And suddenly the world has changed . . .

No, I don’t want to tell you about how God has changed the life of one of our Congolese neighbors this time. Those of you in our support network know that I, Miriam, was diagnosed with invasive breast cancer in July in South Africa, joining one out of eight American women, and my sister and my mother only this year. The funny thing is that genetic testing seems to indicate that our illnesses are unrelated.

(What are you doing, God?) I was given 3 weeks to put things in order in Congo and make arrangements for moving to the United States for 8-9 months of treatment. Let me hasten to say that the doctors are very confident that we can beat this.

The opportunity to be close to family was one of the main draws to southern California. Here my mom and I share a bench during a short tour of the LA arboretum the afternoon after my first chemotherapy treatment at City of Hope.

I’ve come, with Ed, to southern California, where my mother and our daughter live, and a whole host of the missionary “aunts and uncles” that I grew up with. We now live in a pleasant apartment with our daughter (a special privilege) two miles from my treatment center and along a bus line that goes there, and we’re making slow acquaintance with our new town, when treatment activities allow it. A new friend has loaned us her car for the duration, actually one of four cars offered us. Thank you, friends, for your generosity!

Still the string of blessings must have needed a spot of darkness for compositional balance. A month ago now, returning on foot from an afternoon errand, I tripped on the edge of some uneven sidewalk and broke my left arm at the wrist badly! Suddenly that changes everything again. Quelle aventure!

The cure has imposed some sacrifices. The hair will grow back when pharmaceutical bombardment ends.

A special challenge is figuring out how to dress my head. Yes, I’m temporarily bald. It’s funny that it should make such a difference to me, working in a country where children, schoolgirls in rural schools and many village women, routinely have their hair cut close to their scalps, but it does. Wrong color of woman for it in my mental associations, maybe. I am using a wig, a hat and a kerchief, sometimes with the addition of scarves, keeping an eye out for winter hats, and eagerly looking forward to growing my head of hair out again at the end.

I am tolerating the treatments well, to date. I mentioned adventure. To me, this is an adventure of new experience that God is leading me through, one not completely unexpected, given medical history in my family, not desired, but then that describes ¾ of the adventures we are given in life.

The sun umbrella and I have become even closer friends during these past ten weeks. The pharmaceutical concoction that the doctors are feeding my tumor causes a supersensitivity to the sun's rays in some people. I'm not taking chances.

I am now ¼ of the way through my treatments, through the first chemotherapy regime designed to stop and diminish the presence of cancer in my body, and, sure enough, there are no signs now of any cancerous activity outside the actual tumor, and that is significantly diminished already. God be praised! Eventually they expect to operate on me, and finish with cautionary radiation before I can go back to Congo in April 2013.

Ed is returning to Congo and Lusekele Ag Center in early November, but wants to come back to support me through surgery and the early days of recovery in January. His absence from Lusekele has coincided with the main planting season and absence of the director, due to illness, from day-to-day activities, and there is much to be done.

Weeks in between my chemotherapy treatments are for recovery . . . of the body and of the soul. My cousin, Carla, administered some soul first aid, inviting Ed and me to tour the Huntington Gardens after my third treatment.

So what does God have in mind for this time? Why did he want to pluck us up out of the work we’ve been doing in Congo right now? The answer could be as simple as time to stop and grow in our lives with him. Or it could be the beginnings of new directions in ministry. In Isaiah 43:18-19b, God says, “Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?”