I feel as though a milestone has been reached; I finished my first course of chemo therapy. On Friday, July 18, I received my final doses of the first two drugs used in my treatment regimen. I had no real side effects this time, other than tiredness, as long as I did not do anything (!), so I didn’t. I was a good girl and came home from my chemo session, stayed home Saturday and Sunday, too, and didn’t venture out on my own until Tuesday morning when I had to have an injection (Seth brought me to and from my Monday morning appointment) and then did some errands. I am overjoyed that I went through that final session so well!

In 2 weeks time I will start my second type of chemo therapy. I will have 2 drugs infused once a week for twelve weeks. Toward the end of October, one drug will be finished and the second drug will continue for nine more months after that, given every three weeks. I do not yet know how I will respond to these new drugs. In November and December I expect to undergo radiation as well.

My neurologist, who oversees my Myasthenia Gravis (muscle weakness) wants to start reducing the Prednisone I am on in about 3 months. Pray for wisdom and God’s healing. I have been very strong the past 6 months even with all the trauma and stress my body and mind have gone through. Some of this is due to drugs and the fact that I have a much more sedentary lifestyle (I always laughed at that concept, because I was supposed to live it!). By that I mean, I am not managing my own household, cleaning, cooking, etc. (my kids hardly let me do anything!), nor have I had the full burden of work (which is hard to escape when the office is next door!). But God has been the One who has made all this happen. He has answered untold prayers made on my behalf.

It is just like Paul the Apostle said about his work and Apollos’ work among the Corinthians. Paul sowed, Apollos watered, but God gave the increase. Here we have a similar truth. I have certain drug therapies for MG; I rest, which is called for in MG; but God makes all these things work, and more. We had fears that the cancer treatment would wipe me out physically. The opposite has happened! This is the hand of God, his good, gracious hand. Your prayers have been heard to this point! Please don’t quit!

Now we ask for continued strength, grace and healing. God’s peace has sustained me as well these past 6 months and I pray it will continue. I have a long haul yet.
A dear friend sent me Tony Snow's speech. He recently died of cancer. I thought it was so well done and worth the reading, I wanted to share it with you.

Cancer's Unexpected Blessings by Tony Snow

Cancer's Unexpected Blessings

Blessings arrive in unexpected packages-----in my case, cancer. Those of us with potentially fatal diseases and there are millions in America today-----find ourselves in the odd position of coping with our mortality while trying to fathom God's will. Although it would be the height of presumption to declare with confidence "What It All Means," Scripture provides powerful hints and consolations.

The first is that we shouldn't spend too much time trying to answer the "why" questions: Why me? Why must people suffer? Why can't someone else get sick? We can't answer such things, and the questions themselves often are designed more to express our anguish than to solicit an answer.

I don't know why I have cancer, and I don't much care. It is what it is----a plain and indisputable fact. Yet even while staring into a mirror darkly, great and stunning truths begin to take shape. Our maladies define a central feature of our existence: We are fallen. We are imperfect. Our bodies give out.

But despite this----or because of it----God offers the possibility of salvation and grace. We don't know how the narrative of our lives will end, but we get to choose how to use the interval between now and the moment we meet our Creator face-to-face.

Second, we need to get past the anxiety. The mere thought of dying can send adrenaline flooding through your system. A dizzy, unfocused panic seizes you. Your heart thumps; your head swims. You think of nothingness and swoon. You fear partings; you worry about the impact on family and friends. You fidget and get nowhere.

To regain footing, remember that we were born not into death, but into life, and that the journey continues after we have finished our days on this earth. We accept this on faith, but that faith is nourished by a conviction that stirs even within many nonbelieving hearts----an intuition that the gift of life, once given, cannot be taken away. Those who have been stricken enjoy the special privilege of being able to fight with their might, main, and faith to live----fully, richly, exuberantly----no matter how their days may be numbered.

Third, we can open our eyes and hearts. God relishes surprise. We want lives of simple, predictable ease----smooth, even trails as far as the eye can see, but God likes to go off-road. He provokes us with twists and turns. He places us in predicaments that seem to defy our endurance and comprehension----and yet don't. By His love and grace, we persevere. The challenges that make our hearts leap and stomachs churn invariably strengthen our faith and grant measures of wisdom and joy we would not experience otherwise.

Picture yourself in a hospital bed. The fog of anesthesia has begun to wear away. A doctor stands at your feet, a loved one holds your hand at the side. "It's cancer," the healer announces.

