There Are Good Things Here

In this episode, Katie Hubbard simply ponders examples from Scripture where people express faith or disbelief in the face of fear and pain. “Where is your faith?” It was a question Jesus asked many people in his day, and Katie heard the divine challenge in her own. 

Her subsequent journal entry ends with an epigram, the kind she was known for: “I am trading my physical symptoms for mental ones. I must cling to what is true rather than what I feel.”

Finally, I read from my own journal entry from mid-March of 2015. I thought it might interest some of you to hear how I was processing life (really, my own sin) during this same period of our journey.

In this episode, Katie Hubbard writes about the fruit of faith and the frustration of missed expectations in the struggle with cancer. “The fruit of faith. Hope. Courage. God is pleased. Fortitude. Stepping out. Encouragement for others.”

She had no idea what kind of impact she was leaving behind when she wrote the words, “Without faith and belief, what do we have to offer others?” Her words are raw and powerful as she asks God what her own future will hold, as she tries to hold on to her faith in the present.

Katie probes the question of what faith means for others and for herself in the face of cancer.

Katie Hubbard was coming to grips with the extent of pain and suffering in the world as she waited for her own miracle. She also knew that the trials recorded in the Bible far outnumbered the miracles recorded. What is more, you can't minister to people in pain unless you've experienced it yourself.

That was a lesson Katie learned well. She was waiting on a miracle herself in the face of her own pain and suffering. Yet her heart was growing softer toward a hurting world around her. That is a miracle in itself!

Katie would often say (in her mom's words) that trials can make you bitter or better. Perhaps her journey will help you see how suffering can make you better, softer, more compassionate when you keep turning your attention to Jesus.

Please take note that Katie was also turning her attention to Plutarch! What a fantastic window into the kind of person she was. Though she felt so sick that she could hardly leave her room, she was expanding her mind by reading The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (as a part of her reading in The Great Books of the Western World).

"We want the miracles of Acts but not the trials."

Katie Hubbard had struggled through the final week of February 2015, but she surged into a new season of faith and hope in the face of cancer when March rolled around. She identifies the source of the change in her first journal entry for the month. The first was practical, or circumstantial. We rearranged our bedroom to make it beautiful and functional for her when she didn't have the energy to go anywhere but didn't want to stay in bed.

The second reason was deeper. She resolved to do the hard work of believing God. In the face of cancer, faith and hope are easy to let go of. It's easy to find faith foolish or too assume you're standing at the back of the line, nowhere close to receiving another display of God's favor. Katie shows some of the interior work that was going on in her mind and heart that leads to her final declaration for March 1: "I need to accept cancer and quit looking at it as ruining my life. I can have cancer and a good life. it doesn't have to go away in order for me to start living or even enjoy living. I just hav to do what I can around it."

"I can have cancer and a good life."

In this special episode, I want to give you a chance to hear Katie Hubbard in prayer … not just her voice coming through as I read her journal entries … but her actual voice. I recorded a handful of prayer times we shared together in 2014 and 2015. There were not remarkable occasions, but I wanted to capture her heart and voice for the Lord so that others could hear her. (By this point in our lives, we knew she would not survive cancer without a miracle.)

The recording you’re going to hear was made in Illinois in February 2015. As you listen to it, pay attention to the way Katie refers to Scripture. In short, to hear Katie Hubbard in prayer was to hear her telling the Lord what she was learning from The Word.

We learned to pray this way in The Navigators, largely because of the influence of Vic Black, our campus staff. If you'd like to learn more about this kind of prayer, you can check out Vic's book, Speak, Lord, on Amazon or at Navpress.com.

When Katie wrote the two entries featured on today's podcast, cancer treatment and pain medication had combined to leave her so low you can actually see it in her handwriting. If you only had her journal entries, you would assume that she was simply sitting in her bedroom trying to get over her fatigue and nausea. Far from it!

Though she was not letting on to anyone (not even me!) how bad she felt, she was still opening up our home to international guests and visiting alumni. She was also welcoming former students who were learning their chops as new parents.

Where does a person find inner resources to keep giving her life away when cancer treatment and pain medication leave you almost powerless? Katie would surely say the resources didn't come from her, but from God. At least, that's what her journals show. She honestly cried out for help and experienced it in real life.

Katie's journal entry actually reveals how bad she felt. Yet, she kept opening her home and life to others.

The presence of cancer and the threat of paralysis cannot overwhelm a soul that trusts in God. This week’s podcast features Katie at her best in the worst of times. She opens her heart in a journal entry (below), email, and Caring Bridge post with striking vulnerability, spirituality, and wit. She was passing through a deep place of uncertainty in her soul, faced with the reality that cancer was now destroying her spine and threatening her with paralysis.

You see the damage cancer is causing and think "This can't be me"

In the face of it all, she says, “I have no control over the cancer that is relentlessly eating me up, but I do have control over my thoughts, emotions, reactions, and choices.” She quotes from The Incredibles, Rocky, Handel’s Messiah, Jesus, and Lecrae. This podcast is vintage Katie: facing the threat of paralysis with tenacious faith, spunk, and humor. (Her unofficial guide to all the machines they stick you in during cancer treatment is also priceless.)

In these posts, Katie talks about the snap trip we made St. Louis to consult with a spine specialist. We went to Atlanta Bread Company for dinner when all was said and done. We checked into our hotel in the early evening, and Katie had nothing left. She wanted to stay up to keep me company, but she needed to sleep. I remember sitting in the room, just watching her sleep. Hours of watching filled with stillness and sorrow. They are holy to me now.

How do you keep living forward day after day with a Stage IV cancer diagnosis? If you're Katie, you just open your Bible up and read the next passage. Then, you open your journal up and write out the verse(s) that meant the most to you, underlining the words that matter most.

That's what you find in her journal entry from Feb 6, 2015. It's obvious that she wanted to see the salvation of the Lord, just as Israel had. Of course, she was working out that longing while saying "Everyday is such an effort to get up and get going." That's what a Stage IV cancer diagnosis hands you: a hard option to trust God in the face of continual fatigue.

For Katie, one bright spot was the overwhelming kindness of friends who were renovating our motorhome. Another was a fun-filled night for The Navigators at the University of Illinois, a formal Katie helped plan to bless students.

Katie was living with Stage IV cancer and didn't often wake up feeling happy or hopeful. Her journal entry from January 31 was uncharacteristically upbeat for this season of life. She sets a good example for all of us going through hard times. It's OK to feel happy and even better to express it to God!

In this entry, Katie's lighter side really comes through as she recounts a visit we made to Elkhart, IN, "kind of a dumpy town". (Sorry to all of you who love Elkhart.) As we were shopping for supplies for our motorhome, Katie encountered a particularly helpful person and reflected, "I always think of kindness as doing good when it is within your power to do so, and that is what Trina did for us."

Katie was didn't often wake up felling hopeful about her future with cancer, but she almost always stayed thankful. Thankful for small kindnesses, ironic restroom signs, and beautiful decorations.

"I would rather be disappointed ...""... tomorrow we will trust you again."Journal entries for January 24 and 28, 2015

In her entries for January 24 and 28, 2015, Katie reflected on lessons she was learning from fellow-travelers as she walked her own road with cancer. In particular, she was processing the tension she felt over parenting (when you never feel good) and trusting in God for a miracle (when you never feel good).

In times of intense suffering, it's easy to let circumstances cloud your clear thinking. That's when it's most important to have others around you who are supporting you on your journey, not just with meals but with words of truth.