The Cake That Changed Everything

Today is July 17th.

4 years ago today we bought a cake.

The cake was a celebration. It said "Goodbye Hospice." Grandma had been in hospice care for months after taking a drastic turn in the fall of 2019. For those who don't know, she's my best friend. We have an amazing relationship that has spanned my entire life and gotten us through many hardships. Everyone kept saying, "You gotta get prepared. It's really bad. The doctors say she just has months. It's going to happen. You need to be ready..." During that time I just had this completely insane, irrational, otherworldly peace. Every day we prayed for a miracle and God gave me the utmost assurance that He was doing something.

January of 2020 was when she started hospice. When we would visit she'd say she felt ok, and she just wasn't ready. She didn't feel like this was it, and neither did I. That was such a picture of our relationship--defiant even in the face of death. To keep her safe during the pandemic we didn't see her in person often, but I kept calling her on the phone every day like I normally would. As weeks passed, I noticed her voice was sounding stronger and stronger. Finally, she was given a new scan, and there had been no new growth. Without treatment, she wasn't getting worse. Her body had become stable enough to start a new treatment. In July she graduated from hospice because she was doing so well.

To celebrate that monumental milestone, we bought a cake. Jordan's family owned a bakery and made a sweet custom cake just for the occasion. We picked it up on a Friday afternoon to take over to Grandma and Grandpa's house the next day. You can imagine this was just about the best celebration we could have ever asked for. I prayed for months, on my knees before God daily for this day exactly. We were on cloud nine, almost too excited to sleep, ready to celebrate the day we had been longing for.

But it was that night, after Tag had gone to sleep, that Lucy came to me and said "I think I'm growing an extra rib." This seemed likely to her because I do have an extra rib. And an extra vertebrae. Those are things one is born with, not just grown out of nowhere, so my heartbeat instantly quickened. She showed us the rock-hard mass sticking out of her sternum. A sick feeling washed over my entire body. The mass was so hard, so immovable...she had had no injuries to explain it...it was just there.

And that began a 9-month quest to find out if our daughter had bone cancer. One of the happiest days of our life immediately dissolved into facing our worst nightmare. Then the nightmare just dragged out. Doctors had no clue what was going on. We went through months of testing and waiting and being passed from one specialty to another. So often those days would end with me sneaking out to the front porch with Jordan after the kids were asleep so I could just sob into his shoulder, not wanting Lucy to know the fear we were feeling.

In the midst of all that though, I got to call my grandma every evening like normal and talk to her. God lined up those events PERFECTLY so that they were undeniably intertwined. Our best day and one of our worst--tied to each other. Every moment of heartbreak and fear starting from July 17th, 2020, lasting until April 2021, was met with "But look what He did! He did this before and He can do it again."

Charles Spurgeon once said that in Heaven we will see that we had not one trial too many. I already see a glimpse of that here. There was purpose in every tear, and every moment of uncertainty was met by the one who holds eternity in His hands. We wouldn't have made it through July 17th, 2020 and every day for 9 months after had we not been privileged to see God move before that in miraculous ways.

Picking up the cake from the family bakery

The celebration we waited for but

not the one we expected