Author Archives: Jenna

That sign God gave me … two and a half years ago

Heidi is scheduled to get Erica’s kidney August 10th.

She’s been cancer-free for a year, and now her other major health problem, the one that has made her despair of living so many times as she has endured dialysis in its many horrific forms, is going to go away. She will be, finally … healed.

As I think about the journey that started December of 2018 and, in many ways, is about to come to a close, there is one thing that rises above the detritus of thoughts and feelings that I have about this period in our lives.

God said he would save Heidi, and he did.

January of 2019, as I cried about Heidi’s horrible new diagnosis, I asked God Are you going to heal Heidi? I have to know how this ends. Tell me. Give me a sign. And he gave it to me–immediately.

As I’ve written about before, it turns out that getting a sign … does not make things easier. As Heidi faced death over and over, as complication after complication made it seem like she wouldn’t be able to get a bone marrow transplant she needed, as we planned her funeral and talked about her wishes and joked about the eulogy I would give, I had to contemplate not just the death of my sister, but the death of my faith.

If God didn’t do what he said, I couldn’t trust him again.

Things between us would be broken forever.

Pretending otherwise was unthinkable.

Early on, I shared what God told me with Adam and my sisters, but beyond that, it felt too risky. Too crazy. I kept the sign mostly to myself.

Then, I realized how cowardly that was. If I was so hesitant to share, that must mean I didn’t really believe it. God had given me a gift, and I was treating it like a shameful secret instead of something incredible. But I couldn’t help thinking, what if he doesn’t do it? What if I share it widely, and he fails me?

Put my glory at stake, God seemed to whisper into my heart. It feels scary, but I’m God. It’s not scary to me.

So I did.

I couldn’t shut up about it for a while. I blogged about it, talked about it with anyone who would listen. And even as my faith experienced a wonderful boost through this process … I remember the looks and responses. People nodding, smiling … and then clearing their throats. Looking down awkwardly. Looking back up to tell me, Be careful. Lots of people think they get signs, but it’s just wishful thinking and self-deception.

Trust me, I get it. I don’t blame anyone for this response. Plenty of people claim to have “heard from God” and predict things like the end of the world next Tuesday. I fully considered that I might be one of these crazies! And I didn’t expect for anyone to accept my word for it, wholesale. Only time would prove the truth or foolishness of my little sign.

But I clung to it anyway. Being cautious and smart had come to taste of a kind of duplicitousness to me. After all, I asked, and He gave it. Why hide that? Didn’t the prophets speak out unreasonable-sounding things all the time?

What proceeded was not some sweet experience of absolute trust and peace. It was two and a half years of standing on the edge of that promise as it seemed like the very earth was crumbling under me, and God’s character with it.

I fell into a profound depression. God was not doing what he said. Heidi nearly died . . . many times over. There was a period of months in which I couldn’t stop crying. I remember sitting in my car in the parking lot at work, late because I was unable to stop weeping. Tears racked my body like the waves of a storm set on destroying me. I wept in the grocery store, at the dry cleaner’s, at the hospital, in my car, on a bus, on my bed. I thought about self-harm, a lot. I thought about ending my life.

I was Jacob, wrestling with God, demanding a blessing for Heidi. And he has given it. But like Jacob, I’m walking away from this experience with a limp. Changed. Hurt. Injured. God has saved my sister … but he has not spared us from breaking.

But the point of this post isn’t to unearth all of the questions, truths, and darkness that I now carry with me. It’s to say,

He did it.

He said “I will do it,” and he did.

You have no idea how incredible it is to write these words, in spite of everything. Like releasing a long-held breath, like finally flopping into bed after an exhausting day, like … rest.

The story has been a heart-pounding thriller, a horror movie with twists and turns jumping out from behind every door. It’s been a heartfelt poem, a shriek of lament, a whipping chaos that felt like it was no story at all. And now … it gets to be a song of praise.

God isn’t just someone who did things thousands of years ago. He does things today. Speaks to us now. And follows through.

Isaiah (the 40s and 50s) has been my book during these past few years. It holds the words I used to beg God to be faithful to us, and the hope I dug my bleeding fingers into as I lived inside this long nightmare. And now, I get to share these words with you that so often I hoped I’d be able to say:

Who has announced from of old the things to come?

Let them tell us what is yet to be.

Do not fear, or be afraid; have I not told you from of old and declared it?

You are my witnesses! Is there any god besides me?

There is no other rock; I know not one.

I am the Lord, and there is no other.

I did not speak in secret, in a land of darkness;

I did not say to the offspring of Jacob, “Seek me in chaos.”

I the Lord speak the truth, I declare what is right.

I am God, and there is no other;

I am God, and there is no one like me,

declaring the end from the beginning

and from ancient times things not yet done,

saying, “My purpose shall stand, and I will fulfill my intention.”

The former things I declared long ago,

they went out from my mouth and I made them known;

then suddenly I did them and they came to pass.

You have heard; now see all this;

and will you not declare it?

For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven,

and do not return there until they have watered the earth,

making it bring forth and sprout,

giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater,

so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth;

it shall not return to me empty,

but it shall accomplish that which I purpose,

and succeed in the thing for which I sent it.

