Hold Your Ground

I sought the Lord, and He answered me, and delivered me from all my fears – Psalm 34:4

My brothers, I see in your eyes the same fear that would take the heart of me. A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship – but it is not this day. An hour of wolves and shattered shields, when the age of men comes crashing down – but it is.not.this.day. This day we fight! – Aragorn, The Return of the King, J.R.R. Tolkien

We must wait, we must withhold judgment, we must read to the end! For no story, least of all our own, makes sense until we have read all the way to the final page. It is only then, in light of the whole, that we will see the skill, the ability, the genius of the Author. – Tim Challies

This I recall to mind, therefore I have hope…The Lord is good to those who wait for Him – Lamentations 3:21-25

True story: I almost got hit by lightning over Spring Break.

No joke. It happened.

I mean, almost.

We were in Newport, Oregon, our last night camping after a week away.

Oregon State Parks are consistently reliable for the availability of their yurts (read: permanent tents, raised off the ground with indoor heating, electricity and lamps, all things that make Lana cry YAY!), and the relative closeness of their bathrooms to said yurts,

but this last stop at South Beach State Park might have been our favourite yet.

South Beach is stunningly beautiful, reaching out to the north like the left arm of Newport Bay, surrounded by water and epic sunsets. You can hear the roar of the ocean as you fall asleep – that is, when there isn’t also a massive thunder-and-lightning storm raging.

It started out small, and we thought tucking in for a fire under our canopy could be doable, one last night in the elements and away from wifi and responsibility.

But then the raindrops turned to hail, so we put the fire out and went in for the night.

See, the great thing about yurting in March is that it doesn’t really matter what kind of weather you encounter, you’re going to be relatively comfortable. Safe. Protected.

Which is good, because the weather on the Oregon Coast at any time of year can change on a dime, as if subject to the whims of some two -year-old in charge of a weather machine she’s mistaken for a toy.

On this particular night, we’d been at the beach less than an hour before the rain turned to hail; the sun was out, we were letting the dog run on the sand, listening to the roar of the water, the wind cold but not biting,

and then somewhere in the distance thunder sounded

and a flash of light cracked the overcast-hued sunset.

We thought it was a false alarm, and for that first hour all we saw was light rain,

and then toonie-sized raindrops,

and then hail.

By the time we’d packed up camp and shut in for the night, the thunder was sounding only a second or two after the bolt of lightning pierced our view of stars through the skylamp.

Surprisingly, we were both hit with a fit of giggles.

What is this trip coming to?

Seriously, if it was an episode of a sitcom, it would have been The One With all the Fails.

See, I’m not the most experienced camper.

Learning to love the outdoors is one of the things I’ve done because I love my husband.

And I genuinely love it now – in a way that only things you thought you’d hate but someone you love made you love them kind of way. Special.

For me, that goes along with Pinochle – the Meredith family card game that took me eight – yes, EIGHT – years to learn; biking; and Lord of the Rings.

Which, as you are about to see, I genuinely adore.

(Confession: I’m watching it right now as I write, because, come on. That story is epic.)

So its taken me some time to develop the acquired taste of glamping

(because not bringing the tent, or carrying all potentially-required supplies on your back, I am told, is glamour-camping, or glamping).

and it wasn’t until Spring Break 2023, our first kidless trip in a thousand years or more, that I caught the vision for why people purposely plan, pay money for, and work hard to go on a trip that’s

… well, a lot of work.

On that pivotal 2023 venture – I learned how to cook outside.

Virtually all of the credit for that goes to Half-Baked Harvest, for this incredible recipe, made even better when cooked on a dutch oven over open fire.

Seriously, every time I make it for my family, they drool. All I have to do is say the word orzo to Elliana, and she immediately perks up, because they make it seem more like risotto than orzo.

(You guys really should try it).

But before I digress too much about the food, even though our family are thorough fans of gastronomy,

back to the point,

which is –

that my husband is usually at his best in nature

(He’s named after a famous Cascadian botanist, after all)

and I finally learned to love it almost as much as he does.

The combination of cooking, eating, and walking outside, reading, thinking, falling asleep to the sound of the ocean, seeing my husband in his most restful element;

and being reminded once again that if the God of the universe created all these massive forces – in which the roaring ocean tide goes out and yet always comes back,

then maybe He can be trusted with my chaos back home.

And lets face it: there’s always a little chaos back home.

But – then we got a dog. On Valentine’s Day.

(Speaking of chaos).

