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  “It can be stopped,” Harry said. “Honey, you just have to have faith.”

  Sylvia finally sat down beside him. “I’ve presumed on God,” she whispered. “All this time I’ve been sure that he would send us back to the mission field, let us resume our work, allow us to bear more fruit. But he’s got other plans, hasn’t he?”

  Harry’s mouth quivered at the corners, and she saw him struggling with the tears in his eyes. “Maybe for now.”

  “His ways are not our ways.” She breathed a humorless laugh. “That makes me so mad. What is he doing?”

  “I don’t know.” He pulled her forehead against his, and started to cry.

  She touched the tears on his face, and pulled back to look into the agony in his eyes. “Oh, Harry.” She hated seeing him so sad, and she knew that her own pain provoked that sadness. She had to pull herself together. If not for herself, then for him.

  They wept together for a few moments, then finally, she dried her tears. “I’m gonna be okay,” she said, drying his face with her fingertips. “I am, Harry. I’m going to fight and do everything that the doctors tell me to do, and I’m going to trust the Lord, whatever he chooses to do.”

  Harry swallowed and nodded. “That’s my girl.”

  “We can’t live in fear,” she told him. “That’s no way to live. We’ll have to figure out a way to live life without constantly thinking about it.”

  He made a valiant effort to wipe the emotion from his face.

  “Remember when I said that cancer was a gift God had given me?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I said that, believing it would go away. But it’s still probably true. If God gave it to me, then it’s a gift. An opportunity. I have to find a way to think of it as that again. Would you pray that for me, Harry?”

  He didn’t wait until he was alone. Instead he just held her, and began to pray.

  CHAPTER

  Sixty

  That night when she had her bearings, she called her children and each of her neighbors individually and told them the news. They were each crushed and quiet, and had little to say in the way of comfort. But Sylvia hadn’t expected otherwise. They were as shocked as she, and it would take a few days to sort out all these emotions and figure out what to think.

  That night as she and Harry lay in bed next to each other, neither tried to fool the other into thinking they were sleeping.

  “The thing I hate most about all this,” Sylvia whispered, “is that I’ve always hoped that if I ever came to a place like this where I had a terminal disease and was going to die…”

  Harry cut in immediately. “You are not going to die.”

  “But you know what I mean, Harry,” she said. “I hoped that if I ever had a terminal illness, I would handle it as a godly woman with a positive attitude and a cheerful heart. I hoped I would focus more on the people around me than on myself, that I’d worry more about whether their spiritual needs were being met than I would about my own physical needs. But that’s not how I am.”

  He touched her face. “How can you say that? You’re the most godly woman I know. Anyone would agree.”

  “But anyone doesn’t know what’s going on inside of me,” she said. “I feel so angry and so out of control. I want to scream and holler at God and ask him what in the world he thinks he’s doing. I want to yell at everybody who’s healthy, that they’d better enjoy it while they can because it could be snatched out from under them at any moment. And I want to scream at all those complacent Christians sitting in the pews on Sunday mornings and doing nothing with their lives, wasting their talents and gifts God has given them when they could be out sharing the love of Christ.”

  “I feel the same way. Honey, it’s not ungodly to feel all those things.”

  “But that’s not what I want to feel,” she said. “I want to be someone that God would be proud of. If I’m going to die, I want to go out with a bang, you know? And don’t say I’m not going to die again because we’re all going to die someday. Whenever it is, I want to do it right.”

  He wiped the tears off of his face with the top of the sheet. “Honey, God’s going to give you whatever you need to get through this. You can believe that. The one thing we’ve learned over all these years is that God is faithful. Haven’t we learned that?”

  “Yes, we have.” Sylvia let the tears run down her temples and through her hair onto her pillow. “I wonder if I’ll live to see my hair grow all the way back in.”

  “Of course you will,” he said. “It’s long enough now that you could go without your wig.”

  She was quiet for a moment, trying to picture herself as she’d been before the surgery, with her body whole and her hair just the way she’d chosen to wear it.

  “It’s strange, going from thinking of myself as being healthy and healed, to realizing that my fight is not over.”

  “No, it’s not over,” he said, “but you don’t have to worry, Sylvia, because you’re not fighting it alone.” He slipped his arms around her and pulled her close, and they wept together long into the night.

  Instead of slowing Sylvia down, the news of her recurrence spurred her onward, faster, with more fierce urgency to do the things that she felt God had called her to do. Since the Breezewood Development Center didn’t close for the summer, Sylvia spent more hours than ever at the school, working with the children. Little Bo began to meet her at the door each morning. “Miva,” he would call her, in his own special combination of “Miss” and “Sylvia.”

  As if the Lord wanted to show her that her work did please him, the children had all managed to learn their own version of “Jesus Loves Me.” The tunes varied, but the sounds of their awkward words hit close to the real words. Even their attention spans seemed to have broadened. Sylvia had a calming influence on them, and they loved to hear her read. She had advanced from the wordless book to reading actual stories. Still, each day she went over the wordless book again, until each child considered it his favorite book, the only one that some of them could “read.”

