How We Got Here
For months, Jason battled mysterious GI issues and rapid weight loss. We anxiously awaited our specialist appointment, hoping for clarity and relief. But fate had other plans.
On a seemingly ordinary Monday night, everything changed. Jason woke me in agony, clutching his abdomen. We rushed to the ER—no time to hesitate, no time to second-guess. The hours blurred together:
11pm: Checked in, Jason nearly fainting from pain
1am: CT scan revealed a perforated colon
3am: Emergency surgery—stat, stat, stat!
A colon rupture. Unbelievable. Unimaginable. Four hours of frantic waiting, holding our breath. But even then, worse words awaited us than we could have imagined.
“Stomach cancer.” Then the words from the oncologist:
Inoperable, incurable, Stage 4, Palliative chemotherapy…
Those words hung heavy in the air, each one a blow. It felt like darkness settling over our lives. Yet, as Genesis says, “The Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light.”
I asked Jason to share what it was like to hear the news. He said, “The world got really quiet and loud at the same time. ‘Cancer!’ It reverberated throughout my being. There is power in that word, and I felt every letter. The doctor asked if I wanted to know how long people live with this. I said, ‘No.’ I won’t give cancer that power. It is not the Author of my story. Nor will it tell me when my story will end.”
Now what? Jason said, “Now, I sit with it. Sit in the reality of what my wife and I just heard. Reality. I love that word. We all live in one. Cancer is now a reality in my life.”
He shared a parable from Matthew 13—the wheat and the tares. A farmer plants wheat; an enemy plants weeds. The Master says not to pull out the weeds, lest you harm the wheat. Let them grow together until the harvest.
The beauty and challenge of this parable? It invites us to grow alongside the very thing we fear might destroy us. Sometimes, the weeds make the wheat stronger. Jason says, “They tell me cancer will never leave my body, that treatment is just management. Okay, we’ll see. But no matter what, the Real me grows strong.”
We are learning to grow wheat among the weeds. To live in reality, to refuse to let fear or a diagnosis write the end of our story. And to trust that, somehow, the wheat will thrive—even among the weeds.
