Tag: community

Uncategorized, Friendship

Curiosity & Caring

Hannah

There’s a sacredness to suffering that not everyone understands.

When someone is walking through the deep waters—when every breath feels borrowed and every day is held together by grace—questions can become sharp without ever meaning to be. Have they given you a timeline? What treatments are they trying next? How bad has it gotten? Have they told you when they expect you to die?

Some of those seem atrocious, but they are questions we have actually answered had to field at one time or another. Sometimes these questions slip out clothed as concern, but they land like cold hands on tender skin.

Curiosity is not the same as caring. Curiosity wants information. Caring wants presence. Curiosity circles around pain to peer inside. Caring steps into the shadows and sits down beside you. Curiosity tries to relieve its own unease. Caring is willing to feel uncomfortable just so you don’t feel alone.

I’ve learned there is a holy difference.

I don’t mind sharing pieces of my journey—there is beauty, even here, and God’s fingerprints are everywhere. But when the conversation turns to timelines for my dying or details of treatments that stretch my limits just to endure… that crosses into a territory my soul guards carefully. It’s not because I’m ashamed or afraid. It’s because this is holy ground for me and my family. We are living it, breathing it, praying through it. I am learning to trust God in the dark, and trust is fragile when handled carelessly.

What I welcome—what I desperately treasure—are those who choose presence over answers.

The ones who say, “I’m here.”

The ones who quietly hold space when the tears come.

The ones who don’t need to know the forecast of my future to love me faithfully in my present. The ones who walk with us without needing to understand every detail of the valley. This is the love that looks like Christ.

He never demanded explanations from the suffering. He didn’t ask the bleeding woman for her medical history or the blind man for an exact timeline of his decline. He simply came close. He touched. He healed. He stayed.

He showed us that compassion doesn’t interrogate—it accompanies.

And so we lean into the nearness of God and into the arms of those who reflect Him, the ones who simply show up. The ones who see us instead of studying us. The ones who offer presence instead of probing questions.

If you want to walk beside me, you don’t need to understand every piece of what’s happening. You don’t need updates or timelines. You don’t need the painful details.

You just need a willing heart and a steady step.

Sit with me. Pray with me. Laugh with me. Hold hope with me when I’m tired. Remind me that God is still good, still here, still leading us home.

Curiosity might reach for facts, but caring reaches for hands.

And in this season, hands—and hearts—are what hold me up.

Uncategorized, Friendship

The Seasons of Staying

Hannah

Being a friend of someone with terminal illness must be quite the roller coaster. I’ve had the privilege a few times, but never for so long a stretch of time as my illness has asked of my tribe. That in itself is a beautiful gift, but the cost of it is also not lost on me.

Being a friend of someone with terminal illness must be quite the roller coaster. I’ve had the privilege a few times, but never so long a stretch of time as my illness has asked of my tribe. That in itself is a beautiful gift, but the cost of it is also not lost on me.

There’s something both sacred and sorrowful about watching friendships move through the seasons when you are the one who is dying. In the beginning, the circle is wide — full of love and meals, visits and prayers, the kind of tender urgency that comes when people don’t yet know what to do but feel compelled to do something. It’s a holy flood of kindness, and it humbles you to your core.

But time, as it does, stretches. Months turn into years, and the edges of the circle shift. Some friends drift quietly into the background, not because they stopped caring, but because life resumes its relentless rhythm. Kids grow, careers change, and the crisis that once felt immediate now lives in the quieter corners of their awareness.

And honestly? I get it. I’ve been that friend before too — before this diagnosis rewrote my sense of time. I’ve meant to reach out and didn’t. I’ve avoided pain I didn’t know how to face. I’ve loved someone deeply and still failed to show up in the way I wish I had. So I hold that understanding now with open hands and no resentment, just a bittersweet ache that love sometimes outlasts proximity.

What’s left are the ones who stay through the long middle — not just the early crisis or the final goodbye, but the drawn-out, unpredictable middle where the reality of terminal illness stops being dramatic and just becomes life. They sit with me in the mundane. They ask the unglamorous questions. They know when to come close and when to give space. They’ve learned that faithfulness doesn’t always look like constant presence, but steady presence.

And then, there are those who come back — friends who circle in again after time away, sometimes awkwardly, often tenderly. Their return feels like mercy. It reminds me that love isn’t linear; it’s tidal. People ebb and flow in and out of each other’s lives, and that movement, too, can be grace.

I used to think loyalty meant never leaving. Now I think it means being willing to return.

So to my friends — those who have stayed, drifted, returned, or simply remembered me from afar — please know this: your love has carried me. Every text, every silence, every prayer whispered when you didn’t know what to say has mattered.

Illness has taught me that friendship isn’t measured in constant nearness but in the threads of care that remain, even when time and distance stretch them thin.

If I could sum it up, I’d say this: the seasons of friendship are not a sign of failure, but of humanity. And what a fragile, beautiful, sacred thing it is to be human together — even in the shadow of goodbye.

One of my all time favorite reads!

faith

When Small Acts Become Sacred Moments

Hannah

As a member of my church, one of the things I most enjoy is using my spiritual gifts from God to serve wherever I’m needed. That has looked like playing with toddlers and teaching pre-schoolers as their parents sit in the service. Sharing my story with groups of people who don’t know me yet. Helping prepare and serve meals for special occasions, and taking meals to people when they’re ill. Though introverted, I also have a social streak, and I have enjoyed the hustle and bustle of working in a busy kitchen, preparing games, activities, or projects for large events, and participating in set up and take down for various events.

As you can imagine, my illness has stripped away my ability to do most of these things. This has sent me seeking different ways that I can still be an active part of my congregation instead of feeling like I do not have anything of value to contribute.

