Kate McRae

Kate McRae. A precious blond-hair blue-eyed 6 year old that is desperately fighting for her life. This is the background of her story written by Kate's mom:

Monday June 29th, 2009 was supposed to be a day filled with summer fun. The kids and I were going to the water park to celebrate summer. However, I noticed that a slight tremor in her right hand that she developed over the past 2-3 days had notably worsened. We decided to take her to her Pediatrician, just for safe measure. Her Dr decided to get a CT of Kate's head, to rule anything out. We proceeded to Phoenix Childrens Hospital for a stat CT of her head. At 5:30 I, Holly, Kate's mom, was taken into a room alone and told Kate had a massive tumor on the basil ganglia portion of her brain. The world stopped for us that day. I called her dad and through sobs told him to come to the hospital quickly. Our journey had begun. Kate was directly admitted to the PICU. One minute thoughts of the water park the next our child is critically ill in the PICU. We would have never chosen to be a part of this journey with childhood cancer, but it was chosen for us, and our sweet Kate. She is now in the Phoneix Children's Hospital undergoing treatment for this disease.

Kate underwent a craniotomy with tumor resection on July 3rd, 2009. They unfortunately were only able to remove 50% of the tumor due to it's location in the left temporal lobe of her brain and the fact that the tumor had wrapped itself around major blood vessels to her brain. Kate experienced right sided paralysis immediately following surgery. She has since regained much of this, however right sided weakness still continues.

After a few days of waiting the pathology report was in, Kate was diagnosed with a very malignant, aggressive brain tumor called a supratentorial primitive neuroectodermal tumor or sPNET. Our hearts were shattered. Dreams for our little 5 year old daughter put on hold to battle this monster. Long term prognosis and outcomes weren't encouraging so Kate has been put on a study that is showing a little more promising outcomes, hopefully a better chance at survival and less long term side effects. She is currently undergoing the Head Start 3 Study out of Los Angeles but doing it at Phoenix Children's Hospital. The study involves the initial brain surgery, 5 round of very intense chemotherapy with possibility of a subsequent brain surgery and then another round of chemo with a stem cell transplant. We are hoping to avoid radiation after transplant. Kate is also in physical therapy and occupational therapy and has been released from speech therapy.

We believe strongly in the power of prayer and the ability of Jesus to heal our precious daughter. Whether He does this through modern medicine or simply a divine touch, we aren't picky. We are asking others to join us on this journey and fervently pray for our Kate. The road is long and unbelievably hard. We have 3 children, all who are intensely affected. Olivia is now 7, Kate is 5 and Will is 4. Please keep all of us in your prayers as we try to walk this journey of childhood cancer. Thank you. (As of September 29th Kate was readmitted to begin her 3rd round of chemo. She will be hospitalized for the entire round.)

My heart literally breaks for Kate and her family. Kate "celebrated" her 6th birthday on December 27th. Birthdays for a 6 year-old should mean parties, friends, cupcakes, and laughter instead of hospitals, vomiting, morphine drips and IV's. Kate is sick, but not forgotten. She is immensely loved by Her creator.
The faith and perseverance Kate's parents have displayed through this has been a witness and a living testimony of God's supernatural love. This is not the path they (or anyone for that matter) would choose, but they know where their hope lies and they cling to the Ultimate Healer. They believe and know God is good and loving and faithful and all-powerful. The gospel is hope, and the Lord is strength.

“Do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand”. Isaiah 41:10
“He works out everything in conformity with the purpose of HIS will”. Ephesians 1: 11

This was a particularly powerful update from Kate's mom on Christmas eve:
Instead of tucking all 3 of our kids in tonight, calming them down due to the anticipation of tomorrow. I will just be tucking one in. Into her hospital bed. Hoping she perks up, instead of calming down. Praying her fever comes down. Praying her mouth sores diminish. Praying her heart rate slows down. Praying the blood cultures grow nothing. Praying that even now every last cancer cell would be destroyed. Forever.

The one thing that remains true and constant even tonight, even amidst our present pain, is the reason for Christmas. We could be celebrating at home. Enjoying family and the traditions the season brings. Or we could be in the hospital fighting for our daughters life. I am just so thankful that Christmas means Jesus. And that does not change even when our circumstances do. He came and brought salvation. And one day there will be no more pain, no more tears and no more cancer. Praying Kate gets to experience the later here on earth and will get to experience many more joyous Christmas' in the years to come.

it's about the Cross

"The beginning of the story is wonderful and great but its the ending that can save you and that's why we celebrate...it's about the cross, it's about my sin, it's about how Jesus came to be born once so that we could be born again. It's about God's love nailed to a tree, it's about every drop of blood that flowed from Him when it should have been me. It's about the stone, that was rolled away, so that you and I could have real life someday. It's about the cross." Go Fish

Those lyrics are from a song by Go Fish that's somewhat cheesy but the lyrics are powerful.
Let us not forget that Jesus was a baby born to die. His birth was about the promised Messiah, but also about a covenant which was broken that He came to restore.
It's about the cross.