And while we spent late February and early March learning the day to day of trying to coax an exuberant puppy to pee outside and not spend his every waking moment biting our furniture or his own tail

We weren’t even sure we would bring the dog.

And then last minute, we decided we would.

But I’d not booked any pet-friendly yurts.

So we called the campsites.

No, they’re pretty strict on the no pets in non-pet-friendly yurts,we learned. It’s for people who have allergies, they said.

So David thought he could sleep in the car.

No pets unsupervised in vehicles or not on six-foot leash, they told us.

I guess I could sleep in it with him, he conceded.

But that didn’t sound like much of a vacation, so I went hunting for pet-friendly yurts, and while doing some internet wizardry and complex reorganization, I was able to rebook our six nights in non-pet-friendly yurts to four nights in pet-friendly yurts and two in non-pet-friendly yurts.

That would be enough, right?

On March 22nd, we set out – while our oldest flew from Stockholm to Lyon (to tour the south of France with friends on her spring break from Holsby) and our youngest headed to Sea-Tac (to fly to San Diego to serve in a ministry called Casa de Luz which is incidentally led by some of our dear friends and the Pastor who dedicated our kids),

me sleeping in the car post-night-shift

while David drove us to Astoria, Oregon, for the first night of our adventure.

We were hungry, so we stopped for food.

But we had a dog – and most places were like sorry, no we don’t take pets here

and a few were like sure, but you need to keep them outside

and the only place that had room didn’t have an overhang or covered porch

and I’m not sure if y’all know this, Astoria is the rainiest place alive.

Spitting-rain turned to penny-sized drops in moments, and we decided,

okay, the dog can stay in the crate for a bit while we warm up inside.

After a great dinner and time to recover from the drive,

we headed to our campsite.

But again, Astoria being one of the rainiest places of all time –

and yet its the first campground we’ve found that does not have overhangs the entrances to their yurts.

Um. Yeah.

The canopy we’d bought in anticipation of wet weather did nothing to ward off the increasingly painful hail-sized droplets or the mud-caked-on-to-our-puppy’s-paws as he tried to spend most of his free moments rolling down the muddy hill next to our yurt.

And that’s when I learned my husband gets realllllly stressed when things aren’t clean.

I mean, I’m not a fan. It’s one of the reasons I held out on getting a dog for as long as I did. But I assumed that going camping with a dog would mean a bit of dirt that I didn’t want.

David, it appeared, has assumed something else.

I told him, hey, this is fine, it’s only one night. We’d be much further south the next four days – surely the weather would be better, and of course we’d figure out the canopy thing.

The next day, we got to our next spot and –

in pouring rain –

realized that not only do we have to find a solution for the dog for two of our four nights there

(or face a citation imposing hefty fines and/or possible jail time)

(yeah, they are real serious about their pet-friendly yurts vs non-pet-friendly yurts in Oregon)

but there’s no wifi, even with an eSIM card or RoamLikeHome option

anywhere in sight.

Not at the campsite – ok.

Not at the local grocery store. Wierd.

Not anywhere downtown. Which is more than weird.

And while I’m all for vacation meaning I’m unable to be found, in this case I wanted – even needed – wifi, because, well 1)there was no other way to research solutions to our dog problem,

and, far louder an issue, at least in my mama brain –

2) BOTH MY BABIES WERE IN THE AIR SOMEWHERE THANK YOU VERY MUCH AND I JUST NEED TO SEE THEY’VE LANDED AND ALL IS WELL AND THEN I CAN BREATHE. YUP. THANKS.

But that mama-breath had to wait until the next day, when, after an hour of driving around, I stumbled on some wifi at a sweet little coffee shop , which, incidentally, made a write-home-about-oat-milk-latte, and also allowed me a quiet spot to regroup, journal, and check in with my offspring.

Amid all that, I learned that there was no other pet-friendly yurts available when we needed them across the Oregon Coast.

We had another twenty-four hours to solve that problem, and when I made it back to our site, David informed me that he’d talked to the park host and found a kennel only seven minutes away that got rave reviews, and yes, they’d take Mr. Darcy for two nights, as long as we got his health records emailed to them.

We went back and forth on this, right up until the moment we dropped him off,

because we are new puppy owners and a little protective of our sweet boy,

but as we drove away from the best home-away-from-home a dog could ask for, I realized how essential it was because

I could literally see the weight falling off of my husband.

I really, really needed a break, he admitted, his tone a little guilty-sounding.

