It's a Roller Coaster

Last week, I started my 22nd cycle of chemo (each cycle is 21 days long and has two infusions), which means I’ve received 43 chemo treatments since I started last May (and will get my 44th on Tuesday). Forty-three! That number is mind-boggling. How have I even done this?! I was traumatized by chemo the first time I did it and that was only eight treatments. And now I’ve done FORTY-THREE more.

And there is no end in sight. I recently had my CT scan and everything from the neck down is stable – meaning this treatment is holding my cancer back, keeping it from spreading. This is great news, except it means that there’s no getting off the merry-go-round of horrors. (I’ll get my next brain MRI this Friday, August 16, and we’ll find out how things there are faring.)

It seems almost inhumane, giving someone this many chemo treatments. But they’re doing it to help me. And everyone’s thrilled that it is still working for me. Isn’t it interesting how programmed we are to want to live, to want our loved ones to live, to fight for life, even when it’s hard?

I think that’s because we were made for life on earth, not life in the sky somewhere. We want to stay here because we were made to stay here - on earth, the incredible creation God made for us to live in and rule over. Earth, which is currently under the curse, but which will one day be made new when our returning King comes to dwell again with man, bringing with Him the New Jerusalem, the glorious city He is preparing for us.

Our future isn’t playing harps on a cloud forever. It’s living and reigning forever in the New Earth, where everything sad comes untrue (as Tolkien described it) and all things are made new. Where everything good that we started in the Kingdom-here-and-now is fully realized.

I will never be able to do everything on my “bucket list,” but that’s okay. There will be endless days for me to enjoy the New Earth. I believe that everything amazing that’s ever existed will be there, and in the state it was always meant to be, and the only tears will be tears of joy at the immense beauty of it all. It’s to this hope that I cling, as feeling sick much of the time is so discouraging. Paul understood. Life is hard. As he wrote to the Corinthians, “If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied” (1 Cor. 15:19).

But our hope isn’t in this life; it’s in this life made new. This life won for us when Jesus conquered death and the grave. He was the first to rise from the dead to everlasting life, but all who know and love Him will do the same one day.

So I fix my eyes on Jesus, who, for the joy set before Him, endured torture and death on a cross (Heb. 12:2). There is great joy set before me, too; I’ve just described it. What I’m going through is so, so hard right now, but I fix my eyes on the One who went before me, who endured and who now pleads with the Father on my behalf. May I endure to the end to sing His praise eternally!