The sun slips through the dining room window — quiet, steady, warm. The air still carries a cool edge of early spring, and yet the children have declared it summer, shorts and all, as if hope itself has warmed the ground.
The twelve- and fourteen-year-old wheel Cecilia down the sidewalk. Lily following along beside them. Their laughter drifts back toward the house in a way that warms my heart.
This is today.
This is the day placed gently into our open hands.
And we will hold it — not because it is easy, but because it is given.
The pathology report returned with words that land heavy: all nodules viable osteosarcoma metastatic disease. Pleura-based. Growing along the lining of the lungs. The kind of detail that shifts the air in a room. The kind that quietly redraws the map of what may come.
April 7, 2026 — scans. An appointment. A TKI medication to be taken daily, a small act of defiance against progression. We move forward with what is available to us. She continues the no-sugar diet. We read, we research, we pray through options beyond the narrow corridors of Western medicine, because those corridors feel shorter now. And we begin making firmer plans for Lourdes — for water, for pilgrimage, for surrender in a place where millions have carried their impossible hopes.
Real life and trauma life no longer take turns. They braid together. School assignments and medical terminology. Wheelchair walks and prognosis percentages. Grocery lists and whispered prayers at 2 a.m. It is all one life now.
Sometimes I remember the before — before cancer pressed its sharp outline against everything. Before I understood so viscerally that control was mostly an illusion I clutched for comfort. I once thought safety meant knowing the plan. Knowing the timeline. Knowing how I would make it all happen.
Safety looks different now.
Safety is not certainty about outcomes.
It is certainty about Presence.
It is waking up and choosing to believe that the same God who holds galaxies can hold scan results. That He will supply the next word when I cannot find it, the next provision when resources look thin, the next breath when fear tries to steal it.
Safety is not knowing the whole road.
It is trusting Him for the next right step.
So the sun keeps shining through the window.
The children keep walking.
The day keeps arriving.
And we will receive it — as it is — because it is ours to live.
“You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you.”
-Isaiah 26:3