My sign about Heidi’s healing is much more than just that. It’s a sign to anyone who’s walked this journey with us that God is to be trusted.

He does what he says.

Love you all, and thank you for following along.

One Year Later

Anxiety looks like this:

Three sisters on speaker phone for the hour and a half leading up to The Call, when the doctor will say if the cancer is back or not.

The one-year bone marrow biopsy was done twelve days ago. One sister had a bad feeling about it. One sister had a good feeling about it. But an hour and a half from The Call, everyone has a bad feeling about it.

Two of the sisters are together in a backyard in Chicago. The other sister is in Boston. The two sisters in Chicago sit on the steps facing the backyard with a plate of vanilla wafers, passion fruit curd to dip them in, and toasted coconut flakes. The sister in Boston is also outside in her yard. Her cat is napping in the sun on some rocks. She just moved there, and as the sisters talk, the movers are inside, unloading furniture and boxes, setting up the pieces of her life that have moved so often, and so far, from Alabama to Alaska to Hawaii, from California to Cameroon and then to Madison, where two and a half years of pain and grief have carved something deep into the sisters’ hearts.

If The Call goes one way, a kidney transplant will bring two of the sisters together in a few months. One will give a kidney and one will get a kidney, and it’s strange to say that such an event would be a dream-come-true, the fulfillment of years of crushing disappointment and wafer-thin hope, but it is. As kids, they dreamed of a lot of things–horses and boys, first kisses and beautiful dresses–but getting kidneys wasn’t one of them, so this is a surprise.

If the Call goes the other way, it will be time to face death. They’ve faced it before over these two and a half years, but this time, there would be a finality to the story. There will be no second bone marrow transplant. If the cancer is back, the ending begins.

In an hour and a half, their lives could change forever. It’s a strange feeling, to be a breath away from such a moment. (And is there anything as life-changing as death?) The world feels both a little pretend and a lot lethal. It could crumple like paper, or stab you in the heart.

Erica and I sit in her backyard together, feeling faint and sick one minute, faint and weepy the next, faint and slap-happy after that. We’re killing time with Heidi on speaker phone, because it’s unthinkable to do anything else, to do anything normal, not when we’re this close to the edge. So we start talking about butts. It starts with someone alluding to that classic elementary school math problem. If Train A leaves the station at a velocity of 90 mph, and train B leaves from the other station . . . except trains become asses.

The Eastward-facing ass is traveling at a rate of three knots. What will be the force of its collision with the Westward-facing ass given the wind resistance and relative body mass ratios of each ass?

The asses are soon colliding past each other, breaking the space-time barrier, and time-traveling into the past. Time-traveling asses lead to the collapse of the space time continuum, with pauses in our little armageddon story to remark on the true origins of the Grand Canyon. All of this traveling ass humor is delivered in our “Chicketarian” voice (™) which is a dead ringer for Christopher Walken. We laugh so hard we almost pee our pants. We briefly panic when Heidi gets an incoming call (it’s Dr. Hall! The cancer is back!), but then it’s just prescription refills and we proceed. “As the old proverb says, ‘A greased ass travels fast’ . . .” We laugh and eat wafers and watch Erica’s chickens. One of them digs three holes in the yard. We keep waiting for her to take one of her legendary dirt baths, but she doesn’t seem interested in anything but her digging, with brief interludes to terrorize the other three chickens.

The weather is perfect in Boston and Chicago. Sunshine and a gentle breeze, warm but not hot.

Every now and then we check the time. Fifteen minutes until The Call (will he be late? Do you promise to text right away?). Five minutes. He calls. “Gotta go.” Click.

Erica and I sit on the steps in the shade, the chickens and the sunshine before us. But we can’t remain there. She hops up to do something in the yard, and I compulsively look at my phone.

If she doesn’t text for a long time, that must mean bad news . . .

How long is a long time?

We get a thumbs-up text from Heidi’s husband five minutes in. This seems promising. But still too tenuous. We need more. We are freaking out. We haven’t stopped freaking out for hours.

Heidi calls. There is no cancer.

No cancer.

No.

Cancer.

Ahhh.

All three markers they check are one hundred percent clear.

We don’t have to cry tonight.

We don’t have to rage and fall apart and limp back to our anti-depressants.

We don’t have to plan an emergency trip to Boston because you could never hear the news your sister’s death is imminent and not hop on a plane.

We get to hang up after a few celebratory whoops, rise from the steps, and go back to our days. I log back onto my laptop to check my work email. Erica fires up the sewing machine. Then she goes to get her kids from school and I come back home.

The day is normal.

The sun is shining.

The news doesn’t feel real.

Good news is like that. Anti-climactic. Where bad news is a punch. And after the tortuous adrenaline storms, the horribleness of the punch sometimes fits better than the gentle caress of good news.

It’s a relief . . . but somehow it doesn’t feel as full and as happy as I want it to.

Yet.

That’s okay. I’ll save it like a stone in my pocket and slip my hand against it as the day goes on, feel its edges, feel its weight, feel the warmth of my own hand on its surface.

And I’ll repeat it back to myself, over and over:

That she is not dying. My sister is not dying. Not today.