My alarm went off at 5:30 a.m. yesterday and it didn’t feel real.

I slogged through my morning in a haze. Breakfast, Bible study, car, MARTA, desk breakfast. Like the steps to a dance I’d almost forgotten.

It could have been drudgery, I guess. Maybe it could have felt like that without me being able to control it, or maybe I view things through rose-colored glasses. What I know, for sure, is that my daily routine — particularly after a long-delayed return — does not feel like drudgery.

Okay, of course, some parts of it do. But there are little pieces to cherish shot all through it. Lugging books onto the train. Making calls and getting assignments (although, of course, there’s not much of that this week after Christmas). Making the decision, even when it’s one driven by exhaustion, on what to do after work.

None of it’s exceptional. It’s the opposite, actually. But I don’t hold these moments in my hand, sifting through them like little throwaway jewels, because they’re exceptional. I do that because they’re mine. This is the life I’ve been given.

And I will rejoice in it.

For the first time since I waited for my parents to arrive, the night before my second brain surgery, sitting on my couch and gnawing my nails to the quick…I am alone in my little apartment.

I’m unpacking slowly, drinking out of all the familiar, too-cutesy mugs — the scratchy black “M” from Target, the one that looks like a chevron sweater — and hearing the swish of the dishwasher on my Pyrex casserole dish, which I’d left occupied in the fridge.

Soon I’ll chop smoked sausage and potatoes for a winter casserole in that dish, soon I’ll curl up under my cloudy white faux-down comforter and go to sleep. Tomorrow I’ll go for a walk in the morning cool, because I’m not allowed to run. I’ll fill out the paperwork to renew my lease here — to live somewhere for more than a year, for the first time in what feels like so long.

My heart aches because I miss my loud family and our menagerie of animals and the subtle beauty of home — only beautiful because it’s home — but that’s beauty in itself, that’s the glory of scattering your heart all over, of loving things you cannot hold in your hands at the same time.

And I’m thinking now about the way this is all grace, the bags and boxes of Christmas gifts still stacked on my worn leather couch, the plans for the weekend, for the week ahead, the life, the being alive.

Welcome home.

I spent most of Friday wrapped in hand-wringing, nail-biting, gray-cloud fear over four tiny metal pins.

The type of radiation I’ll have in a few weeks — my doctors’ attempt at making sure this tumor doesn’t recur a third time — is stereotactic radiosurgery, which, gloriously, means I only have to go in once, for a sort of extended session. As with (I think) most radiation of the brain, the radiation oncologist will fix a metal frame on my head, using four metal pins screwed into my skull, numbing the areas of insertion with a local anesthetic.

I am really. really. really not looking forward to those pins.

I spent Friday following long strings of Google results, trying to find someone who’d experienced this procedure and could tell me how much pain there was, how much the local anesthetic staved it off, how scary it was when the pins screwed in. It’s an oddly specific thing to Google, and I didn’t find much…so I just worried.

Sometimes, though, God does this thing where He speaks to you exactly where you are, in the middle of the upending of your little world, before you’ve even stopped shaking. From my daily reading of the #SRTAdvent study on Saturday, the day after all this happened:

“The comfort God provides is not an anesthetic. There’s no numbing, no loss of consciousness. He’s not a drug in your veins. He’s the Hope anchored within you.”

And then, in the other study I’m reading through, Kay Arthur’s Lord, I Want to Know You:

“The truth of God’s sovereignty makes it easier to obey those commands in the New Testament that charge us to rejoice in all circumstances of life…isn’t it easier to give thanks when you realize that your Father, El Elyon, God Most High, is in control and that nothing can happen in His universe without His permission?” 

I can’t (and, I hope, won’t) depend on numbing, on loss of consciousness. My trust is placed in the Hope anchored within me, and everything that’s about to happen was filtered through His hands.

–How You Can Pray–

For peace as I face those little pins, of course :) And for the financial stability to handle the continuing medical bills.

I’ve been trying to seek out one thing in this experience (when I’m not seeking bland things like the next round of pain meds). You might call it love, or joy — really, just an experience of God in the circumstances I’m in, an experience that goes beyond staples that catch on the collar of my shirt and paper gowns that don’t quite fasten in the back.

You’d think love would be abundantly easy to find, and it probably would be for a better person than me, and it is, in flashes. When my dad walks into my hospital room and sees me eating Jello on my own and smiles to split the moon, when I hear that my two-year-old class at church made me a get-well banner, when my baby cousins tell me to feel better, the love comes easy and quick.

But for me, with my heart the way it is (fallen, human, dirty, in a way I can’t overstate)…I have a hard time. A hard time realizing I’m not my nurses’ only patient. Not letting my medicine metabolize into annoyance with the family sitting behind me at my brother’s guitar concert. Being kind and patient with my family, recognizing the sacrifices they’ve made. I give in too easily to self-righteousness; I forgive myself far too much, with the tumor as my all-purpose excuse.

