Thanks for asking, Dotsie. To be honest, I'm so excruciatingly frightened that it's almost unbearable. But I keep putting it all into God's hands, gritting my teeth and willing myself to just breathe and trust. So I'm constantly waffling between a strange serenity and this excruciating fear...quite a roller coaster ride.

My brother is still waiting to hear from the cancer clinic as to when his chemo treatments will begin. The waiting is very hard - you'd think that once someone's been diagnosed with cancer, they'd want to start the chemo right away to begin eradicating it!!

In the meantime, he's having a very difficult time fighting off infections - with the lymph nodes (the infection fighters) dysfunctional and the diabetes still not stabilized (because of the steroids he's taking to shrink the lymph nodes), his immune system is not working. When he was in hospital, he had a biopsy done - a tiny incision in the neck. Well, now that tiny incision has become a raging infection that he's having a difficult time getting rid of. The frightening irony doesn't escape us - that these infections could be more of a danger than the cancer itself!

Anyway, we're battling on, taking it one day at a time; my brother is upbeat, eating well, and enjoying his time off work. I'm a different story - while I'm very confident that God could and would heal him (whether through the doctors and medical treatments or by some divine miracle) if He wanted to, I've been disappointed before, so I'm having trouble trusting that He will want to heal my brother. I know He loves us, and it's not so much a faith-in-God crisis, but a reluctance to once again submit my will to God's will, knowing quite painfully what that could mean.

But I also know, from a lifetime of walking with Him that He really does love us and really does want the best for each of us (ie, abundant life), so I have to trust in that love and know that whatever happens, He'll be there through it all.