  Sylvia didn’t stop with the children. In the afternoons, she spent time teaching Bible to Brenda’s kids, while Brenda did her typing.

  On Wednesday nights, she and Harry kept teaching the Bible study at church. And on Thursday nights she and her neighbors gathered to pray.

  In between all her work, she wrote the children in the orphanage in León individual letters letting them know she loved them and missed them.

  There was little time for self-pity, even though her back had begun to ache constantly as the cancer sank its teeth deeper into her bones. There was no kidding herself that the new drug was working.

  She knew from deep within that the cancer was growing, occupying more territory, overthrowing her body.

  But there was little that she could do, except press on, and trust that God had things under control.

  CHAPTER

  Sixty-One

  The meteor shower that only occurred every thirtyfive years or so was scheduled to happen at the end of May. Brenda suspended school that day and let the kids sleep late, so they could stay up late enough to see the heavenly display. At ten o’clock they took blankets outside and went up to Lookout Point at the peak of Bright Mountain.

  Stars shot across the sky, delighting the children as they lay on their backs, clapping and cheering for each burst of light.

  Brenda lay next to David, praying that the beauty and majesty of the shower would cause him to acknowledge his Creator. But he had made his salvation so complicated that the doorway was not only narrow, as Jesus had warned, but it seemed locked and bolted shut.

  Still, she prayed and hoped. With every star that flew across the sky, she asked the Lord to let this miracle be the one that opened David’s eyes.

  “Isn’t God cool?” Joseph asked, his head pillowed on David’s chest.

  Brenda laughed. “Very cool.”

  David’s silence became his answer, but Joseph didn’t let it lie.

  �
��Dad, how could you not believe in God after you’ve seen this? It’s just so obvious. All this stuff didn’t happen by accident.”

  David expelled a long sigh. “I’m just not the kind of person who can have faith in what I don’t see, Joseph.”

  Joseph sat up. “But you did just see it. It would take more faith not to believe than it does to believe.”

  David didn’t answer.

  “Wish we could have videotaped this,” Daniel said from his place on the ground. “This is the most awesome thing I’ve ever seen.”

  David nodded. “It is amazing.”

  They lay quietly for a moment, listening to the music of the wind as it scored the spectacular showing in the sky. After a moment, Leah sat up and looked at her mother.

  “Mom, is Miss Sylvia going to die?”

  Brenda shivered. Forgetting the display overhead, she got up and went to snuggle between her twin daughters. “I don’t think so, sweetie, but we’re not sure yet.”

  “Do you think she’s scared?” Rachel asked.

  “Nope,” Joseph said. “Not Miss Sylvia. She’s not scared.”

  “How do you know?” Daniel asked. “Did she tell you that?”

  “She didn’t have to,” Joseph said. “I just know, ’cause I was there once. How can you be scared when you know you’re going to be with Jesus?”

  Brenda met David’s eyes, but he looked away. He slid his arm around his youngest son’s shoulders and pulled him close. Once again she said a prayer for her husband to believe.

  CHAPTER

  Sixty-Two

  When Annie called Sylvia to ask if she and Josh could come over to ride the horse, Sylvia welcomed the opportunity to spend time with the two kids she had chosen for each other. The horse needed riding, but her back ached too badly to ride today.

  She met them out at the barn that afternoon and helped them saddle her and get her ready to ride. Josh had ridden for most of his life, so it all came easily to him.

  They rode double on the horse, and headed off to the pasture beyond the trees. Sylvia sat on her swing and watched, smiling at how well things were working with them. She thought of herself and Harry, when they had first fallen in love. Every touch, every look, every smile had carried special significance. In so many ways, that hadn’t changed today.

  She thought of the way Harry had stood beside her during this illness, even though his own dreams had been interrupted. But she knew he would have it no other way. How blessed she was to have him.

  Lord, whether it’s Josh or someone else, bring Annie a soul mate like that. Someone to stand by her for her whole life. Someone like Harry.

  She heard footsteps and turned to see Cathy coming toward her. “Hi,” Cathy said.

  “Hi yourself.”

  She sat down next to Sylvia, making the chains creak. “How you feeling?”

  “Not bad.”

  Cathy got quiet. Sylvia knew she was keeping a respectful distance from the subject of Sylvia’s cancer. It was clear that she tried hard to let Sylvia set the parameters of their conversations.

  “Looks like Josh and Annie are getting along really well,” Sylvia said.

  Cathy nodded. “Yeah. They don’t need much help from us.”

  “I just think they’d be a wonderful couple.”

  “Well, don’t rush them. You know Annie’s still young.”

  “I know,” Sylvia said, “but she’s a precious young woman and she deserves the best.”

  She looked at Cathy and saw tears misting her eyes. “You know, there was a time when I didn’t hold out much hope for Annie being a spiritual person.”

  “I know that. But God surprised you, didn’t he?”

  “Yes, he did.”

  “That’s the thing with God. He always has surprises for us. He has so many plans and so many layers, and they’re so rich in our lives…if we just had enough faith to trust in them.” She’d said too much, she thought, and now they were back on the subject of her cancer. She wished she’d kept that thought to herself.

  “You have enough faith, Sylvia.”

