His Word Will Not Return Empty

June 11–13, 2025

Wednesday was Megan’s and my fourteenth wedding anniversary.

Fourteen years earlier, we stood together and promised to walk through life side by side. I am sure neither of us pictured celebrating an anniversary in separate cities while our daughter recovered from her first round of chemotherapy.

Kinley was still feeling the effects of treatment. I had gone home to Youngsville on Monday night so I could be with Cohen while he attended camp at our church.

That Wednesday morning, after dropping him off, I spent some time with Pastor Sean at The Bayou Church.

At that point, I had become pretty reclusive.

I did not feel like talking to people. I did not want to answer the same questions over and over or try to explain something I still could not fully understand myself.

I had chosen a few people I trusted to be my point people. They could receive information from me and help pass it along. Megan had done a much better job communicating through social media. She could somehow find words when I had none.

My buddy Steve, one of the people helping carry that load for me, joined us that morning.

Most of our conversation will remain private, but Pastor Sean shared Isaiah 55 with us.

A few parts stayed with me:

“Come, everyone who is thirsty, come to the water.”

“My thoughts are not your thoughts, and your ways are not my ways.”

“My word that comes from my mouth will not return to me empty.”

There would be many verses shared with us throughout this journey, but that chapter arrived at the right moment.

I was thirsty.

Not physically. Spiritually.

I needed something stronger than my own thoughts because my thoughts had become a terrible place to live.

God’s ways were higher than mine.

I did not understand them.

But His Word would not return empty.

I left that conversation feeling strong and optimistic.

That feeling would be tested before the day was over.

A Huge Victory

I was able to visit a few customers while I was in town, then I started driving back toward Baton Rouge.

On the way, Megan sent me a video.

Kinley was walking down the hospital hallway.

Not only was she walking, but she was walking by herself.

This was huge.

A few days earlier, getting out of bed had been an ordeal. Now she was taking steps without someone holding her up.

I could not wait to get back and see her.

But by the time I arrived, things had started turning south.

Kinley was nauseated and weak.

Every day, the nurses gave her Lasix, a medicine meant to help her body eliminate extra fluid. Usually, it sent her to the bathroom several times over the next few hours.

That night, she went once.

Barely.

It was the first warning that the night might not go as planned.

It had been seven days since chemotherapy began, which was traditionally one of the hardest points after treatment.

That morning, I had left church feeling strong.

That night, I sat beside Kinley’s bed staring at my baby while fear and anxiety crawled back into the room.

Here We Go

Megan had gone to the Hog House to get a full night of sleep. She had been beside Kinley for nearly forty-eight hours and desperately needed rest.

Around ten o’clock, the nurse came in to take Kinley’s vital signs.

Her temperature was 100.2.

The staff watched her temperature closely. If it reached 100.4, a chain of protocols would begin to test for infection and illness.

At midnight, they checked again.

99.6.

Good.

I thought maybe we had dodged it.

I was still nervous about her not going to the bathroom, but at least she did not have a fever. I tried to get some sleep.

Around one o’clock, the nurse returned.

100.7.

Here we go.

The nurse immediately called the resident physician. Suddenly, there was a doctor and three nurses in the room, moving things around and beginning the protocol.

Kinley was nauseated, irritated, and exhausted.

She just wanted everyone to leave her alone so she could sleep.

They had to test her port and her IV for bacteria. They took blood samples. Since it had been a few days since her IV had been changed, they decided it was time to replace it.

They swabbed her nose and throat.

Earlier that day, after her walk, Kinley had managed to eat a pickle. When they swabbed her throat, she threw it up, along with some of the liquid sitting in her stomach.

They called in an ultrasound nurse to help locate a good vein.

Nothing was easy.

Finally, sometime around four in the morning, her temperature dropped below 100.

The room began to settle.

Kinley was finally sleeping soundly, and her breathing was no longer labored.

Around six, Megan checked in and asked how the night had gone.

“Not awesome,” I told her. “We had a rough night.”

She asked why I had not called.

I told her she needed the rest.

Now that Kinley was finally sleeping, I needed some too.

Nausea Is Nauseating

By Friday, I was running out of polite ways to describe what chemotherapy was doing to her.

Nausea is nauseating.

The pain was relentless.

The struggle was real.

Chemo was a mother.

I had been blessed with a night of sleep at the Hog House. When I returned to the hospital, Kinley’s room was dark.

Megan looked at me and said, “All night. We’ve been up all night.”

The doctors decided to give Kinley another blood transfusion to help improve her counts.

By the time it began, it was already afternoon. It did not finish until midnight.

Afterward, she still had to receive Lasix, which meant she was up and down going to the bathroom into the early morning hours.

She was still nauseated.

Still vomiting.

Still hurting.

There was not much relief anywhere.

Friday was also Cohen’s last day of camp at church, so we decided Megan would drive back to Lafayette for the closing ceremony and bring him home.

I was as rested as either of us could reasonably be, so after she drank a Red Bull for breakfast, she headed out.