Mere Christianity

Very few authors have influenced, strengthened, penetrated, challenged and shaped my faith more than C.S. Lewis. His writing either sings to you or he doesn't, but boy does he sing to me!
I will examine some of Lewis's other books another day but here are some of my favorite excerpts from Mere Christianity. This is the stuff I thought I already knew. But I didn't-not really, not clearly.

"God made us: invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on gasoline, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other. That is why it is just no good asking God to make us happy in our own way without bothering about religion. God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing."

Lewis says that Christian's believe an evil power has made himself (for the present) the Peace of this World. Lewis then asks is this in accordance with God's will and says "if it is, He is a srange God...and if it is not, how can anything happen contrary to the will of a being with absolute power?"
Therefore, we can come to the conclusion that God created things with free will. Free will means those things can go right or wrong. Free will makes evil possible.
"... Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. A world of automata -- of creatures that worked like machines -- would hardly be worth creating. The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water. And for that they must be free...of course God knew what would happen if they used their freedom the wrong way: apparently he thought it worth the risk. Perhaps we feel inclined to disagree with Him. But there is a difficulty about disagreeing with God. He is the source from which all your reasoning power comes: you could not be right and He wrong and more than a stream can rise higher than its own source. When you are arguing against Him you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all: it is like cutting off the branch you are sitting on. If God thinks this state of war in the universe is a price worth paying for free will -- that is, for making a live world in which creatures can do real good or harm and something of real importance can happen, instead of a toy world which only moves when He pulls the strings -- then we may take it it is worth paying."

"We believe that the death of Christ is just that point in history at which something absolutely unimaginable from the outside shows through into our own world. And if we cannot picture even the atoms of which our own world is built, of course we are not going to be able to picture this. Indeed, if we found that we could fully understand it, that very fact would show it was not what it professes to be — the inconceivable, the uncreated, the thing from beyond nature, striking down into nature like lightning. You may ask what good it will be to us if we do not understand it. But that is easily answered. A man may eat his dinner without understanding exactly how food nourishes him. A man can accept Christ without knowing how it works: indeed, he certainly would not know how it works until he has accepted it."

We are told that Christ was killed for us, that His death washed away our sins, and that by dying He has disabled death itself. That is the formula. That is Christianity. This is what has to be believed.

"...repentance, this willing submission to humiliation and a kind of death, is not something God demands of you before He will take you back and which He could let you off of if He chose: it is simply a description of what going back to Him is like. If you ask God to take you back without it, you are really asking Him to let you go back without going back. It cannot happen."

Lewis' genius is his humility, his self-forgetfulness before truth. Mere Christianity is so powerful because it's not about Lewis' faith, it's about THE Faith.

may He be enough

found this video through John Piper's twitter:

http://fm.thevillagechurch.net/blog/pastors/?p=363

Wow. Matt says he's grateful that the Lord has counted him worthy..and now in this area where it's not a big win he gets to show that Christ is enough.
"I will bring them through the fire, refine them as silver is refined, and test them as gold is tested. They will call on My name, and I will answer them; and I will say, 'They are My people,' and they will say, 'the Lord is my God." Zechariah 13:9
Matt is saying this as a man who will likely lose his life-that nothing in this world is better then exalting Jesus as Lord.
"Taste and see that the Lord is good, blessed is the one who trusts in Him!" Psalm 34:8

Blessed. Blessed is the one who TRUST in Him. Do I really believe that? So much of the time I feel like I'm a pretender. I welcome the sunshine and exalt the name of Christ when life is easy. I want the benefits without the cost. I am a consumerist to the core.

But what is it that I'm afraid of? 1 Corinthians 15:54-55 says "Death has been swallowed up in victory. Where, oh death, is your victory? Where, oh death, is your sting?" When we swallow something, we digest it and it fuels us- making us both bigger and stronger. So if death is swallowed up in victory, essentially this means death becomes part of victory, making it bigger and stronger. Victory will become more meaningful, more overwhelming, because we have known loss.

Oh me of little faith.

Simple Joys

10 simple things I am thankful for:
1. conversations that ignite uncontrollable laughter
2. the smell of a fire pit
3. sweatshirt hugs
4. interacting with people who are authentic and bring a different perspective to life than I do
5. running outside in Chapel Hill and seeing all the Christmas lights
6. diet coke
7. cats...because they remind me how much I LOVE dogs (sorry if you're a cat person!)
8. the immediate rush of walking into a warm house after being outside in the cold
9. snuggling with salpal
10. for passion and purpose

New Every Morning

"Because of the Lord's great love we are not consumed, for His compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness. I say to myself, "The Lord is my portion; therefore I will wait on Him." The Lord is good to those whose hope is in Him, to the one who seeks Him. It is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord." Lamentations 3:22-26

