Driving Through the Construction Zone of Life!

Praise the Lord, O my soul.  All my inmost being, praise his holy name.  Praise the Lord, O my soul and forget not all his benefits - who forgives all your sins and heals all your diseases...  Psalm 103:1-3

Cutting off that passage at verse 3 is kind of an injustice, but this is already a really long post.  That passage from scripture is a beautiful picture of how our God, our Creator and Savior, loves and cares for us.  It has been a wonderful thing to focus on this week.  This has been a very difficult, exhausting week.  I certainly don't mean to say that God has not sustained us and blessed us because he has - abundantly!  His hand in our day-to-day life is often most appreciated and recognized when we are experiencing hardships.  You gotta go through the fire to be refined, which is what we want.  We want to be more like Christ.

Just 7 weeks from today, our moving truck is supposed to be driving out of FL.  But at the moment, life is at a stand-still.  Last week, Alan became ill.  He had the same symptoms that he has had repeatedly, over and over again for months.  Both of us had enough, so he finally mustered up the energy to go the doctor.  They guessed it was a virus and sent him home.  Then about 2 hours later, the phone rang.  It was the doctor.  He needed to talk to Alan in his office right away about his blood work.

It turned out that Alan's white blood cell count was 9x the normal levels.  That apparently is indicative of one thing: CANCER.  Specifically, leukemia.  To verify their suspicions, they decided to run a bunch more tests and they told us to come back on Monday to discuss the results.  Monday arrived and the news was still bad.  The flight doc said they had ruled out everything BUT cancer.  He'd get us a referral to see Heme/Onc (Hematology/Oncology) ASAP.  Of course, there is no military Heme/Onc here, so we had to go through Internal Medicine to get our referral to go off base to a civilian provider.

By Wednesday, when we got into the Internal Med doc, his WBC count had dropped!  PRAISE GOD!  This still left many questions to be answered, but it also gave us a lot of hope that this is not leukemia.  This also delayed our referral to heme/onc.

This morning, Alan had a thorough CT scan and perhaps that will lead to more answers.  He is feeling much better, thankfully, and we are praying God provides more answers next week.  

And the icing on the cake for this crazy week is that we will only be receiving HALF a paycheck on the 15th.  Then, NO PAYCHECK until congress (Who, of course, is getting paid!) decides to compromise about the budget.  We are fine and we are prepared for this, but there are a lot of military families who are not.

It's very sad and very frustrating!  I have seen photos of soldiers in Afghanistan holding cardboard signs that read, "Will Fight Terrorism for Food."  Funny at first, but then you realize, some of them will give their lives for our freedom, all while their families at home are struggling to put food on the table.  There are lots of military families who make so little money that they are on WIC (Women, Infants and Children - welfare/food stamps).  Can you imagine not handing them a paycheck for an indefinite amount of time?!  Please pray for this crisis to be resolved quickly!

God is FAITHFUL and even though it feels like we are currently driving through a crazy construction zone, complete with bumpy roads, delays and detours, we trust in His plans for us!  He does NOT promise that life will be easy, but he does promise that HIS WAYS are GOOD and they are the BEST for us!  I think God is really wanting us on our knees more often this week!  Prayers are appreciated!

"Be joyful always; pray continually; give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus."
1 Thessalonians 5:17