I’m sitting in a hospital room on the 9th floor while Marissa is sleeping. The sun is rising and silhouetting the life flight helicopter that sits on a landing right outside our window. I’m drinking coffee out of a paper cup, and I’m missing my children and my normal life. Maybe Marissa can go home today and we can trade oxygen tubes and pain medication for a messy house and noisy family. Maybe we can just drive away and rest.

It’s been a rough couple of weeks and hardly a chance to recover from one blow before another comes. Since September of 2015 we have been running to stay ahead of this cancer. It’s been relentlessly chasing her and now it hardly feels like she can stay on her feet to keep running.

She is so tired of running, and the enemy is winning this race.

I have watched my daughter cry out in pain and struggle to breathe. I have heard bad news–wave upon wave nearly knocking me down. I have felt my faith twisted and pulled, and sometimes I can almost smell the burning of the rope that is holding me.

A skirmish of the soul.

I run, desperate, to the living Word, and I long for deliverance. I long for peace. I long for truth that is bigger than this moment–bigger than this story and bigger than me.

I stretch out my hands to you; my soul thirsts for you like a parched land. Answer me quickly, O LORD! My spirit fails! Hide not your face from me, lest I be like those who go down to the pit. Let me hear in the morning of your steadfast love, for in You I trust. Psalm 143:6-8

I think I know this failing of spirit. I think I have felt this anguished thirst.

I, too, have searched for a hidden face.

Snow is falling gently now outside my window, making everything white. There is beauty in its covering. It changes the way everything looks, and even the ugly is masked.

Truth brings its own covering of beauty. It is a strong mantle covering the worst of pain, the ugliest of days. It is the big picture of redemption and new things and death swallowed up in victory. It tells of a future with no more sickness, no more dying, no more tears.

It is the big story, the forever story, the story we’re meant to tell.

It is the old, old story of Jesus and His love.

For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son, that whoever believes in Him will not perish but have everlasting life. John 3:16

And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” Revelation 21:3-4