"In His Grip"

It's Sunday evening, usually a favorite time, relaxing with Mike and Scott and planning for the week ahead.  I have a lot of stuff in my head tonight though.  My surgery is a week and a half away.  And this past Thursday afternoon, I received another piece of my pathology report from the biopsy - the cancer is HER2 positive.  This was not good news; from all the research I have done, this makes it a more aggressive cancer and one that seems to indicate that I will require a pretty strong course of chemotherapy. Obviously not  a happy thought :).  After praying about it and talking to Mike and Nancy at length, I met with my pastor and our council president to describe the situation and explain that I need to step away from the job.  My job is as the secretary at my church; a job that enables me to interact with wonderful people who are so supportive of me; a job that I'm good at.  But the job also cannot be done sporadically; there are weekly deadlines and I am a one person office.  It is not fair to the church to not do my best and, more importantly, I honestly can't have the stress and worry about getting things done on time in my head at this time.  The meeting went well - again showing me just how wonderful and supportive these people in my life are.  I will be spending the next week and a half getting things in the office as ready as possible for whoever will replace me.  I guess this is the first of what will probably be more losses in my life.

On the medical front, I had my pre-admission testing done, including blood work, EKG and an MRI.  This was my first MRI ever and an interesting  experience :).

This really is an interesting road I am traveling down; thoughts and feeling change and develop each day.  But I know God is always with me.  I received a card from a friend, telling me that I was in her thoughts and prayers.  But it was the way she signed the card that really spoke to my heart.  She signed it "In His grip,".  I received this card on Friday and I was feeling pretty low at the time.  "In His grip" was exactly what I needed to see.  The thought of not just being in God's care or in his hands, but rather "In His grip" is very comforting to me. I know He is holding onto me, giving me strength and comfort always.