The day before tomorrow.

About tomorrow ...
We start the check-in process at the hospital at 5:15 a.m. tomorrow morning.

Surgery is scheduled to take place at 7:30 a.m.

It will be a long surgery, and we have been told they will not wake Amanda until Wednesday.

We will take a laptop to the hospital and put something here on the blog when we know the surgery is successful and complete.

The surgeon told us today that she is encouraged by the latest scans and remains optimistic about the success of the surgery in getting all the cancer in that pelvic location.


About Wednesday ...

Wednesday we will wake up with a new reality.

There are many things about this new reality that are not known, and cannot be known. The most obvious one would be "why," but that is only the beginning. Much of God remains a mystery to us, and we are not the first of humanity to lay awake at nights, sometimes for years, wondering why things happen as they do. Even so, speaking for myself, laying awake at nights often produces more new questions than it does answers to old ones. You know ... do you ever just want to go back into time a decade or two or three and say to all the people you knew then, "Hey Ya'll ... remember all that stuff I knew back then ... Well, I didn't really know it then, and I still don't know most of it now!" :-) It reminds me of one of my very favorite Mark Twain quotes: "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so."

So .... what DO we know?
Here's an interesting puzzle. There is an African proverb that states, "No one knows the story of tomorrow's dawn." Few of us would bother arguing otherwise. And yet all of those who know God, know the story of eternity - a dawn that will never end. :-) I've always found it interesting that in some ways, I know more about what I'll be doing a thousand years from now than what I'll be doing this weekend.

Anyway ... here are some thoughts I would like to share.

1. As the saying goes, "It is what it is." We can't change it.
2. We can meet it with fear and trembling and anger and ... (I've tried those and more, and nothing changed.)
3. We can partner with Amanda ...
   
   • the Amanda that tells her friends, "Hey guys, there are a lot of things I want to do, and I can do them with one leg, but I can't do them with cancer."
   • the Amanda that has faced each and every day as a good one, every day of her life.
   • the Amanda who is so full of joy, she is called Amanda Joy.
   • the Amanda who doesn't complain about her situation, but looks forward to the opportunities of another day.
   • the Amanda that clearly strives each and every day to honor God in all she does.
   • the Amanda that truly does show us what the "fruit of the Spirit" looks like in the flesh.
   • the Amanda that teaches me about humility.
     
   • the Amanda that is basically carrying the rest of us through this.

Look ... I know a lot of you are like me in that you have often looked at Amanda and thought to yourself, "How does she do this with such grace?" Honestly, I'm not sure. I watch her sleeping and think to myself, "How do you do this?"

And so when I say we should "partner with Amanda," I am of course aware of the fact that hundreds if not thousands of you already have partnered with us and Amanda in very helpful ways. But it is my goal to try partnering with her in spirit as well ... in the sense that I will endeavor to live in the moment, be thankful for relationships, seek to honor God, and when asked about cancer, reply like Amanda usually does ... "I don't really think about it." Again, I'm not sure how she is so consistently and sincerely able to do all that, but it seems to be a good plan.