Therefore we do not give up; even though the outer person is being destroyed, our inner person is being renewed day by day.
2 Corinthians 4:16
I love Easter! I love the Hats – and I have had some great ones over the years. My hat for this year was the best yet! I love the new outfits for the family – usually matching! I love the egg hunts, the surprise of the Easter Bunny. The promise of better weather and knowing Summer is right around the corner. Easter lunch with the family and Skype visits with distant family.
Most of all, I love celebrating our risen Lord with my church family! I love the music and seeing all our friends join in worshiping the empty tomb. I love the message of hope our pastor preaches. I love greeting visitors and seeing faces we have not seen in a while. I love our church’s tradition of the flower cross. I look forward to Easter Sunday and hang around as long as the family will allow me to continue talking after the service is over. I LOVE Easter Sunday!
So, this year I had a hard time with Easter. I will admit to sitting in our living room, dressed up, watching the service unfold in front of us and feeling very emotional. I cried several times and longed to be with my church family. This was the first time in this whole coronavirus that I felt full of despair. Easter is about HOPE, and celebrating that Jesus is alive. “Because He lives, I can face tomorrow,” as the old Hymn says. But here I was, feeling total sadness, and not wanting to face tomorrow because tomorrow the coronavirus will still be here. We will still be in our houses and I will still have cancer.
Although, we DID have a great day. The kids got up and we had breakfast together, and they humored me with their Easter baskets (the youngest is still genuinely excited). We got ‘casually’ dressed up and watched worship together. We talked to both sets of grandparents via FaceTime. We prepared a special lunch and ate as a family in the dining room. Dear friends surprised us with eggs for an egg hunt and we went on a family walk. It was a great day – some of our kids’ school friends even came by in their jeep blaring “Beat It,” which greatly lifted my spirts. So why do I find myself filled with despair?
In the evening my husband jokingly said, “well, now that Easter is over what do we have to look forward to?” He is right. What do we have to look forward to? Nothing – the world is canceled, and we are stuck at home until June 10!
As many of you know, this week we shaved my head. It was not emotional – it actually was a relief. You see, my hair has been falling out by the handful for the past 5 days and we were all tired of hair being everywhere. What remained was so unhealthy that it looked like straw. So, we all were all ready to shave it. Here is the video (if you haven’t seen it), and yes, we did blatantly use my head shaving to promote my two sons’ YouTube channel.
The morning after we shaved my head this was the verse in my devotional: “Therefore we do not give up; even though the outer person is being destroyed, our inner person is being renewed day by day.” So how do we keep the inner person renewed EVERY day during this pandemic? That is a good question – and I haven’t found a good answer.
My middle son loves to perform in theater – particularly, *musical* theater. He is very talented, and last year he debuted in the 7-12th grade production of Newsies as Les Jacobs. We were blown away by his performance and the fact that he was a 7th grader holding his own with high schoolers. One of the highlights of our Spring this year was supposed to be seeing him perform as Bruce in the musical Matilda.
If you are familiar with the story of Matilda, she is basically unwanted by her parents, and is sent to a school with a very mean headmistress. In one of the songs, Matilda says:
“Just because you find that life’s not fair it
Doesn’t mean that you just have to grin and bear it!
If you always take it on the chin and wear it
You might as well be saying
You think that it’s okay
And that’s not right!
And if it’s not right!
You have to put it right!
But nobody else is gonna put it right for me
Nobody but me is gonna change my story
Sometimes you have to be a little bit…………. Naughty”
I think this might be my new mantra for this coming week. Because life is not fair right now – for any of us. But we do not have to grin and bear it. We are in charge of how we react to the coronavirus and I am in charge of how I react to my cancer diagnosis. No one else is going to put it right for us because WE are each in charge of how WE react and how WE play out OUR story every day. God is in control of the coronavirus and my cancer; we are in control of how we respond to this present situation.
I would love it if you would comment below to let me know what you are doing to change your family’s story this week to keep morale up!
Have a great week!
Specific Prayer requests:
That chemo got well (tomorrow April 14 at 11:00 am). That Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday are tolerable – these have been the rough days from chemo and Nulestra shot. That chemo is effective and will work to destroy all the cancer cells.
Faith, Family, Friends, and Fabulous Accessories 
1. Planning something to accomplish each day has helped me feel purposeful.
2. Having a rhythm or routine of something special each day: dinner at 7:00 with a poem or story or game to follow gives me a focus.
3. Reminding my self God is in control and I am out of power; I do what I can and leave the rest to God.
4. Sometimes you need to have a good cry which turns into an honest whiny prayer…which leads to gratitude of what you do have. Gratitude always brings me around…
And I am grateful for you, your honesty, your witness ( which may show more through your despair than when you are handling all this just fine—we all suffer so folks identify with the difficult. Why was the prayer of Jesus in Gethsemane included in the gospels? Shows he was real. Oh my , I have begun to preach. I’ll stop now! Love and hugs to you.
