ABOUT THE BOOK
As far as I was concerned, our family had suffered enough already. Even before we added cancer to our list, we had already experienced the premature death of a parent; the effects of alcoholism; physical, emotional, and sexual abuse; drug addiction; the injustices of the legal system; depression and other mental illnesses; the inability to recover from traumas manifesting in arrests, jail time, self-injury, and attempted suicide; the miscarriage of twins; and a child born with cognitive and physical impairments.
For most people, an occasional trauma interrupts a fairly peaceful life for a short while, and then things go back to normal. For us, “normal” is trauma occasionally interrupted by a fairly peaceful life, an interruption we use to catch our breath until the next issue comes along, and it always does. Our reality is stranger and often far worse than anything fictional. When we share our story, the silence of shock and disbelief that people respond with only reinforces the pain and isolation that often come with suffering. We have passed through many waters and walked through many fires.
Spending so much time dealing with one tragedy after another is challenging to one’s faith. I always held on to the words of Proverbs—“Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding” (Proverbs 3:5 NIV)—because there is really no way to explain or understand all of the things that have happened to us. However, I usually left it there. I trusted God, didn’t try to explain why bad things were happening, and asked him to help me through the trials. What I didn’t do was ask him to teach me through my trials.
When cancer came, I continued to trust in the Lord, but this time, I also said, “It was good for me to be afflicted so that I might learn your decrees” (Psalm 119:71 NIV). I opened my heart and my mind. I asked God to teach me and help me gain his understanding instead of my own. He did. These are the lessons I learned from leukemia.
