St. Jude in Memphis, TN trying to get them under control. Every 2-5 minutes, day and night, for 14 straight days, the seizures would ravish his little body. Not only did I feel helpless, but I witnessed our medical team feeling helpless. The moment that is forever etched in my mind, was when the head Oncologist was shaking Jay and screaming, “Jay, breathe! Jay, breathe!” Our Doctor is the mack-daddy, world-renown specialist on Jay’s type of tumor. He is the go-to doctor we had heard about, read about and traveled close to 500 miles to see. Since diagnosis, he had been so calm, confident and always had the answers. Anytime I would freak out, he knew just what to say to calm me down. I had complete trust in him. Now, not only was I freaking, but our mack-daddy-world-renown-go-to Doctor was freaking! I remember standing there listening to everyone panicking, watching my child turn blue and thinking, “Now what? Now what do we do?” Suddenly, in the midst of all the chaos, I heard God speak. Not in a loud audible voice, it was more like a soothing whisper to my soul. He said, “You must trust me. Not the doctors, not the nurses or the medicine, but trust me.” And then my Heavenly Father gave me this verse to cling to: “Against all hope, in HOPE believe.” (Romans 4:18)
The book of Ephesians is a letter of encouragement written by Paul from prison to the Church of Ephesus. In our key verse, Paul tells the Ephesians that he is praying “their hearts will be flooded with light so they can understand the confident Hope….” Paul wanted them to know that ALL believers in Christ have a Living Hope that dwells within them. A Hope that is not a mere wish or a pie in the sky pipe-dream, but rather the very breath of life that assures God’s children to live confidently in His promises.
Looking back on that day in the St. Jude PICU room, I think of Paul. Paul had been a Christian for nearly 30 years. He had taken three missionary trips and established churches all around the Mediterranean Sea. Now, he was under arrest in Rome, his future looking pretty bleak and he is writing to other Christians about Hope. When Jay was diagnosed in 2006, my family and I were snatched out of our so called “normal” life and thrown into the Pediatric Cancer world. Being in that PICU room was my reality check that medically speaking, our future appeared to be bleak. It was in that moment that God stepped in and flooded my heart with the light of Hope that I could stand on with confidence.
Not long ago, I walked into the grocery store wearing a shirt that says, “HOPE Keeps Us Going”. As I passed a guy that had an Obama “Got Hope” shirt on, he stopped me and said, “Hey, I like your shirt!” and pointed to his with pride. Being very annoyed, I rolled my eyes and grunted, “Different kind of Hope.” While I am certainly not here to debate politics, I am here to defend my HOPE. The HOPE that sustained me through an almost three year battle with childhood cancer, the HOPE that held me tightly as I said “see ya later” to my sweet Jay, the HOPE that keeps me going until the day that I am reunited with him, and the HOPE that my family and I have been called to share with others.
That my friends, is REAL HOPE!
“HOPE is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that one day it will makes sense, regardless of how it turns out."