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I’m right there with you on my attitude being what is wrong with my picture. I spent this past weekend refocusing on the small joys around me which far outweighed the disappointments I had been focusing on. Our lives are truly a sum of all these many joys and I am determined today to focus on them. As a Martha and an extrovert by nature, God is using this forced quiet time to remind me of all the grace he has shown me and the joys he has put in my path that I may not have appreciated. I am discovering that I truly love many people at my church who I used to think of as “church friends” but not truly “friends.” I have learned that my husband is not just a spouse, a best friend or romantic partner but a wonderful human being who God provided and equipped to go through every stage of life with me. There is so much more to learn as I stop from my “normal” routine and see what I have been missing.
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I try to get up each day remembering that my attitude is going to set the tone for my family for the day. With this in mind I do my best to keep it a good one, while sometimes I do faulter, of course.
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Like Carolyn, I have been trying to find one thing to be excited about each day. When I have gone through tough times, God has taught me to learn to anticipate (and even begin to celebrate) the time when all of whatever I am going through will be in the past. And we know that day will come. He has taught me to keep my eyes on Him, although sometimes I forget and look away at the worries before me. Then he reminds me:
Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. (Philipians 4:6-7)
Praying for you and your sweet family!
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Go get your Dolly on. I thought you might appreciate this from your dopple-ganger. It came up in my GED yesterday morning – sending prayers and love to you all.
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Go get your Dolly on. I thought you might appreciate this from your dopple-ganger. It came up in my fb feed yesterday morning – sending prayers and love to you all.
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1. Routine keeps it real – which includes morning meditation, yoga and a good run/walk/get the heart pumping
2. Gratitude – I can’t live wholeheartedly without constantly reminding myself of all I/we have to be grateful for!
3. Connect – I make time to reach out to those who need a smile, like writing to you😘
4. Grow – I know His plan is for me to GROW from this experience, so I am reading, journaling and trying to quiet the mind to hear His voice
Peace Be with You🤟🏼
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I love your honesty and I love you girlfriend! Regarding things I do: I don’t look at the entire day because they are sooo long right now. I look at moments; and I live moment to moment, which is really new to me. Because I’m always running around like a crazy unfocused woman.
I spend a lot of moments praying, and focusing on scripture that uplifts me. Romans 15:13 has become my new favorite reminder that even when things are difficult, I’m tired of being disappointed or feeling sad, or sick of waiting for June 10th, and wondering if the things I’m looking forward to are going to actually happen? I can look to Jesus to fill my heart and mind with hope and joy. He always does, but some days I have to ask Him several times, because I forget that I can be filled with joy instead of despair.
I always make sure to find something in each day, that our family can just laugh together. I think taking walks and looking for beautiful flowers and thanking God for all the things I never noticed before helps too. The birds sing at 8:00 pm who knew?
I do my “grateful 10” game a lot right now. It’s where I name 10 things I’m grateful for really fast, and always lifts me up.
I still do my tea time every afternoon, where I just sit and sip on my hot tea alone.
I think we have to remember that it’s Ok, to feel sad, disappointed, fearful, because we are human and miss life as we knew it. We can’t always be happy right now, because life is hard. But since happiness is a feeling that depends on our circumstances, and joy is rooted in our relationship with Jesus, we can ask Him to fill us up. And He doesn’t mind if we have to ask Him repeatedly!
I think the thing that helps me the most, is putting on my headphones and listening to praise music!
Love you! I will be praying at 11:00! I hope you be able to talk to another patient there like last time!❤️ Lastly, that hat is beautiful and I can’t wait to see you wearing it in our new sanctuary! 🙏❤️
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I saw your pictures on Facebook yesterday, and I showed Alan and said “Wow, look at her beautiful table. Only Barbara could do all this, while going through chemo. It’s shocking.” I will be praying for you.
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I love your posts Barbara. They are full of encouragement and biblical perspective. From my point of view, you’re rocking it all and setting a wonderful example for anyone who might follow in your footsteps. I’ll start by saying, I don’t have any great tips about how to keep up morale per se. One thing that has helped me process this situation is to look at it as truly (I hope and pray) a once in a lifetime experience. Especially with teenagers in the house, I’m keenly aware that these months may be “lasts” for a number of things. The last time we all spend all day together at home in PJs. The last time we sit around a fire pit on a “school” night. The last time all the kids beg to have a slumber party together in the basement. The last (maybe only) time I tell them, “Sure, you can eat ice cream for dinner.” When I look at it that way it all starts to seem like a rebellious adventure and that makes it kind of fun. Eventually, things will have to go back to “normal” or something like it. But, for now, maybe we cope by being “a little bit naughty.” 😉
Also, I don’t know about you, but I tend to fee ashamed when I feel anything less than happy and contented. Which, when you think about it, is the worst way to respond to feeling down! As if feeling down isn’t bad enough I have to compound it with shame! Rejecting that for me takes effort. It’s hard work being nice to myself. Life is hard. Feeling down or discouraged doesn’t make you ungrateful, it just makes you human. Sometimes I just say to myself, “Okay, this is how today is going to be. It won’t be this way forever.” And God understands all the feelings and loves us anyway.
Big hugs from the Myers to you.
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I’m praying for you, and what you wrote was a blessing to me!
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Thank you Barbara for being so real and transparent! Thank you friends for all of your comments! I second them all! Praying for you and your family Barbara! Praying for each of you friends as I read your encouraging comments! Soo very thankful God had our paths cross years ago! 😘❤️
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