Confidence

Hello fellow Brain Tumour Bloggers and to anyone else who reads this. I hope this post finds you in good spirits. I've been wanting to post all day and have been thinking about what I should post but even as I type this I'm still not really sure what the end product will really be about.

Health wise I don't have anything to report on apart from a few really nasty migraines and a few panic moments when I thought I was going to have a seizure. I blame those silly moments on my über tiredness that work is providing me with. My next MRI is getting closer, June, and as usual I try not to think about that.

Today is Good Friday and personally I find Easter the most important time in the Christian calendar. I remember a few years ago on a Good Friday I rocked up to my usual church and just questioned Easter and therefore Christianity as I sat there and heard the same story again. 'Like seriously, this is ridiculous! Some guy a couple of thousand years ago dies on a cross and now I'm saved. What am I saved from? Oh and yeah, then he rises from the dead and drifts on up into "heaven"!' these were the types of thoughts that went through my mind when I sat in church that Good Friday morning. I spoke to a friend after the service and moaned to her about how when we talk about it logically the whole story is ridiculous. We'd been told this story since our birth, it was ingrained in us, the names of the people and the places and the concepts of sin and grace were things we just knew. She agreed but whilst we were talking about it she eventually reminded me, as Os Guinness writes, "If ours is an examined faith, we should be unafraid to doubt. If doubt is eventually justified, we were believing what clearly was not worth believing. But if doubt is answered, our faith has grown stronger. It knows God more certainly and it can enjoy God more deeply."

Anyway I'm still a bit unsure where this is headed but I know that the doubt that bombarded me all those years ago on Good Friday most definitely led me to strengthening my faith and as I mention in previous posts, pre-surgery posts, my faith has helped me a lot over the last couple of years. There are days where I am afraid of what will show up on the MRI, in fact I'm always worried by that, or I'll have a seizure but my faith brings me hope and offers me peace.

Last weekend I was at a church and the sermon talked briefly about having the confidence on your last day on earth that God loves you and you are saved by grace. Talking about one's last day on earth is not something that I am afraid of yet at the same time not one that I would regularly wish to converse about. One reason is because pre-surgery I felt very vulnerable to the fact that I may experience my last day on earth before surgery and didn't want that to be the case, not because of fear but because there is so much more that I wish to do and see. I have thought about the words of that sermon over the last week and whilst I know that life with a brain tumour, or two, brings with it a lot of uncertainty about one's time on earth, even after successful surgery, I am confident that whatever day is my last day on earth I am loved by God and saved by grace.

I love reading other Brain Tumour Bloggers blogs, they help, encourage and inspire me. I suppose it's the one positive thing about having and following blogs about brain tumours. This post doesn't offer any information about therapies or the latest research into brain tumours but through this post I wish to wish everyone and anyone who reads this a blessed Easter weekend. Smile, laugh, show and accept love and make sure you eat a hot cross bun or three!

There are few modern day worships songs that really resonate with me, the one I have I shared below is one of those.

You were as I
Tempted and tried
Human

Romans 5:6-10

For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die— but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life.