We stayed up late that night talking about it – the dog, the underlying hum of stress he regularly feels, what that means and where it came from. All the while we stoked the fire and reconnected with the rhythm of just the two of us, which becomes more and more important as the girls grow and spread their wings,

and also tried to figure out if what I’d made for dinner was even edible.

Yeah, see – we forgot the Dutch oven when we were packing.

and the suitable-for-home Dutch oven David found at Fred Meyer as a semi-replacement couldn’t be used over the open flame, and

Camping pots burn things really, really fast.

Like – I went over to stoke the fire so it didn’t hotbox me under our canopy in the rain, and when I stepped back to the stove, the onions I was trying to saute were black.

David’s a good sport, and he tried to make me feel awesome even with the trashed version of Creamy White Bean Orzo Soup, but I couldn’t stomach it. Every. Single. Thing. Tasted. Like. Burnt. something-I-couldnt-identify.

This trip is clearly the One With All the Fails, I said, and he cackled.

Yup, trust us to have a trip like this.

So when, only a couple of nights later, the yurt at South Beach shook with the force of thunder that had sounded less than a second after the bolt of lightning flashed in our skylight,

We jumped into each other’s arms

-not kidding it was one of those laughably-cliche scenes in a movie-

and resolved not to venture out to the bathroom until the storm had passed.

Is someone trying to kill me? I asked him, which received more cackling.

Truth be told, it’s something that’s trying to kill me and not someone.

Most of you know that, for the past fifteen and a half years, our family has walked the journey of chronic cancer in the form of CML (chronic myelogenous leukemia), first discovered in the first week of January, 2009, when Elliana was a mere eight months of age and I had gone to the walk-in clinic over Christmas holidays for what I thought was a bladder infection.

It was indeed a bladder infection, but when the antibiotics didn’t quite do the job, they looked into other things, and discovered my white blood count was 147, when its supposed to be somewhere between 4 and 9.

The pathologist at MSA Hospital recognized my name, being staff, and being a community hospital where almost everyone knew everyone else, and then there was my age – twenty-eight – and this result is incredibly uncommon for someone who is twenty-eight – and he accelerated the rest of the tests, and the next day I got a phone call from the doctor at the walk-in, knowing my family doctor was away, and knowing I needed treatment yesterday –

and of course the first thing I felt upon hearing the word leukemia was fear.

The second thing, more powerful and overwhelming, though, was relief.

See, I’d been exhausted for months. The daily tasks of raising and tending to two little Merediths at the age of three and eight months, each with such big ideas and so much to say, and so much need,

was knocking me out.

I had thought there something seriously wrong with me – but not physically.

A few months prior, when I’d first felt this off-ness, my mom had suggested joining her study at the church I’d grown up in.

It was a good start, because heaven knows that at the exact moment I was hearing these words chronic cancer and start treatment, I’d need to be immersed in studying the book that shows us what happens next, as in, after this life, and if there’s one thing you need to be studying when you learn you might die and soon, its the book of Revelation, the one that teaches you not to fear death or anything that comes afterwards.

But, before I knew that, I kept thinking, I’m doing all the ‘right’ things and I’m still, oh-so-tired.

Can I just not do this? I’d wondered. I’d wanted to be a mom forever, but the girls showed up sooner than we’d planned, and I wondered if maybe God had made a mistake, and I just wasn’t supposed to be a mom, because everyone around me seemed to have their days, their homes, their lives, their joys all figured out, and the whole time I kept thinking, what am I missing here?

Turns out I was missing a lot, but not what I thought.

And, ironically, it was cancer that God chose to show me exactly what that missing-bit was.

See, before cancer, I was a check-list girl. I planned, I did, I learned, I grew, and faster than everyone else, thank you, and the thing about those first three years of motherhood is that they slowed. me. down. in ways that were frustrating to say the least.

So God decided I needed to slow down even more.

And when I did, I saw these beautiful, sparkling, incandescent eyes.

Four of them, two belonging to my girl with the big ideas, and the other two to my girl with the big feels, together two stunning bursts of creativity, joy, and serenity,

and I realized this was the more I’d been missing before.

And all of that came from a seemingly-unanswered prayer and the thing I really didn’t want, that showed up with a bang and shook my heart with trembling

the way that our yurt shook as the thunder followed .5 seconds after the lightning bolt pierced the sky that torrential night in South Beach.

Have you ever been there?

That place where what you’ve just heard or just learned sends an arrow through your heart, and your insides begin to shake?

