Okay. Now what?
The Journey So Far:
Looking in the mirror, she had noticed something different and decided to get it checked out. Her sister died from inflammatory breast cancer, and so this journey has been filled with anxiety for her. When her doctor recommended and immediate mammogram and ultrasound, she began to panic. She wanted to hear that her concerns were nothing to worry about, but the doctor didn't give her that option.
The mammogram was scheduled for 5 days from the day of the doctor's appointment, which seemed like a very long time for Marcia. She prayed about that date, asking for an earlier one. She got in the next day. That's right the day after her doctor's appointment.
She made me go along with her to the mammogram. Well, she would have, if I hadn't agreed so eagerly. I wanted to be with her as she--no--as we went through this. Waiting for over an hour in the reception area wasn't my idea of being with her, but it was a close as I could be, given the state of undress in the mammogram area.
While she was there, praying and trying to keep fear under control, she noticed two things: angels and God's voice. The angels she saw where hovering near the ceiling of the room, just watching what was going on. When she asked if they were there for her comfort, they seemed to say no, not by their words, but by their attitude. They were there for another reason. She also heard God's voice say to her something like "It's not cancer until the biopsy says it is." I don't know that that's literally true, and I'm not sure it was meant to be. But what it did for Marcia was allow her to relax and let go of all the ways this could go--including the direction of inflammatory breast cancer that took her sister in just a matter of months.
I was able to be in the (private) room where the ultrasound was done, and it showed something that would require a pathologist to resolve one way or the other.
Once again, as an answer to prayer, the date for the biopsy was earlier than expected and I accompanied her to the appointment.
Between the mammogram and biopsy, Marcia called together a group of folks she knows and trusts to pray with her and for her. We gathered for a little over an hour and talked and prayed. The word from the Lord everyone heard was that this is not anything there to worry about, that it's already taken care of.
The procedure went well, Marcia, who prayed throughout the procedure, was at peace the whole time, and except for being a little sore, she was fine. This was a Tuesday and we were told we would get the results on Friday at the earliest.
On Wednesday through Saturday we were scheduled to be at a leadership training event led by PRMI staff. They call it "Exousia" which is the Greek word for "authority." Most of the people there we knew and it was a great place to be while we were waiting for the pathology report.
Thursday afternoon Marcia got a phone call and left the session. I followed her out, as did another woman who is a close friend. It was a day earlier than the earliest day we could expect results, but this had been how things had been going. The pathology report did show cancer, a slow growing type of cancer in the ducts of the breast.
When Marcia returned to the room she was surrounded in prayer. It was a wonderful time for her to receive from people she knows and trusts. It was as if God had orchestrated the timing of all this just so she could receive prayer from these people, many of whom have healing gifts as well as the gift of encouragement. A couple of the people there had been healed of cancer and both encouraged her that healing is possible and imparted whatever healing they had received to her.
The Frustrating Middle
The next steps are: an appointment with a surgeon who will remove the cancer, and an appointment with an oncologist (cancer doctor) for post surgery treatment (such as chemotherapy).
But the insurance company had been dragging their feet, making setting up an appointment impossible.
So, once again Marcia gets pro-active and begins making phone calls, talking to the folks at the insurance company and politely pushes them to do their job as quickly as they can. She also decides that she's going to get a copy of the pathology report into the doctors' hands as quickly as possible so that they can begin to consider her situation and begin planning even before official authorization has come through.
About an hour later, Marcia got a call from her primary care physician. They were working on getting the referral to the insurance insurance company so that they could authorize the oncologist. After helping them find the oncologist she wanted (they were looking in the wrong county), Marcia asked them to put "expedite" on their request to the insurance company. Marcia got a call in about 10 minutes saying that her visits with the oncologist would also be authorized!
So now it's time to schedule an appointment with the surgeon. With everything in place now, we hoped this would be quite soon. However the surgeon's secretary told her that the earliest she could get in for an initial visit would be September 25 (about 3 weeks after getting the authorization). Further the surgeon would be out of the office until the following Tuesday (the day I'm writing this, actually). Marcia, who knows this surgeon from working with him in the hospital as a part of her job, asked the secretary to ask him as a personal favor, to see if she could get in earlier. For the next 40 minutes she went about her job praying a declaring "My Daddy loves me. He cares about my anxiety, He cares about my health. My Daddy loves me." Although the surgeon was out of the office, she got a call back about 40 minutes later with an appointment date 11 days earlier (September 14). We have an appointment with the oncologist the next day.
Lessons Learned So Far:
The first lesson learned is that fear can often be bigger than we think it should. Nor does it respond well to logic. Fear about a multi-variable unknown can be overwhelming. At the same time, God's presence and assurance can make it disappear with a peace that goes way beyond what the understanding could ever do. Still, hearing and being open to God's voice and God's presence means taking our eyes off of the problem long enough to see the Problem Solver.
The next lesson is that tenacity pays. Marcia never settled for the hand she was dealt. She didn't accept anything as her 'fate' or Christianize fate as 'providence' (which is a terrible way to blame God for stuff He didn't do!). Like the persistent widow (Luke 18:1-8), she kept pounding on the door of the decision-makers until she got a better decision. Like Ruth (at Naomi's urging), Marcia put herself in the path of her destiny for healing.
This is like prayer in many ways. We can pray in a way that aligns us with an unwanted fate, or we can, in prayer, resist an unwanted fate and push against it until it bends to God's will to bless. We don't want to partner with a curse in some perverted sense of nobility under hardship. No! We resist the devil and we resist the curse--defy the curse if necessary, clinging to God Who promises to "never stop doing good to [us]" (Jeremiah 32:40). We don't deny hardship; we defy it. That's what those declarations were all about: defying "reality" and ordering it to come into alignment with the Truth.
A third lesson learned. Well meaning people sometimes do hurtful things. In the prayer we received at the Exousia event, one of the prayers was that we would be able to gracefully handle all the unsolicited advice we would likely receive. So far we've gotten some, but not as much as we thought might happen. This is in part because we've gotten ahead of this by asking that all advice be filtered through me or one of Marcia's prayer team members. I think some people just have a need to rescue, or to make their own reactions go away by telling someone of a sure "cure" or treatment plan outside of modern medicine, or a prayer strategy that is guaranteed to work (after all [whatever they're suggesting] worked for [friend, relative, someone I read about]). Marcia doesn't want to be anyone's project, nor the relief valve for someone else's anxiety. So I stand between her and that stuff. Anything worth passing along, I'll pass along.
This includes setting boundaries on who "gets" to engage in prayer ministry with her (lay hands on, take her aside, etc.). Anyone who's been around charismatics and Pentecostals knows that there's just too much weirdness out there to have no boundaries about this. Further, too many, even with a better theology of prayer, are still driven more by anxiety, or a need to be needed as they pray. We don't want to deal with those dynamics right now.
I hope this all makes sense.
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