Conversations With God

Dear Heavenly Father,
I'm coming to you to ask for a miracle for my Dad. Right now there are two big events that lie ahead of us. I'm asking you to make sure the first one goes we'll so that the second one is even possible. You know Dad had testing on Monday, you and I have been talking about it a lot. I need you to make sure that his results are good enough to get him accepted into the trial. You know I like to be upfront and honest with you so I'm not asking you for that, I'm telling you to do it. That might be disrespectful but my heart is broken and I need you to come through and fix it by fixing my Dad. I know you can appreciate me being real with you. You know how I'm really feeling so there's no reason to pretend in our conversations that I'm being polite and asking. Even if his tests didn't go we'll or his body wasn't in the shape it needed to be on Monday I need you to do a divine intervention and change the results. This needs to happen. Oh, and there's more. Not only do I need you to get him into the trial, I need you to make it be successful. I need you to cure him of cancer. Every drop of it gone, never to return. Again, I'm not asking you. I know you hold the whole world in your hand and that you are the Alpha and the Omega. You are the redeemer and the healer. I know that you can see what is ahead of us and what the outcome of this is for my Dad. I trust you and know that if it's not your plan to heal my Dad right now that you have a reason. I get that. But, you also gave me emotions. Love, anger, sadness, angst, hope. So I think it's only fair that despite my knowledge of what you're capable of, I still am not ok with the thought that you might not heal my Dad. I'm coming to you now to tell you I need you to heal him. If you don't do it I won't understand why. I don't see the future like you do and I don't think that I can take any more bad news. You have shown me a lot of things in the past few days, and you've told me that I need to have hope. Until a few days ago I have been very real with myself and with how cancer works. I have purposely calloused myself to not get my hopes up. But you have shown me verses on facebook, and t shirts. You even brought up hope through a small clip in Breaking Bad the other night. You have given me doubts and being real and made me start believing that it is ok to hope again. So, I'm going to need you to do your part. To show me why you wanted me to hope again. You're the one who made me open my heart and make it vulnerable again and I'm hoping that that means you're preparing it to be able to rejoice. And that it will be ready to believe the good news when I get the call that my Dad is healed. I'm not telling you to do this because I don't think that you will, I'm telling you because I know that you can.
Amen.

Anticipation vs Reality

Every time I see my Dad he looks more like a skeleton and less like my Dad. I can't help but to notice how small his legs are. They're frail and bony. They used to deliver roundhouse kicks as he instructed karate class and now they barely hold him as he walks. His tattoo he got done just a few short years ago used to stretch across his muscular arms. Now it hangs on his limp skin that has no muscle or fat to cling to. His clothes swallow him up. The shirts he wears are loose garments draped over his body. His pants hang from his waist and I imagine a belt underneath that has added holes in it to make it tighter than it was meant to go and a cinched waistline bunched up beneath it. There's this darkly ironic detail I've noticed. The chemo has destroyed his body, but his hair is coming back. I know we can't pick and choose what side effects the chemo has but it's wreaked havoc on his weight and let his hair continue to grow in, and it pisses me off. He didn't have hair before because he always kept his head and face shaved, now there's peach fuzz everywhere and no fat anywhere. If that's cancer or life's way of being funny, I'm not amused

He used to be a big foodie. He still loves new restaurants and food trucks, but he rarely eats anymore and when he does he fills up on a few bites and then struggles to keep it down. The lack of calories he consumes has left him weak, and exhausted. It's a challenge to get from the couch to the front door and back. Small tasks like letting our car Fred out, cooking a TV dinner, and chasing my 1 year old Dexter around are doable, but they push him to his limits. Sometimes they push him past them. It's tough to see him on the couch every time I go to their house because I know he's probably only gotten up to go to the bathroom. A few years ago he was training for BJJ/MMA fighting and now....

In the Lupe Fiasco song  "Mission" that I reference a lot, there's a man at the intro who talks about his battle with cancer and what he went through to get into remission. There's a line from the song that he said before that broke my heart but now it haunts me because now I don't just understand what he saying, I see it happening right in front of me. He says, "I literally died to stay alive." Before my heart went out to this brother in the dysfunctional family that cancer creates, but now I weep for my Dad. Even though the man said he was LITERALLY dying to stay alive I didn't get what he was saying in it's full capacity. 

The strange thing about cancer, or one of them, is that you know what to expect, but everything is still such a surprise when it happens. There's a big difference between anticipating and experiencing. I knew my Dad would get sick. I've seen other people get sick, I've watched documentaries, I've seen movies and TV shows about people with cancer and what it does to them, but cheese and rice... seeing it happen to family, that's a whole different thing.