From a Fellow Traveler

This week marks the end of my wife’s chemo treatment. Four months and eight cycles in total. The last couple rounds were tough on her. It feels wonderful for this phase to come to a conclusion.

As a caregiver, it’s been hard to watch. This is not how we were supposed to spend our 20^th Anniversary…

Before this journey began, our daughters had just reached the ages where we could go on great memory-making trips with the whole family. Our health had collectively improved, and everything felt like it was moving in the right direction.

Cancer derailed so much of it.

Two months before my wife’s diagnosis we hiked seven miles up 1500 feet of elevation gain to Black Elk Peak in South Dakota together. The other night, we needed to turn around on our neighborhood trail after half a mile; and that was on a good recovery week for her.

There is nothing fair about what has happened to her and how quickly it all unraveled.

I sat with my eldest daughter the other night and held her as she cried. She wanted to know why it had to be her mom, and why don’t people ask her about it as much anymore. (Don’t they care?)

These are not the parenting questions we wanted to be dealing with, and I don’t have any easy answers for her.

So when Easter arrived this year, as I watched my wife on some of her hardest days, I didn’t really know what I was supposed to be celebrating.

Is it supposed to make me feel better that, when someone dies with faith in Jesus, they have a heavenly home? Because the thought of people dying is the source of my sadness right now.

Do all the cheers of Alleluia and It Is Finished hold any meaning when everything feels so incomplete? My personal reflection this Easter didn’t feel festive enough to match the season. I was having trouble finding resurrection joy.

What I did find were little glimpses of comfort in Jesus’ scars. It honestly felt like an odd place to focus during Easter. But those scars resonated with me deeply.

There are parts of my wife’s body that will take months to heal, if ever. Neither of us have ever entered, let alone won, any competitions for outstanding human physique; but my wife has always been perfect for me.

I look at her, after twenty years of marriage, and I see a body scarred with imperfections; imperfections that display an endless love for me and our two daughters.

Easter this year made me love how the perfect, risen Savior is scarred, too. He might have defeated death and risen in glory, but this true Man has the scars to prove it.

And so does my wife.

I imagine you have people in your life who bear some of the same scars. C-sections, mastectomies, stent placement, Mohs surgeries; the list is endless.

These healed wounds on my wife, and on my Savior, are reminders of the brutal realities this life throws at us.

But there is also a beautiful hope hidden in these scars: hope that what they get will be worth the pain they endured.

And what did they hope to get at the price of these scars? What was worth the cost?

More time together.

With you.

That makes me feel loved.

I hope you do, too.

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