God's Preparations and Presence

Preparation uring her sophomore year in high school, my daughter Ashley was given an assign- ment to write a fictional short story. Ashley chose to write her story about a female teenage ten- nis player who “got” cancer, and she titled her story “The Last Match.” In the story the girl’s cancer was ter- minal, and, as her health got worse, she became too sick to continue playing the game: she loved. As the girl’s health deteriorated, she prayed to God that she would become strong enough to play just one more tennis match before she died.

In Ashley’s story, the girl achieved her dream to play one final match, and shortly thereafter the cancer took her life. What is especially amazing about this story is that Ashley wrote it almost one full year before any evi- dence of her own cancer was discovered.

She had no earthly way of knowing when she chose her topic and wrote her story that cancer would very soon become much more than just a high school writing assignment. Ashley was diagnosed with osteosarcoma (bone can- cer) ten months after she wrote her story, and, as a result of this diagnosis, our family went through the most difficult but amazing year of our collective lives.

Prior to the onset of cancer, Ashley had been a promising high school tennis player, hopeful of earn- ing a college scholarship and continuing her career at the next level. In an effort to save her life though, she chose to have her leg amputated, thereby giving up that dream. There were many other challenges Ashley and our family faced during the period we spent “living” at the hospital. There were times of despair where sick- ness and pain were all we knew, and times of hope, where we could tell that God was with us and that He had a wonderful plan for her life.

Overall, it was an incredible chapter of our lives we never would have chosen, which ultimately caused us to be changed for the better. Over time, my wife, Beth, and I have come to believe that Ashley’s story about the tennis player with cancer provides an example of God preparing her for what she would later have to face in her own life. With the writing of the story, it seems that Ashley was led to consider in a very personal way something that most kids her age would have a difficult time imagining.

She thought about a young female athlete’s mortality and how a life can be changed in an instant by can- cer. She also thought about the importance of family and friends, and the beautiful role that God’s people through church can play in helping a person make it through something that would be so much harder to handle alone. Even though it was almost a year after Ashley wrote her story before her own cancer was dis- covered, it seems that God was already preparing her emotionally for her own difficult journey.

He was laying the spiritual groundwork. One of the lessons we can take from our family’s experience is that we must always trust that God will give us the strength we need to stand up to all of the challenges we will face in life. We must also have faith to know that whenever those challenges do come our way, He will always be with us. I thank God for His preparations and His presence in Ashley’s life.

We would never have made it to where we are today with- out Him.