My mom has cancer, and other things you never want to say
My mom got diagnosed with cancer soon after the start of the new year. Something like that changes the way you experience church. It changes the way you sing the songs, hear the scripture, and respond to people asking you how you are. The first thing I had to deal with was coming to terms with the fact that God is good and that this is an objective statement through which I evaluate the world around me instead of using my circumstances to make a statement about who God is. No matter what, this is a true statement. He is good--and just like so many of the Bible characters that I learned about as a child, I have to trust what I know to be true over what I can see. Some of those characters were used in amazing ways without ever getting the advantage of seeing what, exactly, God was doing with them. So that means that what is going on with my mom, no matter how much it sucks, does not change God's goodness. As I throw up my hands and say, "I don't get what you're d