i love this weather.

today is mild and overcast. we actually have a thunderstorm watch and i love it. i like days like these. it tells me i should nap, lay in bed, and read. i will do all those things right now because little ava is sleeping. my grandma is here. she drove from mi with her friend and they arrived last night. she brought ava this new book with babies faces and she loves it. like she wanted to sleep with it type of love. its precious. we just went out for lunch and ava attempted to talk to anyone in the restaurant that would listen. thankfully everyone around seemed to love her so it worked out. now we are back home and all three of us are resting. i will as soon as i blog. i was not planning on it because i am seriously tired. but i could not keep it inside. all that i am feeling. i am overwhelmed. nearly speechless about the emails i have received in the past few days. so many strangers. i know i just blogged about this and i will give it a rest in a second. but for now thank you. it is such a source of encouragement to us. i just got an email from a women who was coming home from Busch Gardens yesterday and when she stopped at Burger King on the way home she saw a sticky note on the bathroom door which my blog address and underneath that it said. life changing. she thought it was a joke but because she was curious so went home and started reading. the whole thing. that is crazy to me. not because i care about the attention...but because people are reading about jesus and cancer and how you can have cancer and not hate God. it is leaving me speechless. all of it. a little book club in richmond, va was talking about the blog last week and this woman emailed me today because she had come home from her meeting and started reading. because the women talking about it were captivated by it she said. wanna know why they were captivated...jesus. because i have no idea what i am doing. either does justin. cancer is crazy and life is changing. daily. but we know one thing. that jesus is with us. in our suffering. in our pain. when i hate cancer so bad i could cry. he is in it. in our pain he is being glorified. i love that because it does not make sense. how through all of this pain i feel more loved than i ever have in my life. i also love it because jesus does not work in the ways you would you think. but instead he allowed me to get cancer because he knew. he knew he was going to use for his goodness. and its more than clear to me when i get email after email from people who see jesus differently now. love him differently. desire to know him more. or maybe for the first time are thinking about God and what that means for their life. early on i said to i would have cancer for the rest of my life it meant that people who would come to know jesus in a real way. well its happening. and hopefully i wont really have to have cancer for the rest of my life. and i am thankful because we are in the midst of cancer and we are already seeing the Lord work. often times in life we do not know why certain things happen until later...but what a gift it is to be a part of something he is doing now.

saturday, sunday, and today are good days. i wanted to write that down so when i forget what normal feels like i can read this post. feeling normal for me = energy to play with ava, food tastes good and i do not feel the need to throw it up, i have the desire to clean my house, do laundry, and organize areas i have been putting off for weeks, and overall i just feel good. so when normal begins to slip away i need days like today to remind that it wont always be so hard and i wont always feel so sick. three more days until chemo and thus the cycle begins again.