So much promise in that verse.
"For His compassions never fail, they are new every morning!"
I can't even fathom that kind of love. One of my favorite parts about this verse is that after the writer is reminded of the Lord's great love, they proceed to say "the Lord is my portion; I will wait on Him." At the end the author again says "it is GOOD to wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord."
I absolutely hate waiting. I'm one of the most impatient people in the world, I hate anything that slows me down, gets in my way, or takes too long. Our world is extremely uncomfortable with delayed satisfaction, and we make every effort to achieve and obtain quick, but often fleeting, ways of gratifying our lives. We realize we hunger, but we fail to realize that our deepest hunger cannot be satisfied by those momentary pleasures.
My mom brought this up during Thanksgiving a couple days ago and its really been something I've thought about a lot during the past few days. God's word calls me to wait. Say what? Yep, its true. The bible is full of people who have to wait. Our deepest longings will only be satisfied by the renewal of God, who is continually making things new, but perhaps not at the speed we desire. Therefore we must wait.
I've been learning recently that waiting on the Lord is not like waiting in line at a store, but more like waiting when I was a child on my birthday when I finally got to rip open my birthday presents. There is hope and expectation, along with the assurance that I do not know what is wrapped under the bows and wrapping paper, but I do know the one who gives the gift and I know that the gift is an expression of the giver's love for me. While we wait on the Lord, we do not wait in fear and anxiety of what might come in the future, we wait with faith and hope in the God who holds the future.

To wait is to learn the spiritual grace of detachment (letting go) the freedom of desire. Not the absence of desire, but desire at rest.
Psalm 131:2 says "But I have stilled and quieted my soul; like a weaned child with its mother, like a weaned child is with my soul within me."
What a beautiful picture David paints. A young child resting contently against her mother's chest. The child David is describing isn't demanding, isn't frustrated, isn't complaining. There are no insistent tears- the child has learned to wait.
"Detachment (the word) might evoke wrong impressions. It is not a cold, indifferent attitude; not at all. An authentic spiritual understanding of detachment devalues neither desire nor the objects of desire. Instead it aims at correcting one's own anxious grasping in order to free oneself to a committed relationship with God." John Elredge

Real Gold Fears No Fire

So I decided to start this blog just because I love other peoples perspectives. I've enjoyed reading different friends blogs, and love how the Lord encourages us in seeing the transparency of others. My prayer is that you will see a little bit into my heart through this blog. I'm not totally sure what I will write about, just whatever is on my heart.
The title of this blog "real gold fears no fire" was inspired by one of my all time favorite books, Safely Home by Randy Alcorn. If you haven't read it I highly recommend it because its incredible. Quan, the main character, is in a Chinese prison because of his passion for the Lord. In this brief excerpt below Quan is speaking to Ben, an American businessman and Quan's college roommate, who has since college fallen away from the Lord.
"Show me, O Lord, my life's end and the number of my days; let me know how fleeting my life is. You have made my days a mere handbreadth; the span of my years is as nothing before you. Each man's life is but a breath.' He taught me that our lives 'quickly pass, and we fly away."
"Sounds morbid," Ben said.
"No, because our life does not end here. We do not cease to exist at death; we relocate to another place. How can we prepare for death if we deny it? One of Baba's favorite sayings was 'Real gold fears no fire.' I tell Minghua and Shen, we must go through times of testing, but the fire of trails proves what we are made of."
"Fire seems a high price to pay," Ben questioned.
"Purity is worth the highest cost, is it not? God is with us in the fire. Shengjing says our works done on earth can either be wood or hay or straw that will burn in the fire of God's holiness. Or they can be works of gold and silver and precious stones that will be purified in the fire. The choice is ours. If we are faithful, we will come out purer than when we went into the fire. This is why real gold does not fear the fire."

Powerful. As I write those words I am so convicted by Quan's faithfulness. "Purity is worth the highest cost." So much of my life I am like Ben..afraid of the refinement process. Fearful because refinement means change...and change is hard and can be painful.
C.S. Lewis writes "it would seem that our Lord finds our desires (for joy, pleasure, happiness) not to strong, but to weak. We are half-hearted creatures fooling around with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered to us, like an ignorant child who want to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at sea. We are far too easily pleased."
Lewis understands that the longings and deep desires we feel are meant to us point us to the Giver of all good things. Forgive me Jesus for trying to pacify these longings with lesser gods: people, approval, recognition, possessions, the list could go on. I enjoyed the creation rather than the Creator. I enjoy the gifts rather than the Giver.
I am far too easily pleased, and therefore in the same way, far too easily disappointed. I, like the child Lewis is describing, settle for mud pies in the slum, forsaking the incredible vacation offered. When I finally see how filthy I am, I become disappointed that the mud was not all I had hoped it would be.
Jesus knows and understands the deep longings of my heart. He is sufficient, yet I still run after love, comfort, satisfaction, and happiness in all different areas of my life. How easily I forget. How easily I worship tangible things. How easily I forget the very nature of God. Because of my sinful heart I need refinement. I need rebuke. But most of all...I need Jesus.