Caterpillars, butterflies and a new round of chemo begins

“Any transition serious enough to alter your definition of self will require not just small adjustments in your way of living and thinking but a full-on metamorphosis. I don’t know if this is emotionally stressful for caterpillars, but for humans it can be hell on wheels. At times you may feel it’s the end of the world. Just remember that what the caterpillar calls the end of the world, God calls a butterfly.” -Martha Beck

A good friend of mine shared this quote with me and I love it. I think if caterpillars could talk we’d hear lots of painful shrieking and confusion in our backyards: “My skin! It’s so tight! It’s falling off … what is happening here? Why in the world am I building this silk cave cave around myself? Why is it so dark in here? What in the world is happening to me?” Before these caterpillars know it, they are transformed into totally different creatures that are very different than the old ones but are beautiful to behold. Their new identity and reality is what God intended them to be all along but it came at a price.

That’s how I feel about this season in life. God is transforming me into a different woman (thank goodness!). I am not suggesting that I am going to look like a butterfly but simply that metamorphosis is painful and hard work for all of us. The Refiner is passionate about turning us into something beautiful—someone he had in mind when he created us in our mothers’ wombs. He wants us to look more and more like his son Jesus. He has great plans in mind, and needs to turn us into different people for those plans to come to their fruition. So let’s let him have His way with us when he allows circumstances that change us. “Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.” Ephesians 3:20-21.

On another note, I start my new 12-week round of chemo on Monday, June 2nd. This chemo (Taxol, combined with an amazing new drug called Herceptin) is supposedly a lot easier to take and doesn’t have as many side effects. Chris’ cousin Amanda comes in on Sunday, June 1st for 3 1/2 weeks to help us with the kids and such. What a blessing! God continues to provide for us internally and externally. He is good.

Thanks for checking in with the Sicks family and for your faithful prayers!

Love, Sara

Yucky chemo done & Happy Anniversary

It’s really cool to feel like I’m starting to make progress through my treatments.  The 4th and final of the hard chemo is done and “chemo lite” starts in the beginning of June.  That means I’m about half-way through chemotherapy!  Last week was a bit easier than I had thought but lasted longer than expected.  It was a huge blessing to go to my folks house for tons of rest and quiet.  I also was able to spend some good time with my parents.  And now it’s good to be back in the saddle at home with Chris and the kids.

Chris and I are celebrating our 9th anniversary this week — hooray!  While Chris’ folks were here, we went to an incredible French inn near Middleburg, VA from Monday-Tuesday.  Not only did we feel like we were in France, but the 4-star restaurant in the inn was out-of-this-world wonderful.  We had fun eating, shopping in Middleburg, and enjoying the luxury of being with each other without children.  What a blessing!

Much love and gratitude for your prayers and checking in with us.

Sara

4th round of chemo on Monday

Hey faithful gang –

I have my 4th and final round of kick-you-in-the-pants chemo on Monday, May 12th. Although I will start a whole new round of chemo in June that will last for the whole summer, I am quite thankful that the really hard stuff is almost over. Hooray!

We have mentioned this before, but if you are so inclined, we always appreciate prayer: active cancer cells so that the chemo can identify them and blast them!; grace during the side effects; smooth week for the family; and being open to what the Lord wants to communicate with us.

Chris’ folks are in town for a few weeks, which has been great. I head down to my parents’ house for a few days for this round of chemo so I can recover in peace and quiet and then rejoin the family at the end of the week.

I am grateful tonight for the privilege of being a mother of three incredible kids, wife to an amazing husband, and being surrounded by the Body of Christ. These blessings take my breath away and are daily reminders of Jesus’ abundant love for me.

Love,

Sara

To rest between His shoulders

“Let the beloved of the LORD rest secure in him,
for he shields him all day long,
and the one the LORD loves rests between his shoulders.”
Deuteronomy 33:12

We were created to lean back into the Lord like a woman reclines her back into a man’s body with his arms around her. It is a loving body position and shows intimacy between the two people. In this position, the woman rests in the man’s strength and feels secure, protected and loved. I think this verse is referring to the kind of relationship his beloved children were designed to have with the Lord, where we are leaning into him in all areas of our life. I believe this was perhaps our natural positioning with the Lord before the fall of man. But after the fall when sin entered the world, our body position with the Lord changed. The Lord still desires that we would rest between his shoulders–that we would be completely dependent on him. But because our sin and waywardness, we choose to put distance between ourselves and our first love and seek other things to satisfy us. As it says in Isaiah 53:6, “We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.”

Through my ordeal with cancer, I have realized that I have run into the arms of other lovers. I am not speaking of my relationship with my husband Chris, but about my relationship with the Lord. There are other lovers that I seek because I think they will bring me comfort, satisfaction and joy. Some of my lovers are having nice clothes, an organized home, constant fun and laughter with others, a respectable to do list, children who obey me. None of these things of course are bad in an of themselves, but making them into a lover takes it beyond a healthy point. So even though I am a follower of Christ, my life at times is filled with dissatisfaction and emptiness. Part of that reason, I believe, is because my heart is wrapped around other lovers.

I have struggled tremendously this past week with the whole idea of suffering. This struggle is not at all limited to my personal battle with breast cancer, but lies more in why a loving God allows so much suffering in this world. This is hardly a new question but it has hit me so hard. I have not only been terribly angry with the Lord, but confused and quite scared of him. I couldn’t even sing praise songs in church this past week because I couldn’t say any of those words to him.

One of my conclusions is that the Lord allows suffering because it hopefully sends us running back into the arms of our first love to resume that loving body position I described earlier. The Lord doesn’t need to be in that position, but we were made to live like that. It is in that position that we are fully satisfied and we are our true selves. We were made to be bound to his presence. He is a jealous God and will go to great lengths to show us our dependency on him. He is jealous for our satisfaction and joy.  Through Christ’s death on the cross, I now have access to God’s loving arms and am able to resume that intimate body position.  I still do not understand a lot about suffering but I know that the Lord is using my suffering to pry me out the arms of my other lovers so that I can rest fully in his arms where I belong.

Sara