The natural reaction is to turn to God and ask Him to serve as a cosmic Santa. "Dear God, make it all go away. Make everything simpler." But another voice whispers: "You have been called." Your quandary has drawn you closer to God, closer to those you love, closer to the issues that matter----and has dragged into insignificance the banal concerns that occupy our "normal time."

There's another kind of response, although usually short-lived----an inexplicable shudder of excitement, as if a clarifying moment of calamity has swept away everything trivial and tiny, and placed before us the challenge of important questions.

The moment you enter the Valley of the Shadow of Death, things change. You discover that Christianity is not something doughy, passive, pious, and soft. Faith may be the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. But it also draws you into a world shorn of fearful caution. The life of belief teems with thrills, boldness, danger, shocks, reversals, triumphs, and epiphanies. Think of Paul, traipsing through the known world and contemplating trips to what must have seemed the antipodes (Spain), shaking the dust from his sandals, worrying not about the morrow, but only about the moment.

There's nothing wilder than a life of humble virtue----for it is through selflessness and service that God wrings from our bodies and spirits the most we ever could give, the most we ever could offer, and the most we ever could do.

Finally we can let love change everything. When Jesus was faced with the prospect of crucifixion, He grieved not for Himself, but for us. He cried for Jerusalem before entering the holy city. From the Cross, He took on the cumulative burden of human sin and weakness, and begged for forgiveness on our behalf.

We get repeated chances to learn that life is not about us----that we acquire purpose and satisfaction by sharing in God's love for others. Sickness gets us part way there. It reminds us of our limitations and dependence. But it also gives us a chance to serve the healthy. A minister friend of mine observes that people suffering grave afflictions often acquire the faith of two people, while loved ones accept the burden of two peoples' worries and fears.

Most of us have watched friends as they drifted toward God's arms, not with resignation, but with peace and hope. In so doing, they have taught us not how to die, but how to live. They have emulated Christ by transmitting the power and authority of love.

I sat by my best friend's bedside a few years ago as a wasting cancer took him away. He kept at his table a worn Bible and a 1928 edition of the Book of Common Prayer. A shattering grief disabled his family, many of his old friends, and at least one priest. Here was an humble and very good guy, someone who apologized when he winced with pain because he thought it made his guest uncomfortable. He retained his equanimity and good humor literally until his last conscious moment. "I'm going to try to beat [this cancer]," he told me several months before he died. "But if I don't, I'll see you on the other side."

His gift was to remind everyone around him that even though God doesn't promise us tomorrow, He does promise us eternity----filled with life and love we cannot comprehend---and that one can in the throes of sickness point the rest of us toward timeless truths that will help us weather future storms.

Through such trials, God bids us to choose: Do we believe, or do we not? Will we be bold enough to love, daring enough to serve, humble enough to submit, and strong enough to acknowledge our limitations? Can we surrender our concern in things that don't matter so that we might devote our remaining days to things that do?

When our faith flags, He throws reminders in our way. Think of the prayer warriors in our midst. They change things, and those of us who have been on the receiving end of their petitions and intercessions know it. It is hard to describe, but there are times when suddenly the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, and you feel a surge of the Spirit. Somehow you just know: Others have chosen, when talking to the Author of all creation, to lift us up----to speak of us!!

This is love of a very special order. But so is the ability to sit back and appreciate the wonder of every created thing. The mere thought of death somehow makes every blessing vivid, every happiness more luminous and intense. We may not know how our contest with sickness will end, but we have felt the ineluctable touch of God.

What is man that Thou are mindful of him? We don't know much, but we know this: No matter where we are, no matter what we do, no matter how bleak or frightening our prospects, each and every one of us who believe, each and every day, lies in the same safe and impregnable place, in the hollow of God's hand.

End speech.

God is good. Amen.

Jacque

As I sit at my new computer set up at Seth’s home (my son with whom I am currently staying for a couple months), listening to my grandson, Caleb, giggle as daddy gets him up from his nap, I am very grateful for God’s mercy in answer to prayer. Last week Caleb was in distress with the nasty cough with which his two cousins also suffered. Emmanuel was in the hospital with pneumonia and Caleb was getting worse, with breath-choking asthma added to the cough. I appealed to you to pray for these little ones, and I did so without hesitating. Whatever access to “pray-ers” I have at my disposal to solicit prayer in a time of need, I will use! I always “default” to prayer as a first line of defense in all kinds of trials.

