Strange Timing

Sometimes, God’s timing just leaves me astrounded. Even when it’s something that, to most, would seem small. I had one of those moments in my writing world just after getting that call about the lesion on my brain, and I wanted to take a few minutes to tell you about it. To tell about how God provided exactly the outlet I needed…and more besides.

Allow me to introduce Iraja. If you’ve read Awakened, then at the end you may recall a baby named Bleu. Well, 150-some-odd years in the future (keeping in mind that my magically Awakened people in this series are very long-lived), Iraja is Bleu’s wife of 34 years. (If you have not read Awakened, the point of this introduction has nothing to do with that story world and everything to do with my life. Bear with me, LOL.)

Several weeks ago, as I was diving into book 3 of this fantasy world, Amazed, I was debating which points-of-view I wanted to include. I knew that obviously I would have my heroine, Aziza. I knew I would have the king of Ellas, Stefanos. I knew I would have her hometown would-be sweetheart, Galenos. And I knew I needed one more, a POV to represent another part of the world. I’d already decided Prince Bleu and Iraja would be in Ellas during the story.

Prince Bleu from Amazed
Awakened Book 3

Then came that phone call you’ve all heard about by now. The one that said I might have Stage 4 cancer. For weeks, I sat in a place of not-knowing. First, I didn’t even know if I was riddled with the stuff again. They thought it likely it was in my lymph nodes. It could have been in my bones. It could have been everywhere. (It’s not, but I didn’t know that yet.) As David and I drove home from that oncology appointment, where my doctor talked to me about palliative care, assuming this was what the tests would reveal to be necessary, I said, a bit stunned, “This could be the thing I’m going to die of.” And I wrestled with the reality that is always true but just became more true. My days are numbered. They always are, yes, but then I felt it.

And this was when I opened up my document and realized that the next chapter would be Iraja’s first POV. And friends, though I am not a crier and certainly not when working, tears stung my eyes. For one moment, just one, I hesitated. Did I really want to write this now? This? A woman struggling with her own mortality and how to say goodbye to her family?

Then I realized that, yes, I did. More—I had to. I realized that, first, when I decided a week before to make her my fourth POV character, God had nudged me toward an outlet. A way to work through and express my thoughts, my feelings. My fears and dreams. To wrestle with what I might leave undone and what I desperately wanted to do. To remind myself that even now, He should be praised. Even now, especially now, I need to embody love above all, as Iraja does. And I also realized, even after those tests proved that whatever is going on, I do not have cancer all through my body and am probably not dying any more quickly than usual (LOL), that He provided a way for me to have an insight into this woman that I otherwise would not have had. Which seems trivial. Silly.

But it’s not, not to me. It’s critical. Crucial. Because I know very well that there will be readers facing down their own struggles, their own life-altering diagnoses when they pick up this book in the future and think to escape their own world into one completely fabricated. And I want to give them a point of connection…and hope. I want to help them fasten their eyes on the Lord, as writing it helped me to do.

I was hesitant to mention this coincidence of timing to David—because while I was at peace with all this, it was harder for him. Which, again, reminded me of Iraja and Bleu and how I’d already decided they would be. Iraja, who had always known her Awakened husband would outlive her, who would stay young while she grew old; who had wanted decades more with him but trusts that even this is part of God’s plan for her life.

And Bleu, who is breaking. Bleu, who loves her so deeply and can’t imagine what life is going to look like without her. Bleu, who knows he likely has centuries left to live, and they look like a barren wasteland spreading before him without the woman he loves.

Over the last few weeks, there have been so many times when my precious husband pulled me close, rested his head against mine, and said, “You have to be okay. I can’t do this without you.” In those early days, all I could do was hold him. All I could do was promise, “If it’s Stage 4 cancer, then I’ll just set some records, right? On how long I can survive on these meds. I’m not giving up, honey. I’ll fight. I intend to have years and years left. We’ll get to our fiftieth.” And he’d bargain, “Seventieth. No—seventy more. We’re both going to live to be over a hundred.”

Over the last few weeks, every time I open up that document on my computer, I’m amazed (ha! Title of the book…) anew at how even this, this small, tiny, inconsequential thing, was planned so perfectly by the Father. Even this, He helped me set up in advance so that my heart would be more peaceful and my story richer.

Every time I write Iraja into a scene, whether it’s her POV or someone else’s, I see this woman choosing life even as she’s dying, choosing love even as she’s spending her last months on enemy soil, choosing faith even as her dreams are cut short…and I realize that’s who I want to be, whether I have a year or a decade or a century left to live. I want to be the person who embraces her enemy and sees in him a friend—and so, makes him one. I want to be the person who cries her tears and then fastens on her smile. I want to be the person who will change the tides of a story—not by sheer brute force, like her magical husband can do with the literal tides in this fantasy world. But by the power of her love.

So here’s Iraja. A princess-by-marriage in a fantasy kingdom, so very much unlike you and me in our real, humble world. But also very much like us—a child of the King of kings. Beloved of the Father. Chosen by our family. A woman who makes a difference not with power but with acceptance, with love, with a determination to see in others what God sees in them. Iraja is who I want to be.

Here’s Iraja, whose perspective helped me understand my own, as I stared one possible end in the eyes. 

I pray that, someday, when you read her POV, she’ll minister to you as she did to me. And you’ll remember that even in the small, tiny, inconsequential things, God’s hand is always at work.