A Year Ago Today

Friday, February 10, 2012, I was standing in a classroom at Prairie Creek Baptist Church in Plano, TX. It was an hour before students started to arrive for FUEL, their version of Dnow. This was my 3rd year and I had grown so fond of this youth ministry. I looked forward to working FUEL every year and getting the opportunity to show my friends, who I would bring along as leaders, this youth group that stole my heart. This particular year, my cousin, Shelby, was coming to be a leader.

A little back story about my family, for those of you who may not know. My immediate family is a little bit different than most families. We are loud and sarcastic. We joke, we fight, we laugh, we cry. But at the end of every day, my parents, my sisters, Kristen and Lisa, and my brothers, Brian, Spencer and Kyle, are my very best friends in the entire world. The bond that we have as siblings is much closer than most. Our extended family is the same. The people most families would call cousins, we are close to like siblings. One family in our extended family I am very close to. The Dillards. Growing up, the Benk kids and the Dillard kids spent a lot of time together, our moms watching each others kids, going to church together, growing up together. Mike and Cindie Dillard are the closest things I have to second parents. They would ground me if they thought I would listen. Shelby is my roommate and has been one of my closest friends since we were babies.

Shelby met me that night at the church. She was running a little bit late because her parents wanted to see her before she left. When she got to the church she told me she needed to talk to me, so we stepped into one of the classrooms. She was a little shaken and I was a little concerned. Shelby looked me in the eye and said 4 words that changed our lives forever. "Mom has a tumor".

Cancer, that's something that happens to other people. You never REALLY expect it to happen to someone you love. My heart was broken. Shelby and I stood there for a few minutes and cried with each other and I asked a few questions that she didn't have the answer to. We hugged and took a deep breath. We told the youth pastor and his wife what was going on, but we had this unspoken agreement that we were there for the students, and regardless of how difficult it might be, we had a job to do. Shelby and I shared our testimonies one night with the middle school girls and they cried with us for a little while as we told them what God was doing in our lives.

My Aunt Cindie is one of the strongest women I know. That weekend, I remember thinking she would break if I hugged her too hard. She spoke softly and she moved slowly. She was scared. You could see it on her face that Sunday when we all went to lunch. We all were. Everyone choking back tears and speaking at a quieter volume than our normal family gatherings. I remember Zach, the youngest of the Dillard kids, coming up and hugging me as he whispered in my ear.
Zach: "Did you hear about mom?"
Me: "Yes Zach, I did."
Zach (tightening his hug): "Im scared."
Me: "I know you are, I am too. We just have to keep trusting in God, ok?"

Those are things that will be burned into my mind forever. Trusting in God, that's what my family did. That next week I lived in Shelby's apartment with her. We wanted to make sure that she kept going that semester and didnt just sit and dwell on wanting to be home with her mom. We waited through that week until Thursday when Aunt Cindie went in for surgery. That Thursday, February 16, we would find out if the tumor was cancerous.

We stayed together, she and I, through the hardest year either of us has ever faced. And we trusted in God.

I'm sitting here crying as I remember the events of that weekend, not because the story is sad, though it is at times, but because through it all, my God provides.