(This post was started on Thursday, June 5, 2008…)
True, genuine hope for the future has been a little hard to come by for me lately. I can see hope for the near term–Ian has been improving, and we should see much more of our boy by Father’s Day. But hope for the long term…a year from now, two years from now…I don’t have much. I’ve been trying to figure out why.
The best I can figure out is that if I dare to have hope, then I open myself up to disappointment. And since we’re talking about the life of my only son, the disappointment hurts deeply. As much as I want to imagine Ian growing up and becoming a man, it’s difficult for me to have the courage let my mind wander there now. It’s safer to…not.
(…then finished on Saturday, June 7, 2008)
Two things happened that broke the thought pattern I wrote about above, and brought honest hope:
1.) Later, on Thursday evening, Deb told me that Ian’s oncology team was going to meet with another little boy who also had a DIPG. He was treated with the same experimental therapy that Ian is undergoing, only during the stage one trials. He was coming in for a routine MRI, just to verify that his tumor had not returned since his treatment ended three years ago.
2.) The biggest difference came just before I went to sleep on Thursday night. I’m in the process of reading Victory Over the Darkness by Neil T. Anderson. In chapter 8, Neil discusses the battle for my mind, and describes some of the enemy’s strategies to affect my thought life.
One aspect he brought up is that the enemy speaks directly to our minds, in subtle and devious ways. Instead of saying “There is no hope,” he says “I don’t believe there is hope.” See the difference? He substitutes his thoughts for ours, making us think that his suggestions are our own thoughts, just by changing the sentence from the third person to the first person.
The enemy’s weapons are lies and deceit. By leading my thoughts along the lines of hopelessness and depression, I was living in defeat. Through the teaching of Mr. Anderson, I’m learning the deeper meaning of 2 Corinthians 10:5 (We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.)
That concept, of taking every thought captive, always seemed insurmountable to me. Once I learned that not everything that goes on in my head is my thought, but that the enemy will place suggestions there for his purposes, it became a matter of learning to hold my thoughts up in light of scripture, and from there either rejecting them as a temptation, or acting upon them. The more quickly I reject thoughts that go against God’s word, the better off I am. And the only way that I can quickly discern what’s going on in my head is by consistently spending time in scripture: reading, studying and meditating on God’s word. Only then am I truly equipped to fight the accuser on the true field of battle: my heart and my mind.
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