There Are Good Things Here

Katie Hubbard grapples with the distressing notion that cancer might kill her, and God might regard her life as "dispensable." In her words: "I feel shaken to the core. I feel sad. I just feel totally dispensable. How do you face your life being taken away? Not being here at all?! It might not even be necessary for me to be here, according to Your plan."

In her journey with cancer, Katie Hubbard learned a thing or two about what truly satisfies. To God, she wrote, “You are the one thing that I crave and desire that FULFILLS. Everything else leaves me feeling empty.”

Cherishing the beauty of your own backyard. Asking God for the things you want. Trusting him for the things that lie ahead. That’s what you’ll hear from Katie Hubbard in her journal entries from mid-August 2013. And you get classic commentary like this: “You just keep providing, and I keep being stingy and amazed.”

Join Norman Hubbard as he reflects on Katie Hubbard's life, the "voice" of this podcast, and Jesus' promises of eternal life. January 25, 2024 is the 8th anniversary of Katie's passing.

Katie Hubbard tried to find her footing in "the land of the living" after weeks of chemotherapy had kept her sidelined. Resuming something like normal life meant confronting the anxiety of normal life. She wrote down a quote from a friend about Satan's goal to turn us into "cowardly joyless souls" by filling us with fear.

Katie Hubbard had lived under the shadow of cancer and cancer treatment so long, it was hard to look ahead with hope. Even so, that's what her God and her garden asked her to do. Sitting under her new pergola (of course), she meditated on the way that spring flowers gave way to mid-summer blooms. She felt challenged to look ahead with hope in the Lord. This was important because she also decided to stop her chemo regimen early. It was taking too much away with too little promise of helping.

Katie Hubbard must have spent every morning in June of 2013 under her new pergola thinking about the troubles in her world and the beauty of her God. I don't know that you need a pergola to do so, but if you do, find a friend to build you one. For Katie, it proved to be a place of peace where she could slow down (inwardly) to meditate on the presence and goodness of God in a troubled world.

Katie Hubbard was capable of tutoring an entire generation on thanksgiving in the face of suffering. Many of us know what it's like to write a half-hearted thank-you note or "give thanks" over a meal. It's an honest effort to do what's right, and we ought to keep trying honestly. However, Katie disciplined herself to find the good in her kids and her circumstances so that she could give thanks with the kind of feeling most of us only aspire to.

In her journal entries for late May 2013, Katie wonders how to trust God for the healing that others need. She was not only walking through her own cancer journey but also praying for friends whose cancers had recurred. Her true struggle was not with medication and side effects at this point. It was an inward struggle to trust God in the face of perplexity. (She also had to figure out how to keep me from spending too much money.)

As Katie wrestled with her own sickness and fear, she knew how tempting it was to turn her eyes only on herself. The Scriptures were calling her to focus on God's holiness with humility. GK Chesterton's quote captures Katie's reflections masterfully: "How much larger your life would be if you were smaller in it."