something peaceful.

there is something peaceful about me sitting in bed on our laptop and justin asleep next to me with the nbc rockefeller special on tv. his cold has gotten a lot worse tonight. so after some night time medicine he was out. but ava. well little ava on the other hand was put to bed at 7:30pm and i totally thought she was sleeping until i looked at the monitor only to see her little hands waving in the air. she has not cried. not once. but now i am worried her little cold is getting worse because she has not fallen asleep yet. ok i just looked over and i think she is sleeping...

i have been thinking about august a lot today. a girl emailed me who is in the midst of her own lymphoma diagnosis. same age. married. and with a two week old little boy. my heart broke when i read her email. i started crying as i wrote her back. it brought it all back. all the emotion. the fear. the pain. the anger. all the unknowns. wanting answers. begging for them but being asked to wait. august was by far the hardest month of my life. and even as i type this out. i am realizing that i was a different person then. i literally do not feel the same anymore. and i can't explain it. not in a bad way or even a good way i guess. it just does not seem like this...like what we are living right now is even our life. and august. well that seems like a hundred years ago. and certainly it did not happen to us. i bet this sounds strange. because i am actually processing this as i type this. or actually not really processing anything, but maybe just beginning to for the first time. what this means. how i feel. what has changed. where we go from here. and then i remember. we are still living it. we are 7 treatments in with 5 more to go. we are just over halfway. i think in many ways since hearing that the chemo is working its been easier to not take all this so seriously. because i am "fine."and i guess tonight when i was driving home i thought...wow we are still in this. in the middle of it. and this is still real. and we still need to be on our knees. how easy it is to lose sight when your prayers get answered. we prayed and prayed. we begged and begged for the chemo to work and for the cancer to stop growing. and it did. and its working. and i still want to live with the deep dependence on christ that i did before we knew if the chemo was working. and tonight i realized that i have not. that since we heard the news from my pet scan things have looked and felt different. but i desire to trust and depend on the lord regardless. not only when its good or when its really really hard. but no matter what.