parenting manual

i think suffering is one of those things where... we all think that we understand it, and we all think that we... we know what it is. and i think we do. everyone has some level of understanding of it, but there are moments... that show you the true breadth of it, and we should never think that we’re experts before we hit that moment. my wife and i and our two kids, we felt called to plant a church in washington d.c., and so you know we moved into the city and the first day that we moved into our house, our house was broken into.

and before that kara was pregnant, but miscarried our third child. and so about six months after we started on the church planting journey, my wife felt... felt something in her chest and went to the doctor to have it checked out. the biopsy results came back and revealed that not only was it breast cancer, but breast cancer - a very aggressive type. i didn't know who god was after that point. even after years of seminary, and walking with jesus for, you know, decades before that, i was left with incomplete theology and a broken understanding of who god was. i went down to my basement without the lights on and just could not stop crying.

and i thought about the thought of losing my wife. in prayer, a kind of desperate prayer, i felt like god responded to me, but he didn’t respond in the way that i thought. instead of saying, you know, “it'll be all right. everything will be perfect.” i felt like god was saying, “stop crying. you know, it's not going to help.” and i was really shocked by that, and i was really shocked by kind of this... admonition, this... almost like a rebuke. i think there comes a moment in every person’s story of suffering where yes, you need to lament, you need to cry out, you need to be honest before god,

but when it's time to get up, you need to get up, and you need to walk straight into where you're headed. and you need to stop complaining about the cards that you wish you had been dealt... and play the ones you have instead. and that's what i recognized in that moment that this is what faith is for. the first step of her treatment was to go into the hospital for her mastectomy... to have her cancer removed from her body. so she went to the hospital, had a routine blood test done, and the surgeon... called me into the surgery prep area, and told me, “we found out that your wife is pregnant.”

and that was a gift to us because... up to this point we didn't even know if god was still around. maybe he just left our area and wasn’t listening to us any longer. and it was at this moment as if he was saying, “no, i'm still here and i'm doing something... "and you don't get what i'm doing. but the evidence of it is this child, "this child i'm going to give you.” so after deciding to both go through chemotherapy while having this baby, we waited for the first trimester to pass... so that the baby would have the best chance at survival.

after hours of labor, it was september 9th of 2010, my son was born. almost his entire life up to that point spent it swimming... in a cocktail of drugs of chemotherapy drugs, and he had come out healthy. he was just a miracle. miracle, there is no other kind of easy way to put it, no other way to say it besides that. and that's precisely what our son had proven to us that nothing could... hinder god from saving if he wanted to do that. whether it was cancer, or the recommendations of the doctor, chemotherapy drugs, and nothing... none of these things...

are bigger than god's ability to save. about a month after my son was born, a brand new study came out of md anderson, and the study said that women who are pregnant while they have breast cancer... have a much higher rate of survival than non-pregnant women. some reason, the mechanism is unclear, but babies serve as a... potent medicine against breast cancer. and it was in that moment that our whole story came full circle. not knowing why god had given us this child, not understanding it, not understanding why we had... my wife had gotten breast cancer in the first place,

and after all these trials and everything it was in the end as if god was saying to us, “no one knew what your son would be for your wife but me.” and i worshipped god that moment. i realized that god have been in control every single step of the journey, that he was there... during the miscarriage, he wasthere when our house was broken into, he was there during the diagnosis, he was there in the... the operating room, he was there all throughout our entire journey... kind of orchestrating every single moment. and so we had a fourth child that we named lucy.

after that we... we had another child actually, so we thought that was just a fluke, but it ended up that she got pregnant again with our fifth child, xavier. my wife is doing well. she's six years out from her initial diagnosis - cancer free. my son jonathan, he is now a five and a half year old going to celebrate... his sixth birthday this year. we're doing well as a family. we’ve moved crossed country to seattle , and we’re thriving out here. but we still live very much in the lessons and the reality that we saw...

that we learned in that time period, that we realize that god is not a god who's...

easily understood. he’s a god that's far bigger than our comprehension, but that his goodness is bigger than our comprehension, his wisdom as well. and we still live daily in that reality.