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September 30, 2013

The Kane Family

I have had the blessing of getting to know Travis, Sue and Wyatt over the past year.  What a truly amazing family!  When Sue asked me to take Wyatt’s one year pictures, I was so excited!  Please take a few minutes and read below why Sue is such an inspiration to me. Here is a little bit of what her journey has been like the last couple years in her own words. . .

Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of – throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.” — C.S. Lewis (Mere Christianity)

To be sure, I am not alone in my love for the poetic way that C. S. Lewis can get right at a feeling, but this one in particular embodies the relationship I have with Jesus at this point in my life, and the essence of my personal faith. I am like a living house. I am a Christian, and I have been nurtured in my faith by my family, but in ways I never expected. I have been challenged and remodeled, and have really come to know how deeply I love God and believe whole-heartedly that he is with me, in me, and has a plan for me even when I don’t see it.

I was diagnosed with breast cancer in August of 2009. I fought two battles with cancer over three years: 20 rounds of chemotherapy, 35 radiation treatments, and so many surgeries; and thankfully, I can say that am cancer free today. It is extremely difficult to articulate the way that I feel about this experience, and impossible to do so without expressing my conviction that God carried my through it.

Cancer is tremendously humbling. One moment I was making decisions, putting in the time and energy to get where I thought I needed to go, and making headway; and the next minute I was in the hospital wondering if I would make it through treatments or have the opportunity to ever have children of my own. I was afraid. I had no control in my life, and much like that remodeled house, I had so much pain and it didn’t make sense. I had to really live my faith to survive breast cancer because I know that God was with me through all of the treatments, and I trust that it was part of His plan for me.

I have often heard people say that God won’t give you more than you can handle in their well-intended words of encouragement; but I think that’s wrong. I think that there are moments when your troubles get so thick that you can’t see the other side and what people mean to say is that God will never leave you to do it alone. He challenges us past the point that we can do it, and he carries us to the other side. He places people in our paths that encourage us, and remind us to keep moving forward one day at a time. My family did a great job steadying my faith and my husband picked me up whenever I fell down discouraged. These people where all part of God’s promise to me.

And, here’s where I got the most beautiful miracle. I had been told early in the course of my treatments, that I would never have children after these regiments. As my body slowly started to heal from the most recent battle, I revisited the topic with my doctor and was told once again that there was a strong possibility that carrying a child was never going to happen for me. God had other ideas. Only a few short months after I finished my treatments, I found out that I was pregnant. I was terrified, thrilled, and confused. I fought anxiety about the cancer returning during the pregnancy and if our baby would be impacted by all of the drugs that I had sent coursing through my body only a few months before. The doctors gave my pregnancy a 50/50 shot. Those were better odds than I had been given for my own life only a year before that. How lucky can one person get? And yet, our son was born on August 10, 2012. I will never forget the way I felt when I saw him. He was healthy, and beautiful, and a complete miracle.

There were a million things that could have gone wrong. None of them did. There is no medical reason that this child of mine should have come into existence, and yet here he is! And this amazing journey is just beginning. He just celebrated his first birthday and I am chasing him around, both of us healthy and normal. God is so good. I am compelled to honor God in my survivorship, and all other parts of my life because He lives in my house and I have one of his miracles to look at each and every day. I am a believer!

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