Caleb did not have any pneumonia involvement after all, and the medicines given him were effective. I thank God for knowledge, skill, and attainable medical intervention. But only God heals, ultimately. For we all know of instances when every known remedy was used to no avail. We always cast ourselves on the mercy of God. He is sovereign.

Thank you for praying. You had a part in these little ones’ recovery. Emmanuel is home and improved, as well. My prayer, giving them up to God even as I asked for healing, is that these little boys become men of God.

In all our praying, in fact, all our daily living, we must lay down at God’s feet all that is most precious to us, letting go of it (or them), our very lives, submitting ourselves and what we love to the will of God. Anyone of us who would “save” our life, putting ourselves and desires first, will lose it, all of it; the one who loses his life for Jesus’ sake, denying himself, taking up his cross and following Jesus, will save it (Luke 9:23-25).

I’ve taken this at face value and been attempting to live this truth for many years. I say attempting, because I haven’t gotten it down pat yet. I still must exercise my will to choose to do it in every situation which arises in my life, whether it is about my own health or my grandchildren. I believe my Lord when he says I could gain all I want, even the whole world, yet lose my own soul; and what is the point in that? It makes no sense to work hard all your life and in the end lose it all. So I choose to do just what Jesus explained we should do; lay it all down, turn around and follow Jesus, seeking first his kingdom and righteousness. He then promises to meet all our material needs (Matthew 6:19-34). If I give up all here to follow him in obedience, he will add so much more, and eternal life to boot (Matt. 19:29)! So what’s to choose, when you think about it?

So how have I been lately? I had chemo again Friday June 27. It took me longer to recover (6 days as compared to the previous 4), for whatever reasons. Could it be I didn’t drink enough water (65 ounces a day) to flush out the drugs because I just can’t stand the taste of plain water? The drugs are having a cumulative effect (this was my third round)? The sleeplessness side-effect robbing me of strength and energy? I don’t know, but those are possibilities.

Regardless, God brought me through once again. And I am noticing how strong I am, in respect to the myasthenia gravis (muscle weakness). Before I came out to CA I was extremely weak and, anticipating the added stresses of surgery and chemo therapy, I had a week long round of IVIG (intravenous Immunoglobulin) infusions which boosted my strength. Now 6 months later I am still strong, when the IVIG is known generally, and in my personal history, to last maybe 3 months. This is amazing and wonderful to us! I am able to eat an apple (peeled) off the core, without cutting and coring it, corn on the cob and other such eating challenges which to a normally strong person are not even given a second thought. But for me these are very real issues because of the weakness of the muscles.

I am also able to go for walks around the neighborhood on a daily basis (on my good days, so I have about 2 weeks to work with between chemo sessions). I couldn’t do that before. Some days at home in WV it was a stretch to walk 20 minutes on my treadmill. I don’t run or even speed walk either! Randy has been praying God would heal me of the cancer and the myasthenia. I’ve lived with the MG since 13 years of age.

God has been very gracious to me and I am so very thankful. Your prayers, concern and the many expressions of encouragement have definitely played an important part in all this. Thank you.

Randy, back in the saddle in West Virginia, is working away with a will. We talk about every day by phone. Randy dislikes talking on the phone but it is the only way we can “be together” so many miles apart so it truly is a case of “love covers a multitude…”!.

Along with focusing on research and writing, dealing with teams, and overseeing staff, he is trying to hire a nearby accounting company to take over the bookkeeping responsibilities of Mustard Seeds, even though a staff person in the position is the ideal. We have not had anyone apply for the position from our recruiting efforts. It is not exciting work, but absolutely necessary! Bless all the bookkeepers and administrative assistants! We need you and appreciate you. (And if you come to WV and join Mustard Seeds’ staff you’d become a beloved member of the Mustard Seed family! Just ask our 4 ladies on staff. They enjoyed a day at the spa as a thanks for all their extra efforts the past 5 months!)

We have some real issues to deal with in relation to our group health insurance through Mustard Seeds because of my being here in CA and on medical leave of absence. Your prayers are needed for us and our board, with our benefits agent, to work through these issues to the best conclusion. I have been doing minimal work from here the past 6 months and we will be looking at what more is feasible for me to do long-distance, which, with today’s technology is much more than possible only a few years ago. I may not be “in the saddle” but I’m still in the buggy!

God’s smile on all who love him sincerely.

Jacque