It’s been about 2 weeks since returning home from our winter trip to Ethiopia, and I continue to wonder if I’ll have the words to express my perception of the trip. Since being back home, my mind has been all over the place. I have a desire to follow up on our trip, and this is for me as well as for my team and the people we served in Ethiopia. As I’ve been processing this and seeking words to describe it, I’ve also had to take care of myself. As a trip leader, and a wife, and a mother, it’s so hard to put myself first, but pursuing personal strength and wellness is essential for being able to love well and have strong relationships.
That said, just before leaving Ethiopia to return home, I began prepping for a body scan that would help determine the level of progress after last year’s battle with thyroid cancer, thyroidectomy surgery, and radioiodine treatment to kill remaining cancer cells. Prepping for this scan entails a couple weeks of a strict diet, and a handful of daily doctor visits the last days before the scan. During this time, my eyesight has gotten really bad. I became paranoid that it could be because of thyroid related issues or something serious. After visiting the eye doctor and my thyroid doctor, I realized I’m just getting old. Haha! At the end of last week, I got a pair of prescription glasses that have both made me so much more confident with this new ability to see, as well as just aware at how poorly I could see before.
The day I got new glasses was also the day of my body scan, and after the scan, the initial results seemed to be 98% good. They saw a tiny something on the scan where my thyroid once was, and they want to check it out. They wanted to wait til seeing my bloodwork before they decided what to do next. It’s possible that it’s a recurrence of thyroid cancer. However, the spot is so small that even if it is cancerous, they may not do any surgery or treatment, since thyroid cancer usually remains isolated and is slow growing, if it grows at all. People have asked how I feel about this news, and honestly, I don’t know how I feel. I really just want this chapter of my life to be over, so I can start a new, clean chapter. The reality is that this chapter will never be fully over. Since I had cancer, I’ll be at a higher risk of eventually getting it again, compared to people who have never had cancer. I now have to figure out how to live with this part of my story, with hope that cancer won’t return.
Hope is something that I’ve had a really hard time with over the last couple of years. Just when things are going so well, life throws me for a loop. Although I know that I’ve experienced more joy than pain in my life, when I’m in a painful situation, it’s so easy to focus on the damage being done and forget the blessings that I’ve been given. As I reflect back on my trips to Africa, I think about how different our cultures can be when it comes to facing struggles or being blessed. Our perception of hope is so different. The people we have worked with have been through HELL. When I say “hell,” it’s because I cannot imagine anything worse than what they have been through, not even from stories I’ve heard, or movies I’ve seen. They are left physically scarred, but also emotionally scarred. I’m blown away by how these scars contribute to their beauty. When you meet these people, you see so much joy in their eyes, and you wouldn’t imagine that they’ve been through so much. In some cases, one year of their life seems like it is more pain than we’ll ever experience. And after all this, it’s hard to fathom that the hope that you hear in their words. We have so much to learn about how to be grateful, how to trust God, how to have joy, and how to simply have hope.
Two groups of people in Ethiopia teach me about hope: women that have been rescued from a life of prostitution, and young boys who live on the street. In speaking with the women who had been rescued from prostitution, we learned that the need for money drove them to choose such a life. Over 50% of Ethiopians are unemployed. These women are without work, they’re hungry, their children are hungry, they can’t afford medicine, and so they’re family is often sick and dying because of their conditions. Prostitution is their only hope. They wouldn’t do it if they knew some other way. Then you have the street boys. These teenage, homeless boys have either lost their families to AIDS, or they’ve fled the extreme poverty or dangerously abusive situations at home because it’s better for them on the streets. The streets are their only hope. It’s all they have. Because they’re on the streets, local society shuns them, and they don’t expect to get any encouragement from anyone. What kind of life gets to a place where you choose prostitution or living on the street because there is more hope in that than any other option you know? I’m amazed at these women, and these boys, because while I don’t consider them to have anything that I would call a huge “blessing,” they have hope in the simple fact that they are alive.
I’m spoiled. My life has been mostly blessing, and if something interrupts that, I’ve felt like my life is hopeless and coming to an end. It’s ridiculous. Why am I so blind to hope sometimes? Why do I put such a high price on happiness and feeling like I’m blessed? After all, I’m alive… I get to live. In looking back at my time in Africa, I really do feel like God called me there to get closer to understanding the meaning of hope: to see it, experience it, and believe it. After being faced with this reality in others, this decision to have joy and be hopeful, how do I process my struggles? How do I now feel about my body scan test results? It’s easier to be hopeful, to be thankful with the results and feel grateful for the time that is given to me. I’m blessed with so much, and I have hope for a long, beautiful, healthy life with my family and friends. I have hope that I will be celebrating many more years with my friends in Africa. And I’m excited to share my story of hope with others, including my friends in Africa. I aspire to be as encouraging to them as they have been to me.
So, this is me processing things over the last couple of weeks… I feel like I needed to get past some medical struggles, so that I could then more clearly process my time in Ethiopia. I’ll write another blog soon with details from the trip!