That’s been me, plenty of times.

In fact, I’m kind of there right now.

The last fifteen years have been something of a quiet miracle. What should have killed me in mere weeks has been diminished and kept at bay by a revolutionary twenty-first-century drug class known as tyrosine-kinase-inhibitors. These – oral – chemotherapy pills have successfully targeted the cause of philadelphia-chromosone-positive CML and in many cases, cured to the point of remission, some to the point of continued remission while weaning off of the drug altogether.

While I have been granted a major molecular response, in which the cancer gene counts are in the -3 to -3.5 range (according to a negative logarhythmic function for you people who are smart at math), at times being as low as -3.84, I’ve never broken the -4 barrier, or complete molecular response, or achieved remission.

Don’t get me wrong – I’ve been granted an extension of life that is now more than fifty percent of what I’d lived up to the point the cancer was found. Fifteen years is not nothing.

Fifteen years has allowed me to live long enough for both my girls to remember me, for each of them to have been raised by a mom for a significant period, to have lived many adventures, loved and lost many dear people, retained a few gems among them, and had my rough edges continually rubbed off by that irritating and wonderful little white pill that reminds me every day my life is not my own.

And there are times that I wonder if its been worth it.

Times I’ve wondered if the non-cancer-related pains have been just too much and should I really still be here and didn’t I just make everything so much worse

times when everything I’ve prayed for – that I thought I was supposed to pray for

seems to end in a big fat nothing with seemingly no purpose at all.

I was there a bit recently.

On returning from our fated camping trip, I discovered something that left my heart shaking as much as that yurt did that last night when the lightning landed only yards from our campsite.

Like, what, on earth, are you doing here, God?

I saw no explanation for it. It made no sense. And it made me wonder if a part of the last six-to-twelve years of my life was all a big mistake.

And I’m guessing you guys have been there too, at some point.

Maybe even right now.

Maybe not for a reason like mine – you might be physically healthy without any illness in sight,

but as the last four years have taught us,

there’s a lot of other things you can lose unexpectedly.

And if you’re anything like me,

then some of those losses have hit deep and left you wondering,

How did we even get here?!?

Its tempting to think there was no rhyme or reason to any of it, no purpose at all.

Some of these losses I’d spent my days at the beach praying over. Asking to understand the purpose. Begging to know what good He was doing in it. Crying out for Him to lift the burden and confusion in it all.

So when I didn’t get the answer I’d expected, I was angry.

How dare you trick me like this!?!

(Because it really seemed like He had).

The Friday and Saturday of Easter weekend were spent with tears constantly at the ready, unsure if and when they should be spilled, confused as to if any of what I’d poured out had even been heard.

And then Elliana came home

at 4 am

on Easter Sunday

early…while it was still dark…on the first day of the week…

And poured out her heart for two hours of all the incredible work she’d seen the Great Story-Teller do and write in and through her life to those around her

And I thought again of those fervent prayers I’d prayed at the beach.

See, there was one other thing I kept thinking in the midst of them.

I didn’t pray enough for Elliana today.

Her name even comes from that verse I quoted at the beginning: I sought the Lord, and He answered me, (El-Elyon-ah), and delivered me from all my fears.

And as I listened to this fiercely-truthful, no-punches-pulled-kinda-girl whose name means He answers

tell how she shared with her team

how the God of Light delivered her

from the deepest darkness

with the words:

I would have despaired, unless I had believed that I would see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living – Psalm 27:13.

I realized that He’d answered.

I’d sought the Lord – about something else, but I’d sought Him, and El-Elyon-ah.

While I’m sure the other things that haven’t been answered yet will become clear in time,

the immediate answer was that

He did a ton of things for the girl I felt like I hadn’t prayed for enough.

And it reminded me that

God will either give us what we ask for in prayer,

or give us what we would have asked for if we knew everything He knows – Tim Keller

It’s a thought I’ve been turning over for the last ten months or so.

Last summer, Shutterfly had a fourth-of-July sale in which you could print as many 4×6 or 4×4 photo prints as you’d like, and only pay for shipping. I realized, that in the fog of the last twelve years, it had been since 2011 when I’d put photos in physical albums, that could be looked through and remembered.

It’s a practice that’s going by the wayside for many of us, and its certainly not required by any means, and most of us moms are living through years in which if we make it through the day with clean clothes or with all of our children alive, fed, and safely asleep in their beds, we’ve accomplished a marathon.

