Living In Tension

I listened quietly, my dear friend’s eyes brimming with tears as she described the weight of living each day not knowing when her husband’s cancer is going to come back for the last time. Though he is currently in remission, it’s a cancer that cannot be cured, so it’s this waiting game of when and how it will rear its ugly head again. The questions my friend turns over in her mind are crushing—the kind that steal your breath and undo your strength. Questions about what she will do when God takes her husband home. We gaze over their beautifully massive yard and wonder how she will continue to cultivate its beauty on her own without her helpmate. Lots of hard questions surface daily when living in this kind of tension between the already and the not yet.

I too, feel the struggle that stretches taut around me— with my health and function teetering between being livable and folding into the reality that my body at some point will not be able to continue like this. How do you continue to move through your days while you are walking such a tedious line between what has already happened, and what we expect to happen soon? How is it not paralyzing?

In the throes of a cancer diagnosis, My dear friends have taught me the blessing of living in 24 hour blocks.

They learned—are still learning—to live in the span of a single day. To open their eyes in the morning and ask, What is in front of me today? What can I do, savor, and love in the next twenty-four hours? Not a week, not a year, not a lifetime… just today.

It’s not that the future doesn’t whisper its what-ifs. It does—sometimes with a roar. But they’ve found that courage grows best in small portions, like manna in the wilderness, enough for the day but never stored up in advance.

So we cook the dinner that’s in front of us. We laugh at the joke we didn’t see coming. We walk in the yard, even though someday it may be too big for us. We love fiercely, even if it costs us dearly to let go later.

Living this way doesn’t erase the pain or the questions. It doesn’t make the tension disappear. But it loosens its chokehold, replacing dread with something far more powerful: presence. And in that presence, God meets us—not in the far-off tomorrows, but in the fragile, sacred now.

Like sailors watching the horizon, we take our bearings from the sun—morning to evening, one day’s voyage at a time. Tomorrow’s waters will come soon enough. For now, we drop anchor in the grace of today.