But I want to love that way in the little moments, the annoying moments…to recognize the holiness in everyone around me, holy in that they were made by God. To me, that’s an essential tenet of this mystery we believe. You can’t believe in God and not believe in people, too.

And I want to see holiness in my life. Laughing with my mom while we wait in the ER. Making sugar cookies from scratch. Picking up my brother from school. I want to live a life drenched in gratitude and recognize these things for what they are: Not accidents, but gifts.

God, fill me up with that. Give me strength to see past my smallness.

–How You Can Pray–

We had a small scare on Sunday night. My face swelled up pretty big (way more than it was supposed to five days after surgery) and the doctor on call at my neurosurgeon’s office advised us to go to the local ER. It turned out the swelling was caused by a superficial hematoma, not bleeding in the brain — good news! Mom & I both commented later that we could feel the relief physically flow through us the second we got the word. So, please pray that the swelling continues to stay down, and pray for some pain relief, because the sting is a little more persistent this time. 

So…I’m home! At my parents’ house, that is. Out of the hospital, all stapled up. This will probably just be a quick update, because my brain is still fogged, and my hands are still working all wrong, and as always, I don’t remember much that happened in the hospital.

Everything I do remember is in little snippets:

Riding to the hospital with my parents on Tuesday, in the dark, all doom and gloom and nerves. Ahead of us in registration a mom was checking in her nine-month-old little girl, and my heart broke about ten times thinking about the fact that the baby didn’t know she was about to have surgery, or what surgery was.

Waking up in recovery and (this is gross, sorry) throwing up all over my nightgown, and the nurses saying “we gave her a bag…she just didn’t throw up in the bag.” (#whoops)

My best friend coming to visit me and knowing when to empathize, and when to stop talking about my brain and just start telling me which makeup of mine she’d tried on that morning at my apartment.

Getting Jello onto a spoon without help on Wednesday morning. (My dad was proud. Is it sad when you can make someone proud using Jello?)

On Tuesday I made it through the first night after surgery, which hurt as much as it always does…is it just me, or is there just no pain medicine strong enough to help on that first night?

On Thursday we met with the radiation oncologist, and it was scary, but I think the decision’s been made to proceed on radiation after this incision heals up a bit. I’m not looking forward to it, but I think it’s the smartest decision.

I hope it’ll be round two & done. I hope that so much that I’m afraid to hope it — I don’t want to hope so hard it goes away, you know?

But it might come back, and it might not, and no matter what happens I have one plan: to live the mess out of whatever life I get, sick or well.

…I plan to get a head start on that as soon as I can sleep all this medicine out of my system, and as soon as things make more sense :)

–How You Can Pray–

Please pray for energy during recovery, a clean pathology report (still stage II) next Friday, and that this will be the last recurrence! I am so, so grateful for all of you & your prayers that have lifted me through this time! 

I wanted to bring y’all an update from my last day before surgery — the last “normal” day for a while, although I’m learning that normal is really, really relative. But my thoughts are so all over the place that I don’t know which I can catch long enough to write about.

I think, more than anything, I’d like to talk about the things I’ve been grateful for throughout this process. That may sound sentimental & saccharine, but my heart feels so much healthier when I’m focusing on those little joys & gifts, instead of complaining.

So, first, I am grateful for community. Last night at church, the sweet people I serve with (leading preschool small groups) gathered around me in the center of the room, laid hands on me and on each other, and prayed for peace. The way I felt in the center of that circle is how I have felt, figuratively, since all this started. I have felt surrounded, wrapped up, by people who have reached toward me to help, to pray, to do what they can and love where they can’t. In this little group are people I know and people I don’t know, people who pray and people who don’t. God doesn’t have hands or feet on earth; he has people. And all of you who have wrapped me up in thoughts and love and cards and meals, the religious and the skeptics alike — you’ve been God on earth to me.

I’m sure they’ll bear the brunt of all my complaining in the weeks to come, so let me say now that I am endlessly grateful for family. For my aunts and uncles and grandparents who wrapped up piles of silky, filmy scarves, all ready for the half-bald days after surgery, and brought them to our Thanksgiving meal. For my brothers who have cheered me up in a million brother-y ways. For my parents, who are letting me stay on their health insurance, and letting me stay in their home for weeks after surgery, and a million things I can’t begin to list. Everything about this would be harder without them.

I’m grateful for social media. Seriously. People have left these strings of comments letting me know they’re thinking about me, and praying for me, and I can go back over those and read them again and again when I’m feeling afraid. How incredible is that? Maybe it’s self-centered, wanting to read these thoughts about me over and over, but I have felt so loved & so cared for, just being able to go back and hear what’s been said.

