My bestie has breast cancer.
There. I said it. Or at least, I typed it. And I want y'all to know that although I have a big lump in my throat from typing it, I'm not crying. Not yet. There's too much we don't know yet. Maybe later I'll cry, if further developments warrant it. My bestie's not crying yet either. "Maybe I should be more upset about this than I am," she said tonight. How the hell do I know? This is territory that neither of us has wandered into before.
What I do know is this: for maybe only the fourth or fifth time since Sean died in April, I prayed. See, me and God haven't been on real good terms since He looked away for a moment that Easter weekend, say to check on the famine in Africa or something, and Sean's blood sugar bottomed out while he was driving home to get his insulin. My bestie knows this about me. "You will pray again," she said in her calm way, "when you feel like you need to." Well, guess what? Now I feel like I need to.
So I prayed a cobbled-together little prayer in the parking lot at work tonight. It went something like this: Hey God, I know you're busy and all and you have better things to do than sit up there drummin' your fingers on your celestial table and waiting for me to get my head out of my butt—oh, sorry—but if you were maybe tryin' to get my attention with this thing you let happen to my bestie...well, it worked. I'm payin' attention now. And I'd really appreciate it if you could see your way clear to not take her from me, not just yet. If you could maybe strike her with some weak little cancer that curls up and dies right away like that big spider in my bathroom, if you could do that, that'd be really cool. Because I need her, okay? And also, you know how she worries. Well, if you could make it so she doesn't worry so much, that'd be awesome, too. I don't want her to worry and be afraid, okay? Because it might really be an itty-bitty-spider kind of cancer, right, like the doctor said. I mean, you got some leeway here, you know? And me and my bestie, we're kinda big on signs, so if you could send us some kind of sign that, you know, sorta points us in the right direction here, we could use it. That's all. For now, I mean. Thanks for listening.
And then I got all settled in at work and logged onto Facebook, and right there at the top of the page was my friend Angela's status: "Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid." John 14:27 Oh. A sign already. I just had to laugh. Here I am, praying my little heart out for a sign, and God goes and hits me right upside the head with one. I figure He's not much on subtlety with a lost sheep like me.
And that's all for now. I just wanted to throw this out there so y'all would know, in case someone who prays with more faith than I have might want to say a little word or two about my bestie to God or your Higher Power or whoever or whatever you believe makes the world and everything in it tick along. So thanks for that.