Jesus Knows How to Live Between

Guest post by Michael Kelley. The following is taken from my book, Wednesdays Were Pretty Normal: A Boy, Cancer, and God about our 2 year old son's cancer diagnosis and the impact on our faith as a family:

"I found myself unconsciously slipping into a prayer for relief. Asking for a miracle. Begging, really. Just like Paul.

He asked the Lord, too. He asked him several times to take his thorn away. And he got back the same answer we did: No. This was going to be a long journey. A journey of years. There was to be no immediate relief of the pain, but as Paul discov- ered, that didn’t mean the Lord was absent.

In the case of Paul’s thorn, the request to remove it was denied, but an elaboration of the negative answer was given: “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weak- ness” (2 Cor. 12:9).
The Lord had chosen for our family to live this portion of our lives as a visible demonstration of life “between.” He was going to show His own strength through our weakness. The days when we were at the end of our rope were also the days when the sustaining grace and strength of God were to be most visible. He did not promise us that the pain would go away; but He promised that in the midst of it, His grace would be all that we needed.

We were left with the hard choice of believing that to be true. We had to choose to trust not in our own ability to be patient with a child on steroids, or even to get out of bed in the morning, but in the One who promised He would be strong in our stead.

But the great news of the gospel is that the power to sustain us comes from Jesus, who knows even better than we do what it is like to have one foot in heaven and one foot on Earth. Sustaining grace for life between comes from One who knows both the glory and the pain. It comes from One who knows the fullness of God and the fullness of man. It comes from One who was raised up on two crossbeams to where He was physically positioned not quite in the air and yet not quite on the earth either. It comes from One who knows what life is like in the “between.” For when we look into the face of our Jesus, we rejoice, too, even in our thorns, because when we are weak, we are strong.

Jesus sustained us by His grace. We woke every morning, and the best way we knew how, knowing that the day would hold both moments of joy and moments of pain, we trusted in His strength. We trusted that He would be mighty in our weakness."


Find the book here.