I’m grateful for experiencing all of this during the Advent season. I’ve been reading the She Reads Truth Advent study in the mornings, and it has, more than anything, set my heart in the right place for all that is to come. This season of waiting, of joyful expectancy for the King born in a dirty manger, reminds me that our whole time on earth is about expectancy. There is more ahead, more for us than what we experience here on earth, thanks to the coming of that baby-King.

How You Can Pray: 

My surgery is tomorrow (12/9) at 8 a.m. We’ll arrive at the hospital at 6 a.m. for a final MRI. Please pray for TONS & TONS of peace for my mom & dad, as well as a safe surgery, safe anesthesia, and limited pain afterward. 

Please also pray for my boss, Matt, and his family. He visited the ER last night & had surgery this morning to have his appendix removed. And, since we are a department of two, follow that up with a prayer for a few slow days :)

Way down deep inside of me, beneath all the real things I should be worried about, is another kind of fear.

It’s the fear that I’m overdoing it. The fear that I’m being dramatic. The fear, to put it simply, that I’m talking about all of this too much.

I want to talk about it, online and in person. I want to share my heart with the people around me, even when my heart is not something kind and good and wrapped up in a neat bow.

But I’m worried that every moment of talking about it comes across as a solicitation for attention.

As an attempt to make the conversation about me.

I am worried, way deep down, that people will look back and say wow, Meghan sure did make a huge, dramatic deal out of this non-malignant tumor.

And that’s another point: Things could be so, so much worse. And I don’t want to treat this situation with an enormity that is an affront to the people who have had it so, so much worse.

But at the same time, it is enormous in my life.

And I do want to talk, and I do want to be heard.

And I’m grateful for the patience that has been shown to me — probably without me realizing it, most of the time — by people who are willing to listen.

— The update —

T minus 48 hours until surgery. I’m feeling very nervous and, at the same time, very ready to get this first step over with & out of the way. If you’d like to pray, please pray for the calm I need to soak up some normalcy tomorrow during my last day of work, as well as safe travels & lots and lots of peace for my mom & dad.

I have been so bitter lately. Like, so bitter I don’t really want to tell you about it, because I don’t want you to know how nasty my heart has been.

I am dreading my surgery. I’m angry I have to go through it. I’m mad at people who don’t understand, madder still at well-meaning people who think they do. I am holding so tight my knuckles are white to every little inch of my recovery. My hands are working; I can almost pinch something in two fingers. I don’t want to lose that. I’ve worn my hair down every day this week, reveling in the fact that it’s all there, bitter, bitter, bitter because it’s going to be gone.

And then, on top of all that nastiness, I am bitter because I feel like I can’t be bitter. Next to others who have experienced major illness, I feel cruel and ungrateful and small. I think of all the times someone has extolled the virtues of a long-suffering patient who never once complained, only rejoiced in their pain, and I wince because I am not that person. I am angry that I’m not that person. This is how cyclical it gets.

It’s one of those times when I’ve just had to give it to God, just give it up entirely and say look, here’s what’s happening, my heart is all messed up and I can’t fix it.

So I left it in His hands. I waited. And tonight on the train, as a panhandler was offering me two for $5 scarves out of a trash bag, I cried as I came to this passage in the book I’m reading. (It’s by John Piper.)

“The fight for joy in Christ is not a fight to soften the cushion of Western comforts. It is a fight for strength to live a life of self-sacrificing love. It is a fight to join Jesus on the Calvary road and stay there with Him, no matter what. How was he sustained on that road? Hebrews 12:2 answers, ‘For the joy that was set before Him [he] endured the cross.’ 

The key to endurance in the cause of self-sacrificing love is not heroic willpower, but deep, unshakable confidence that the joy we have tasted in fellowship with Christ will not disappoint us in death. Sacrifices in the path of love were sustained in the New Testament not by willpower, but by joyful hope. ‘You had compassion on those in prison, and you joyfully accepted the plundering of your property, since you knew that you yourselves had a better possession and an abiding one.’ [Heb. 10:34]

The aim of this book is not to salve the conscience of well-to-do Western acquisition. The aim is to sustain love’s ability to endure sacrificial losses of property and security and life, by the power of joy in the path of love. The aim is that Jesus Christ be made known in all the world as the all-powerful, all-righteous, all-merciful, all-satisfying Treasure of the universe.”

I can imagine how frustrating it might be for someone who’s not into the whole God thing to hear me talk about my experience of illness, but it’s the only way I know how to talk about it. It has been so God-centric for me.

I don’t know how to explain it, really, but it’s gone something like this: You seek Jesus, and you ask him for joy in spite of pain, and what He gives you instead is joy that is in the pain. The moments of my worst fear, my worst discomfort, my worst pain and my worst bitterness have been soaked in His goodness, and I have known His character more through these moments than anything else in my life.

We’re less than a week out from surgery now. I am very, very afraid. And I am throwing myself in His arms and, quiet, choosing to trust. I don’t know what to ask Him, don’t know what to say. I’m just here waiting, sitting still in His presence.