That was about where our nutritional standards were at the time.

Survive first. Discuss breakfast choices later.

“I Just Don’t Want to Hurt Anymore”

Kinley was struggling physically, but I could also see what it was doing to her mentally.

She was exhausted.

Tired of being touched.

Tired of being sick.

Tired of people asking her how she felt when the answer was always some version of terrible.

Then she said:

“I just don’t want to hurt anymore.”

I did not know what to say.

There are moments when a father is supposed to have an answer, and there simply is not one.

So I prayed with her.

I tried to keep my voice steady.

I prayed she did not see the tears in my eyes.

A Narrow Window

Later, the doctor met with me.

There was some encouraging news. Kinley’s blood counts were beginning to rise, and her vital signs looked good.

But her abdomen was still swelling.

If they could get her blood counts high enough, the doctor wanted the surgical team to try draining the fluid again.

This was not a small concern.

Just over a week earlier, they had taken Kinley down for her third procedure to remove fluid from her abdomen. That morning, Megan had messaged me around 7:30 to say they planned to take her into surgery at nine.

Cohen and I had slept at the Hog House. Before the message came, we had gone outside and thrown a baseball while the sun came up.

For a few minutes, life had felt almost normal.

Then the hospital called us back into reality.

We had hoped the procedure would bring Kinley relief, but the doctor called afterward and told us they had not been able to remove much fluid. It had already begun to clot and coagulate.

Her main doctor was not completely surprised, but he had hoped they could do more.

When Kinley returned to her room, they immediately started the second chemotherapy treatment of the week.

Later, Megan and I met with her doctors. They told us that nothing happening was unexpected and that we would stay the course. Another baseline CT scan was ordered so they could compare what the cancer was doing to the first scan from May 18.

The doctor warned us not to be surprised if there had been more spreading. At that point, treatment had only just begun.

But he also said the scan would be important.

It would show us more clearly what we were fighting.

That unsuccessful draining procedure stayed in the back of my mind. We knew the longer the fluid remained, the thicker and harder it might become to remove. We also knew how much pressure and discomfort it was causing her.

Now there was another narrow window.

They needed her blood counts high enough to safely perform the procedure, but they also needed to act before the next round of chemotherapy was scheduled to begin on Monday.

They would monitor her overnight, check labs first thing in the morning, and perform an ultrasound to look for pockets of fluid that could still be drained.

If everyone agreed that it was safe and worthwhile, they would move ahead.

Safe and precise.

Even in the middle of chaos, that phrase continued to follow us.

There was always another test.

Another decision.

Another narrow window.

Another reason to wait.

Provision While I Was Distracted

While I was meeting with the doctor, my sales team was holding our weekly meeting.

I was able to join near the end.

For the past month, my bosses had continued telling me the same thing:

Take care of Kinley.

Do not worry about work.

I still tried to contribute where I could, but there was no pretending that work was my main focus.

Kinley was my focus.

Then my boss told me something unexpected.

Over the previous month, my sales had doubled.

One of my new accounts had grown enough that I had also become eligible for an additional incentive.

“Just keep doing whatever you’ve been doing,” he said.

We both laughed because we knew the truth.

I had not been doing much of anything to drive business growth.

I had been sitting in hospital rooms. The picture above is me trying to do some work while Kinley was in surgery.

I had been missing meetings.

I had been sleeping in unfamiliar beds and staring at monitors.

I had been trying to keep my family together.

And somehow, the work was still being taken care of.

I do not believe every good sales month is a miracle. Sometimes numbers are simply numbers.

But in that season, it felt like provision.

God was making room for me to stay beside Kinley without being crushed by everything I was neglecting elsewhere.

I could not manufacture that.

My hands were full.

Maybe that was the point.

Higher Than My Ways

That Wednesday morning, Isaiah 55 had reminded me that God’s thoughts were not my thoughts and His ways were not my ways.

By that night, I was staring at a fever while nurses flooded the room.

By Friday, my daughter was telling me she did not want to hurt anymore.

Nothing about that felt joyful.

Nothing about it felt peaceful.

But maybe faith is not always carrying the feeling you had when you left church.

Sometimes faith is remembering what you heard there when the feeling disappears.

His Word would not return empty.

That did not mean Kinley would not hurt.

It did not mean every fever would vanish before it reached 100.4.

It did not mean our anniversary would look the way we wanted or that prayer would make the next night easy.

It meant God was still working, even when I could not trace what He was doing.

There were signs of it if I looked closely.

Kinley walking by herself.

A fever dropping.

A wife finally getting a few hours of rest.

Employers giving me permission to be a father first.

Sales increasing while my attention was somewhere else entirely.

A pastor opening the Bible on the exact morning I needed it.

None of those things erased the pain.

But they reminded me that pain was not the only thing happening.

The rain falls.

The ground is saturated.

Something begins to grow beneath the surface before anyone can see it.

I did not understand God’s ways.

I still do not.

But I was learning to trust that His Word was doing something even in the dark.

It would not return empty.