Holding My Breath

After Ken recovered from being so sick from the radiation, he went several months with no significant changes. In fact, if it weren’t for the fact that he had a six-inch-long tube protruding from his abdomen and the nightly tube feedings, you wouldn’t know there was anything wrong with him at all. He began taking back over more and more of his rental business from his sister. Things calmed down a few notches and life almost went back to “normal”.

Ken was doing so well, in fact, that I briefly considered going back to work. I had quit my job at the Pre-K the day he was diagnosed. My "job" had become looking after Ken and doing everything I could to keep him as healthy as I could for as long as I could. When he started going “back to work”, and we didn’t have weekly trips to Erlanger Hospital, it kind of left me twiddling my thumbs. I started looking at the want ads to see if I could find anything close by, but I had a niggling little feeling way down deep in my soul that told me “not yet”. So, I prayed about it and felt like God was telling me not to start anything new.

I had been a parent volunteer at Boynton Elementary almost as long as the boys had been going there and had been helping out whenever Ken wasn’t so bad off. I decided I would just continue doing that, only now on a more regular basis. So, I started working in the Media Center every afternoon from about noon until school dismissed. That way I could be there when Benjamin got out and then we could jump in the car and make it across town in just enough time to pick up Jesse at the middle school.

That’s how things went for the next several months. I SOOO wanted to believe that it would continue this way and that Ken would be well again. And I tried believing it–truly I did. But I always felt like I was walking around on my tiptoes, holding my breath, gritting my teeth...waiting for something else horrible to occur. I began to wonder if Ken’s family member had been right when she said I didn’t have enough faith. I really struggled with it and prayed over and over that God would give me some peace. And no matter how many times I prayed that prayer, He always told me the same thing... “You need to get ready”.
“Ready for WHAT?” I would cry. “You need to get ready”, was all He ever said.