But as I watched our girls take flight in new ways this past year, I realized that making those albums might help me process the chaos of the last decade. And, since I didn’t know how many more years I’d have, it might be nice for the girls to have each of these bonus years I was granted documented and laid out in ways they can remember easily.

So arrived a room’s full worth of orange boxes in David’s old room at his parents house in Oregon last August.

And while piecing these years of our lives together,

what I saw wasn’t just the highlight reel, the Instagram-curated version of our family adventures;

although for anyone who’s ever tempted to chronicle their lives in terms of losses

and yes, I know someone who does that literally, which was part of what sobered me up to tackle this project,

a highlight reel is a beautiful, necessary, poignant antidote.

Because – He’s answered me. So. Many. Times.

Not how I thought.

But better.

Take my girls, for example. The heartaches and misunderstandings they’ve sustained in the last five years have been nothing short of excruciating to watch as their mama. And yet, looking at these pictures, I wouldn’t trade a minute or a single detail of who my girls have become at the hands of immature, not-quite-ready-to-appreciate-them-for-all-the-awesome-they-are-yet peers,

all while walking with those who have at least seen glimpses of their awesome, and know enough to know they want to be around it, a lot,

because these bold, fire-tested, lightning rods of truth

forged in the darkness of would-be despair

are beginning to lift a torch to light the darkness for those around them –

because of walking through all the things

I begged God not to give them.

In fact, those things I implored God to take away are the very things that have made them into women who know how to

stand their ground

when the enemy comes knocking.

Because when the enemy comes knocking, he knows how to make us shake.

Even this latest plot twist in my story has been enough to make me tremble.

(And here’s we get all scientific, for those of you who are reading this just for the status report:)

The drug I’ve been on the last ten years, Dasatanib, has kept the leukemia at bay, but slowly the cancer gene has been creeping up, closer to the -3 mark than the -4 it was a few short years ago. For a couple of years, my oncologist has been talking about a newer-generation drug, Asciminib, developed for those CML patients, who, like me, have tried two different TKI’s (Gleevec, Sprycel, etc) and have not yet received a complete molecular response or remission. Asciminib targets a different part of the cancer gene molecule, and has shown to be significantly effective in doing what the others could not.

Only thing was, it wasn’t available in British Columbia until the last few months.

Oh yeah – and there’s more monitoring involved with this drug, as it tends to cause more side effects.

Heart changes, blood pressure increases, gastrointestinal chaoses, cytopenias, joint pain, fatigue.

So, after much prayer, research, thinking through and talking over,

Tomorrow morning I go off of my current little white pill friend – Dasatanib.

I need to be off of it for five days before starting the new one – Asciminib.

On Monday I get labwork and an ECG.

Tuesday I have a forty-minute appointment with a oncology-pharmacist in Surrey.

Wednesday, I get to pick up the new drug; and

Thursday, begin to take it.

The monitoring will be weekly for awhile – labwork and ECG; then every other week, then monthly, for at least the first six months.

And I’m guessing my body is going to be knocked out a bit.

I know my mind has been … at least shaky at times.

But there’s this thing I teach new labour nurses:

I call it the pivot point.

See, contrary to what many people think, labour and delivery nursing involves a lot of unexpected change. It requires thinking on your feet with mere moments to pivot from casual conversation in early labour to urgent direction of emergencies.

Sometimes we can see the situation coming

and other times it comes out of nowhere.

And managing those quick-moving, heart-pumping moments of that unforeseen emergency

is one of the biggest anxieties of new perinatal nurses.

But the first thing they need to learn how to do is stay in the room. And in order to stay in it, they need to find a spot that’s theirs. A spot where they can slow down their thinking and their heart rate and learn to pay attention to what the team is doing and why, so that someday soon they can mimic those actions and implement the same safety protocols

so that we all stick to our maxim of above all, healthy mom, healthy baby.

In those early learning days, when their somewhat predictable learning environment turns to chaos, I teach them to find

the two-square-foot spot in the room they can safely occupy

as they observe those more experienced than them

in emergencies like these

do what we know to do to get babies out screaming and healthy.

But every time I teach that,

I can’t help thinking that, for me, those two square feet are really a Person

Who gave His life on a cross

that likely occupied about two square feet in the ground

so that He could pay a penalty we could not;

and in so doing,

become that spot that doesn’t move.

