Last night I laid down with Noah to put him to sleep and decided to turn to him and ask him, “do you want to make a little video to tell mommy and Ela good night?” He seemed happy enough about this idea…I mean, anything that meant him staying up just a few more minutes would’ve probably sounded pretty great to him. So we recorded our little video…we said our “good nights” and “I love you’s,” and I went ahead and asked Leslee to send me an audio file with a report on Ela.

After dealing with a LOT of resistance from Noah and some complaining from a tired Josiah—who just wanted to go to sleep—I was able to get to the audio file.

I tell you…hearing mixed reports never gets easier. The stomach twisting and sinking feelings are faithful to return. As uncomfortable as these are, I’d like to think that these negative feelings affirm my deep care and love for Ela. We should feel bad things when our loved ones are in pain or in harm’s way shouldn’t we? Thankfully, God has given grace throughout the years so that I am starting to get better at not letting feelings like this rule the day or take over too much of my thought life.

One of the verses that has helped with this is Luke 10:27 “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.”

Familiar passage. Are you connecting the dots? Keeping the greatest command entails loving God with an undivided mind. That is what “all your mind” is referring to..we ought to love God wholemindedly. This is something hard to do if we spend our whole day entertaining thoughts that hardly relate to loving Him.

I should love and care for my daughter and the rest of my family (which I do), but not at the expense of completely disregarding the command to love God with an undivided mind (and an undivided everything else).

I don’t think I’m going too far with this either. One of Jesus’ disciples expressed a desire to bury his father before following Him (likely referring to a desire to stay with his family until his father passed) and Jesus’ response was “follow me, and leave the dead bury their own dead” (Matt. 8:22). Elsewhere Jesus also spoke about how being his disciple means that our love for Him should be in a category of its own…so deep and so special that our love for family seems like hate when compared (Lk. 14:26).

Anyway, enough of that! Hoping my own reflexions on thought life and how it relates to the greatest commandments is helpful to someone out there. Now to Ela…

• We are waiting on two important lab results to come back. Hopefully we’ll hear something by Friday.
• If either of these results is slightly higher than last time we’re going to try dera again (that one treatment they had to stop because it was affecting Ela’s vision…yeah, not excited about this).
• Doctors are trying to avoid other alternative treatments. One of them has only been used 1 time with an adult patient and it has the risk of giving a unique kind of cancer that transplant recipients are prone to getting.
• Ela’s BNP is up to 155 which IS higher than last time. This is an important marker that could point to being back in active rejection. We want this number to be a lot lower.

Thanks again for your love and your constant prayers…from us, and the cool kids down below 🙂