My wife keeps bringing up the subject of
the timing of all of this. It's pretty remarkable, when you think about
it. If I had been diagnosed ten years ago, I would have had no insurance,
and no way to raise the money for treatment. Even five years ago, there
were no such things as crowdfunding campaigns, at least to my knowledge.
CaringBridge has only existed in this form since 2002. There's never a
good time to get cancer, but we are very thankful that if it had to
happen. at least the diagnosis came when there were resources like
CaringBridge and GoFundMe to help.
And
we won't even talk about what it would've been like if I hadn't found
out until I was 65. By then, I would be at Stage 4, if I was even still
around.
There are other ways that the timing of this has been
amazing to us, but I'll talk about those later. I've always heard that
God's timing is perfect. There have been many times when I thought that
wasn't true. Many times when, by my watch, he was REALLY late. But the
timing of this could hardly have been more perfect. Except for one
thing.
Sharon and I are between churches right now. We were both
raised in churches that really rallied around their people in times of
trouble. If you're not a church person, you have no idea what that's
like, but it's incredible. I've witnessed that my whole life. I really
didn't want to go through this without that.
The church where I
served as music director for 4 years, Hope Fellowship, closed last May.
Last summer, we decided to try another church in the area where some
friends of ours had gone, and we liked it and decided to stay. Then,
last Sunday, the pastor announced he's leaving. So now it's all up in
the air again. Our desire is to find a place where as many of our
friends as possible from Hope Fellowship can attend together. We're
trying Harvest Bible Chapel
tomorrow. 9:00 AM service, if you wanna join us. But it's very weird
not having a church "home base" while this is going on. But you all have
more than made up the difference!
I know our friends at Denver First Church
are going to wonder why we don't come back. We still feel a pastoral
responsibility to the people of Hope Fellowship, even though I'm not a
pastor, and the church no longer exists. We want to try to help them
settle somewhere, and we've made some close friends there. The Bible
study I'm helping to teach is with some of those people. We love our
friends at DFC, and you never know what might happen in the future, but
for now, we need to stay with our Hope friends.
As always, thanks for checking in! I look forward to reading your comments tomorrow!
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