My mother has Cancer. Actually she's had cancer for many years. She has been very blessed however, and everytime a test shows she has developed cancer somewhere new, God has provided ... provided time. An she is still here ... being.
I remember the fist time her cancer heally hit me. I was out of college, and living in Austin, off east William Cannon. I don't remember the moment that someone told me, or the condtions surrounding when or where I was told. But I remember the prayer that God put in my heart.
I was pretty new to my faith, I say my faith because the faith I had at that time was real, and my own, and it hadn't been more than a few years since I could say that. It was an amazing time, when more than anything else, my entire focus and energy was centered on finding yet more and different ways to give to God what I could, to find ways of becoming more dependant on Him, and truly ... truly reveling, basking, in the Love that had reached into my life. The prayer that been the cry of my heart, the bellowing blasting softness that drove me to my knees, and then swept me to the horizon like a warm breeze coaxing the waves across the world ... the prayer that began my life was, "...Your will God, and all for you...". The first prayer wasn't even words ... and only later - in lookin back - could I say what it was thay my tears and my heart had suffered ... had uttered in sylables only God could hear. But that prayer, still in my heart, found words the afternoon I brought my heart for my mother to God.
I prayed, I wept, and I sang ... no lyrics, or bridges, and nothing that any ear would recognize, but a lament the likes to which my heart has not known since, and one born of images. Pictures. Pictures dancing on raging color across the backs of my eyes, moments of my mother laughing, of my mother wearing a Santa Hat, and making thanksgiving dinner, and chasing my child's feet in the front yard of the church, and holding me close when my child's world seemed to be falling down all around me ... and then ... images of what had not yet come ... weddings, and births, and Christmases and moments ... ... soft and warm candle-flames of laughter and joy, and love and a million other things that would make her smile, and make the world seem small. And with all the desire in my life, and all the future I had ever wished for myself, and all the strength I could muster, I begged that God would save her, that she would see those things in her life that brought color to her future ... and then I asked, inasmuch as I could ask for anything, that God's will would be done ... that if her life was required that God's will would find its way in the world ... that no-one would find bitterness in her death, but instead would be filled with longing for that thing which had been always at the fulcrum of her desire ... that whatever God's will was ... that He would find Glory.
Knowing I had no part in the founding or shaping of tomorrow ... I put her life ... and her death ... squarely in the hands of God. Those hands ... the only trustworthy things in all the world that I have ever known - and were, and are, and will be in life or death.
How I prayed. I don't know how long I knelt in my bedroom that afternoon, but when I rose, I knew that if it were within the realm of God's will that my mother's life could be spared, that it would be... and when it was God's time to bring her home to Him - that it too, would be so ... and she would be with Him, in His arms, in His eyes, and her life in all the Deapth, and Fullness of God would begin with the first sinnless blink ... on the other side of the veil.
I love my mother. She fights on, with hospitals, and treatments, and thankfulness for every moment in her own way.
My mother has Cancer. An God, has my mother.