  Sylvia frowned into the wind. “I don’t know if I do or not. People tell me I’m brave, that they admire me for such a valiant effort, but the fact is, I don’t have any choice. What do they think I’m going to do, just roll over and die?”

  The wind was the only answer. It whispered through their hair and hung between them. Cathy looked down at her knees. “You’re going to beat this, Sylvia. I know you are. So many people are praying for you.”

  “I know they’re praying, but I’m not sure if they should be praying for healing.”

  “Why not?” Cathy asked. “Why would we pray for anything else?”

  “Because it may not be God’s will. He may have a whole different plan. And, you know, just because he takes one life and leaves another doesn’t mean that one person is blessed over another, or that one person’s prayers are more important to God. He’s just got these ways that are so mysterious. Who can understand them?”

  Her voice broke off and she looked up at the leaves over her head, focused on them as if she might find some answer there. “I just want to be faithful,” she went on. “When I get to heaven, whenever that day may be, I want to hear those words.”

  Cathy smiled. She knew what those words were. “ ‘Well done, my good and faithful servant.’ You’ll hear them, Sylvia. I know you will.”

  “The thing is, it’s easy to stop running the race. Sometimes I feel like just resting on the fact that I worked in Nicaragua, that I helped a lot of people there. I feel like if I just curl up in a closet somewhere, never to be heard from again, it won’t really matter. But that’s not what the Bible teaches, is it?”

  Cathy just looked at her.

  “The Bible teaches that we should run the race until the end. And I’m not at the end yet.”

  Tears stung Cathy’s eyes. She laid her head on Sylvia’s shoulder. “Sylvia, how could you ever doubt that God is pleased with you?”

  “Because I have all these conflicting emotions raging through my heart, and I don’t feel very holy sometimes. I’m not the way I thought I would be if I ever faced a crisis like this.”

  “God asks us to be holy,” Cathy said. “He doesn’t ask us to be superhuman. Within your humanity, I think you’re as holy as you can be. Don’t forget that even Jesus prayed that the cup would be taken from him.”

  Sylvia sat there for a moment, taking that in. “He did, didn’t he?”

  “Of course he did. He wept and he railed and he sweat great drops of blood.”

  “I understand that,” Sylvia said. “I’ve been there myself.”

  “If you’re supposed to take this with all the stoicism of a statue, then why would God let us see the Gethsemane Jesus?”

  Sylvia nodded as that truth became clear to her. “I guess he did it for me. Seems like I’ve been going through my Gethsemane for an awfully long time. Maybe I’ll eventually come out on the other side and be able to do whatever it is God has for me to do.”

  Even if it’s to die.

  CHAPTER

  Sixty-Three

  Sylvia’s Gethsemane didn’t end for several weeks. During her times of serving others she managed to smile and laugh and get out of herself and forget those anguished pleas she sent up to heaven at night when she faced her illness head-on. But the pain intensifying in her back and hip told her the hormones weren’t working. And when she started feeling pain where she knew her liver to be, fear overtook her again.

  For several days she failed to tell anyone about it because she didn’t want to be an alarmist. She had learned that when dealing with cancer, every pain had significance. If she got a headache, she assumed that the cancer had spread to her brain. If her wrist ached, she was certain it had gotten into that part of her bone. If her blood sugar was off, she was sure that it had advanced to her pancreas.

  But finally when the pain grew more intense, she decided it was best to tell Harry. Harry didn’t even respond. He
went straight to the telephone and started to dial.

  “Who are you calling?” she asked.

  “I’m calling Dr. Thibodeaux.”

  “It’s night,” she said. “He’s not at his office.”

  “I’m calling him at home.”

  “But, Harry, do you think it’s anything?”

  “It’s probably not,” he said, “but there’s no use taking any chances. I wish you’d told me the minute you started feeling it.”

  She sat listening as he told the doctor what she felt, and the oncologist told them to be at his office first thing the next morning.

  She went through another round of CT scans and blood tests, then endured another season of waiting. Her Gethsemane continued.

  They returned to the doctor’s office the next day to get the results. Sick of the place, she wished she could change the curtains and reorganize the furniture. Better yet, she wished the doctor would meet her and Harry in a restaurant that was crowded and bustling with activity and life, instead of in these offices full of other cancer patients waiting for bad news.

  Dr. Thibodeaux had that look on his face again, the one that made her want to put her hands over her ears. “It’s spread to your liver,” he said.

  Sylvia had expected crushing despair, but instead she just felt numb. The pain in her back had already convinced her that the treatment strategy was failing. The doctor was only confirming it.

  He looked up at her, his eyes tired. She wondered if he’d been at the hospital late last night or early today. Oncologists carried such burdens. For the first time, she felt sorry for him.

  “I’m so sorry, Sylvia,” he said, “but this means that we have to change our approach. We have to get more aggressive.”

  Sylvia swallowed. “That would be because the liver is a vital organ as opposed to the skeleton. Am I right?”

  “That’s right.”

  She looked at Harry. The blood seemed to have drained from his face.

  She forced herself to speak. “But what does more aggressive therapy mean? Chemo again?”