The surgeon's office called yesterday.  July 18 at 2 pm. I will be having surgery.

You would think that I would feel like a thousand pound weight has been lifted off my shoulders by knowing that I'm having the surgery, but it honestly does not.  Don't get me wrong, I am thankful that now I know the cancer will be gone.  Over the last twenty months I have had days where I was convinced I would not survive this.  I have had days where I believed I wasn't sick except for a little cancer--that I would be alive to see my kids graduate from college, get married, and have kids themselves.  Sometimes those thoughts changed daily. 

I do feel relief by knowing I will have surgery.  I am happy to think that I have a far greater chance of seeing my kids do all those things.  The word I think of is relief, and yet there is not as much relief as I would have thought.  Perhaps it hasn't set in yet.  Perhaps after surgery it will hit me that the tumors are gone.  I can't say.  What I can say right now is I feel more like twenty months ago I jumped out of a plane.  I was skydiving in tandem with God and now my feet are on the ground, or just about to be.  I've never skydived before, but I imagine when you jump you have to trust the parachute.  You have to believe that it will open and you will eventually hit the ground safe and sound.  But I wasn't jumping alone.  God has been there the whole time underneath me, holding me up.  He is just about to let me back down on the ground. 

The fact of the matter is that once you jump from that plane the first time it makes it easier to do it the next time, and trusting God is the same way.  Once you trust Him a little it makes it easier to trust Him the next time, but God never allows us to jump solo. He said, "I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee." We never have to trust the parachute alone--the treatment in and of itself. 

Perhaps tomorrow I'll write about the changes I have made and what I will continue to do and what I won't.