The Weapon We Had Was a Bible

May 30–31, 2025

This new lull is taking its toll.

Today is lucky number 13 in the hospital.

Thirteen days of waiting. Thirteen days of questions. Thirteen days of doctors walking in and out. Thirteen days of trying to read faces, tones, pauses, and medical words we were never supposed to understand this well.

On one hand, we are becoming more at peace with the fact that this is a complex case. It requires more research. More testing. More people looking at it. More time for the smartest people in the room to build the best path forward.

On the other hand, waiting for answers feels almost unbearable.

Fear has a way of talking loud in the waiting.

Fear says the longer it takes to receive answers, the worse it must be.

Fear says silence means bad news.

Fear says if they knew what to do, they would have already told us.

Fear says a lot.

But somehow, God has been backfilling my heart with hope and joy.

That is the only way I know how to describe it. It is not like the fear disappeared. It did not. It still shows up. It still whispers. It still tries to take over. But God has been filling in the cracks with something else.

Hope.

Joy.

Peace.

Not loud. Not easy. But real.

At the end of each day, when we pray as a family, I always thank God for the time we got to spend together. Especially days like yesterday, when Cohen was able to spend the whole morning with us.

Those moments mean more now.

A regular morning together does not feel regular anymore.

It feels like a gift.

Every morning, we still wake up and pray together. We thank God for waking us up again today. We pray that He uses us to show His light in this world.

And in every prayer, we ask for the miracle.

Every single one.

We ask God to remove all tumors and ailments from Kinley’s body. We ask Him boldly. We ask Him repeatedly. We ask Him because we believe He can.

We are asking and believing for the miracle.

But it took me about a week to get back to praying that way.

That is hard to admit, but it is true.

I had to get the anger off my heart.

Out of my eyes.

Removed from my mind.

I see other moms and dads walking around the hospital with this look of hopelessness and bitterness, and I understand it. I do not judge it. I know that look now. I know what it feels like when your heart is so heavy that prayer feels impossible. I know what it feels like to be angry and scared and tired and not know what to say to God.

But slowly, God has been pulling me back.

One thing that helped was worship music.

My buddy Steve sent me the song Too Good to Not Believe by Brandon Lake.

At that point, I could not really talk to God. Not in the way I normally would. It felt like there was a fog around me. A disconnect. I believed in God, but I was struggling to reach Him. Or maybe I was struggling to let Him reach me.

I was angry.

I was scared.

I was tired.

And honestly, I did not know what to say.

That song was the first time I remember putting forth a real effort to personally reconnect with God. Not because I suddenly had some polished prayer ready. Not because everything felt better. But because worship gave my heart somewhere to go when my words were not working.

So I listened.

And somehow, it helped.

Not because music fixed anything.

Not because the diagnosis changed.

Not because we suddenly had answers.

But worship helped shift my eyes from the weight in front of me to the God who was still present in the middle of it.

It helped me breathe.

It helped me remember that God was still God in the hospital room.

It helped me pray when I did not have the words.

And I am thankful Steve sent it when he did.

The love and support from people has also been overwhelming. People are praying for Kinley. People are donating blood in her name. People are standing with our family in ways I do not think we will ever fully be able to repay.

Their kindness keeps reminding me that we are not alone.

And then Megan wrote something about waiting.

She wrote about how simple the word sounds in everyday life.

Wait.

Stay where you are until something happens.

Delay action.

Be eagerly impatient.

But then she wrote about the biblical meaning of waiting. To hope. To anticipate. To trust. To wait on the Lord requires faith, patience, humility, long-suffering, and endurance.

That sounds beautiful until you are actually asked to live it.

Because waiting in a hospital room after being told your daughter has cancer is not passive.

It is not calm.

It is not sitting quietly with folded hands while soft music plays in the background.

It is war.

It is faithful words battling earthly thoughts every minute of the day.

It is waking up hoping today is the day the doctors walk in with a plan, only for the day to end with more waiting.

It is trying to prepare your twelve-year-old daughter for a battle when you do not even know the enemy’s full name yet.

How do you mentally prepare your child for war when the only weapon you have in your hands is a Bible?

That line keeps sitting with me.

Because that is what it felt like.

We did not have a treatment plan yet.

We did not have all the answers.

We did not know where it started.

We did not know exactly how to fight it.

But we had Scripture.

We had prayer.

We had worship.

We had people standing in the gap when we were too tired to stand.

We had a battered faith that was somehow still hanging on.

And maybe that is not “only” a Bible.

Maybe that is everything.

Waiting has become one of the most acute tests of faith I have ever experienced.

The initial diagnosis is devastating. Treatment is terrifying. But this waiting period, this space between knowing something is wrong and not yet knowing what to do, is its own kind of suffering.

It feels like free falling from an airplane with a parachute, blindfolded, while someone else gets to pull the ripcord, and no one tells you how close you are to the ground.

That is what this wait feels like.

And yet, we wait.

Not because we are calm.

Not because we are strong.

Not because we understand.

We wait because God is still God.

We wait because St. Jude has the case.

We wait because the doctors are working.

We wait because Kinley needs us to keep breathing.

We wait because hope is still alive, even when it is tired.

We wait because God is still in the miracle business.

And if waiting means hoping and trusting, then by God, that is what we will do.

Eagerly impatient.

But still faithful.