When you’re a capable, confident, 28-year-old child of privilege and experience, then you are accustomed to taking the challenges that come up in life and simply…managing them.

By the time I was 28 I had lived in three countries by my own initiative, and several others by tagging along with my parents. I had been married for six years and was a mother for two, and had gotten a BA in psychology and a master’s degree in sociology. My husband, Stefan, who was 29, was a chief financial officer for a division in his insurance corporation. As a result of his job, we moved from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to Minneapolis, with all the attendant tasks and responsibilities an international move entails. In addition to those events, I was seven months pregnant with my second son at this time, so I was also busy finding myself somewhere to have a baby in a strange city. So as you can imagine, at this time Stefan and I had a major to-do list, but nothing that two people with skills and resources wouldn’t be able to manage.

And I swear to you, although it may seem ridiculous, that when Stefan was diagnosed with a brain tumor right in the middle of all this, in some very practical ways taking care of his illness became simply more items added to the list of to-dos. Granted, these to-dos were scarier, and the stakes were higher. But we used the same system, you see, to manage the illness that we had always used to manage our lives together.

Gather resources. Get educated. Make decisions. Take charge. Do the right thing, so you’ll get the right outcome. Assume that everything will work out fine.

This methodology was our foundation, our grounding. We had the energy and efficiency needed to tackle a ridiculous list of to-dos. And when Stefan’s energy flagged with his disease and the treatment, I took over everything. The list never came to an end, but I didn’t notice because I knew my job was to be in charge. Not only did the list not come to an end, but it increased exponentially as we went along.

We did extensive research and decided on a course of treatment. Brain surgery led to unexpected paralysis on Stefan’s right side, which necessitated its own course of research and treatment. I had my baby, Jake, and continued to care for my two sons on my own. I got settled into our community and new house, availed myself of at-home-mom resources, and found preschools.

I managed Stefan’s care, including his radiation and fifteen months of inpatient chemotherapy, which involved a surgical procedure every five weeks. Blood tests every week. Periodic setbacks with low blood counts. Doing the dance of making sure the medication balances were correct. Periodic seizures when they weren’t. All this in a town, a state, with no family, and no friends except for some brand new ones, no church, just us.

Any normal person, especially one involved in ministering to others, can tell you that this all is just too much for the 20-years-ago me to be in charge of, to be expected to manage. But I was not normal in that time period, and I was not involved in ministry, and this is what I thought the world was like: You were in charge of the success and failure of your own life. Problems were unfortunate, and they called for extra competency, and so you rose to the occasion. This is what life is, decided the 10-years-ago me. I am in charge, and the degree to which I can’t meet the challenge is the degree to which I fail, and let my family down. That was inconceivable. So, simple enough—meet the challenge. Always.

After the first six months in Minnesota, things sort of leveled out for me and my family. After a year and a half, Stefan completed his course of chemo treatment, and was declared cancer-free. He was weak from the treatment, skinny and bald, and still used a cane. We were told that this sort of cancer does tend to come back; but really, that was an issue for another day. For now, the to-do list was complete. Time for the next one.

We began to plan our return to “normal” life, still thinking such a thing was possible. In our rush to get through this whole event as efficiently as we could, we hadn’t noticed the ways in which we had already fundamentally changed—and not for the better.

We hadn’t noticed that although Stefan and I were still quite a team when it came to his treatment, in other areas of our relationship things had started to slide. We hadn’t noticed, or at least I hadn’t, that I was wound tighter than a drum, and was nearing the end of my capacity to ignore my own needs in order to deal with babies and health concerns.

And we certainly hadn’t noticed, or at least I hadn’t, that we actually already knew that our belief that we could manage and fix anything was wrong. After all the major drama, we weren’t giving ourselves the space to see that we had been in the wilderness this whole time, a new place entirely. We were still in the desert, and being in the wilderness called for a new perspective, a new game plan. We were like people in the middle of the Sahara with nothing but a bottle of sunscreen, telling ourselves we were having a beach vacation. Or at least that the rescue chopper would be there very shortly.

Things did not stay calm. Stefan fell and broke his hip in December of 2001. While waiting for surgery, he fell into a coma, and no-one was sure exactly why. I pulled out my best medical management expertise, talking to doctors and organizing treatment, figuring out the best course of action.

And herein lies that moment when it all changed, and I saw that I was in the wilderness, had been in the wilderness, lost in the desert for real, and it was time for something new.

I was on the phone with some doctor or another, and they were reporting in. No change in consciousness. A shadow on the MRI—was the tumor returning? Probably not. Why the coma? Sometimes the brain shuts down for a while—that’s a good thing. He could pop out of it just fine. We’ll monitor this. We’ll take a look at that. Oh, and by the way, Stefan has osteoporosis, likely caused by the steroids he’s been taking for years to help with the seizures. That’s why his hip broke when he fell. And on to this. And on to that.

There was something about that osteoporosis part. I remember how I was standing—I was on the phone in the front room of my house with my head bowed, one foot up on the sofa. But inside of me, my body did something else entirely. Inside, inside my spirit, when I heard about the osteoporosis, the one last straw, I opened out my hands.

I let go.

This is too much for me. This may turn out fine or it may turn out terribly, but You’re in charge. Who I might have been talking to, I did not know, but it didn’t matter. It is Yours now, Hand of Fate or whatever is out there. You take it.

Faith is like a mustard seed, Jesus said. It’s just a speck, the smallest of all the seeds on earth, and yet it grows a shrub so large that birds can make nests in its shade (Mark 4:31-32). My experience on the phone was the mustard seed of my life.

It could have been just a temporary thing, a brief respite from a path that didn’t change at all from the one I had been on. But as it turned out, it was not a temporary thing at all. That seed of letting go became the foundation of everything I then did, the foundation by which I experienced all that was to come: Stefan’s death and the choices I made, first in coming to DC, and then in getting re-involved with Unitarian Universalism, and getting remarried, and then in choosing to go to seminary, and all the rest. It’s the foundation I use now, and I don’t think I could be without it if I tried.

I open my hands. It’s Your show, not mine. I turn it over. You’re in charge. Show me what’s next, and that’s what I will do.

The Tao Te Ching says that trying to control the future is like trying to take the master carpenter’s place. When you handle the master carpenter’s tools, Lao Tzu tells us, when you handle the tools, chances are that you’ll cut your hand. Hands off the tools. They aren’t yours.

I couldn’t know at the time the blessings and miracles that would grow out of this moment of transformation. I just let go, and walked off into a different kind of wilderness, one where, like Jesus in the desert, I was waited on by angels. I hope, when it comes to your wilderness, that you have seen them waiting on you, too.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110180929/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/20_10/01.mp3