Fear

How do you live with the fear?

Oh sure, I've struggled with fear my whole life. But looking back at the remote, unlikely things I was afraid of makes me laugh and shake my head.

It's nothing like now.

I don't even know how to describe it...the sinking feeling in your stomach, the clammy hands, the numbness. It comes when the surgeon talks of "extending life" and then says to you and your husband, "If there is anything you have ever wanted to do, any travelling, you should do it now."

And it hangs in the air between you, that no one expects him to overcome this cancer.

It comes when the cardiologist tells you calmly on the phone that he was wrong about your daughter--that she is not a normal, healthy child--that she has a hole in her heart.

It comes when the pediatrician hands you an epinephrine pen for your daughter, who is swollen and red and covered with frightening-looking hives, and you find out that further ant bites could be deadly but so could the shot of adrenaline that is supposed to save her.

And I don't know how to handle it. When fear is squeezing hard at my heart, I get angry with God. I cry.  I curl up on my bed, too overwhelmed to do my jobs. I confide in a friend. Or I try to stay busy and ignore it. But ultimately, it spirals down into a frantic sense of control.

If I stay on my husband about the food he eats, maybe the cancer will stay away. If I swear to myself that my daughter will never play outside without me standing right beside her, she won't get bitten. Even praying starts to feel like control...if I remember to pray faithfully, every single night, maybe the hole will close up on its own and we can avoid the procedures, the surgery.

In the end, the thing I keep coming back to is this--perfect love casts out fear. I can't do it by myself. And I have to throw myself into the arms of Perfect Love and beg Him to cast this out of me. Because I know a life of fear is not really a life at all.