And friend –

let me assure you,

there is absolutely no better place

to plant yourself

in chaos

than with the One who, between a Friday and a Sunday, descended to the place of ultimate torment

and ripped the keys to death

away from the one who used them to taunt us;

so that people like me

could confidently tell you

that those keys are oh-so-safe in His hands.

Because – they are.

Not only that, but since He alone knows when and how to use them – for good –

you and I have nothing to fear.

See, one thing I’m learning recently is that

while the enemy’s primary weapon is a lie

and he’ll use whatever combination of those useful to his cause;

whatever it takes,

to convince us to do a bad thing, or discourage us from doing a good thing,

one of his often-used-yet-rarely-detected strategies is

to convince us that something is over before it actually is.

For someone like me, that can be as basic as trying to convince me life is over before it actually is.

For when he can convince us that there’s nothing left to fight for,

he defeats us before the battle has even begun.

And guys – who knows how many of those battles we would have won?!?

One of my favourite fictional characters embodies this wisdom so well.

Near the end of The Return of the King, unsure if the ring-bearer is still alive, or if the quest still has a chance of success, the soon-to-be-crowned king (that we know, at least), Aragorn, calls forth the dark lord Sauron to battle –

his only goal being to give Frodo a chance to destroy the ring

by distracting the enemy’s attention.

And it shouldn’t surprise us, his motivation. If we’d been listening carefully to what he promised Frodo at the Counsel of Elrond, we’d remember he vows, if by his life or his death he may aid the quest, then he will do just that.

Guys.

Aragorn doesn’t go to that last battle thinking he will win.

He goes to battle knowing he has to try.

Or else, fear wins before he’s even begun to fight.

And oh, how his enemy – and ours – wants us to fear.

In Aragorn’s case, the mouth of Sauron, the dark lord, comes forth – hideous, grotesque, and full of absolute lies; some overt, some a smoke-and-mirrors misrepresentation of reality.

He tries to convince the Fellowship that the ring-bearer, on whom all their hopes rest to defeat evil by destroying the ring of power – Frodo – is dead after a hideously long torture.

He makes it look like it too.

So much so that Frodo’s hobbit-friends quiver in fear, and tears come to even wise, I’ve-been-here-before-so-you-don’t-scare-me-Gandalf‘s eyes.

Aragorn merely walks forward, unperturbed.

While this disgusting mouth of lies taunts him, saying that just because he has the king of old’s sword doesn’t mean he has what it takes to be king, Aragorn lifts the very blade being mocked

and cuts off the Liar’s head.

I do not believe it, he says. I will not.

Guys. We all need to do a little bit more of this, don’t we?

Because that very act – the silencing of the Liar who knows he hasn’t won, not yet, but maybe can, if he convinces his opponent it’s already all over –

turns out to be the biggest turn of the tide in that whole battle.

Had he let the mouth continue to speak, the army would have grown in doubt, fear, and insecurity.

But, knowing the master of lies speaks only lies, he refuses to listen or let his people hear it. Instead he rides back to the rest of the army and speaks what is likely the most inspirational sixty seconds of a movie ever –

seriously, you should go watch it.

I see in your eyes the same fear that would take the heart of me.

Aragorn knows that the battle is by no means won, or even winnable – not in their own strength, anyways. And he doesn’t tell the men to go out and win.

He tells them to hold their ground.

See there’s one thing we can ensure doesn’t fail.

And that, is courage.

Perhaps you and I even now find ourselives in situations in which the courage of all around us fail.

And we may be tempted to join them.

How can I make a difference, just me, against all this?

If you listen carefully, it was this same despair that drew all traitors to Sauron – Saruman the wizard, who once was Gandalf’s trusted mentor and friend, the men from the South, even Denethor, Steward of the capital of Men, who gave himself up to suicide at the first sign of battle –

because he thought it was hopeless.

But – you and I – do not need to believe the enemy’s fake-outs.

Because that is what they are.

We can say no. not today.

Not today will I lay down my sword.

Not today will I believe your lies. No-

Today, I will fight.

By all that I hold dear on this good earth, I will stand.

And, as Paul tells us, we only stand when we are held together by truth.

Only with truth, will we hold our ground.

So please, friends, be careful who and what you listen to. What you let speak. What you let be heard, dwelt on, thought over.

Friends –

Hold. your. ground.

And, if you’re willing – pray that I can do the same.

For those of you who’ve asked – pray that I’ll be granted strength, health, and peace for this next leg of the journey, and that, Lord willing, that I may be given even more time –

because it seems like there may be more for me to do here still.

Regardless –

it’s not over.

Not yet.