Through this season I have learned that Gifts from God are not always wrapped in brilliance. Sometimes, they arrive quietly—like a whisper, tucked deep into the folds of who we are. For me, one of those gifts is encouragement. It does not roar; it does not shine with spotlights. It is a candle in a darkened room, a warm cup of tea set down beside tired hands, a few words penned in ink that somehow carry light.

From time to time, God nudges me—

Write the note.

And so I do.

A card on a desk.

A folded envelope slid into a mailbox.

No fanfare. No flourish. Just I see you. I thank you. You matter. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve learned that God’s timing is far better than mine. That a sentence scribbled in the quiet has found its way into someone’s weary moment like rain on thirsty ground.

This is the mystery of the gifts He gives us; we offer them in faith, and He multiplies them in grace. Your gift may not look like mine. Perhaps you speak life through the meals you prepare, or through the way you listen without rushing.

Perhaps your gift is order in a world of chaos, or joy that bubbles into laughter in heavy spaces. Whatever it is—hold it with open hands. Let God place it where it’s needed most. And do not think it too small. The smallest seed, after all, can become the tallest tree.

This week, listen for His whisper. Offer your gift—quietly, humbly, freely. You may never see all the places it will bloom. But He will.

faith, Fatal Illness, grief, hope

Already Gone, Still Here

Hannah

In the lonely slowness of the in-between, I have discovered something deeply human. A kind of fierce clarity about what matters. An urgent desire to stop faking things just so others won’t be uncomfortable. A pressing yearning to stop wasting words. I can already see who stays. And who doesn’t. Why then do I go to such lengths to create a mirage of okayness so that other people don’t have to reckon with my pain? Why do I smooth over the truth, soften the edges, laugh at the wrong moments—just to make grief more palatable for them?

I think it’s because pretending is the currency of the healthy world. We’re taught to keep things light, manageable, convenient. And when you live in the long shadow of a fatal illness, your reality becomes deeply inconvenient. It disrupts dinner parties. It silences group texts. It taints the joyful camaraderie of a birthday party and unsettles the rhythm of everyone else’s forward motion.

So I contort myself. I wrap my fear in polite phrases. I pad my sorrow with jokes. I give updates that are vague but upbeat. I try not to be too much.

But the cost of that mirage is high. It leaves me lonelier than the illness ever could.

Because here in this slow unraveling, there’s a strange and sacred gift: honesty. The kind that doesn’t flinch. The kind that strips everything down to what’s real and raw and enduring. The kind that doesn’t need to be tied up in a bow.

I’m learning—painfully, awkwardly—that the people who can sit with the truth, even when it’s heavy, are the ones who deserve a front-row seat to what’s left of my life. The rest, kindly, can drift.

This in-between space? It’s not just waiting to die. It’s where I’m learning how to live.

And it’s beautiful and sacred and so much richer than the plot points I would have imagined for my life, and if I am worthy enough to be used for His glory in this way, then I dare not try to contort the storyline that I was written into- one that is not defeat, but is my final triumph.

This is my sacred stage to shine for Jesus- to show a watching world that He is true and every word He spoke is sure. So I will be clinging to His promises like breath itself until my breath is nothing more than the stringy shadow of a vapor hanging suspended in nothingness. If I do that alone then I know it was done with the most honest of intentions, not for the sake of trying to fit into one of the many molds this world would have me choose.

To those of you who were courageous enough to sit near and take fire based on your proximity, I thank you, and I commend you. Know that you did something holy. You didn’t fix it. You didn’t have to. You just stayed—when leaving would have been easier, cleaner, safer. You let the silence speak. You let the pain breathe. You let me be more than just my label.

Know that your presence has been a lifeline. A quiet rebellion against the cultural pull to look away, move on, keep scrolling. You bore witness when I felt invisible. You carried pieces of my grief in your own hands, and somehow, that made it more bearable.

You may not realize the impact you’ve had, but I do. And I will carry the weight of your kindness with me for as long as I have breath.

This long goodbye is not just mine to live—it’s ours to hold. And I am so deeply grateful for those of you who chose to hold it with me.

grief

Bingo, Ice Cream, and the Bitter Gift of Missing Out

Hannah

For several weeks I have been looking forward to this past Sunday. It was a chance to not only go to church in the morning, but then in the evening it was our quarterly meeting plus Ice cream and bingo, and I was excited to see so many of my people. And then MSA.

It didn’t take long to recognize that I was going to have to choose wisely what to use my energy on that day. Pain has been searing out of control more often than not lately, and Sunday morning there was no reprieve. I decided I had a better chance of making it Sunday night if I stayed at home and watched the morning service online, which I did, and then rested throughout the day.

As afternoon faded into evening however, it became clear that my body was not going to tolerate a car ride or anything else. The plans I had so carefully paced myself for began to crumble before my eyes. And with that, came the sting of disappointment—sharp and real.

I wish I could say I shrugged it off with grace, that I whispered a quick prayer and moved on. But instead, I wrestled with it. I grieved the loss of what felt like a lifeline that day. I missed my people. I missed being in the room, surrounded by familiar laughter and shared stories and the simple joy of ice cream and bingo. I missed being seen.

That’s the thing about disappointment—it sneaks in and tries to convince you that you’re forgotten. That everyone else is moving on without you. That your suffering sets you apart in the worst way.

But here’s where faith steps in and steadies the soul.

God doesn’t minimize our losses, and He doesn’t rush us through our grief. He meets us right in the ache. As I sat alone in my living room that night, I remembered the One who never misses a moment. The One who knew I would be here, again. The One who catches every tear and counts every pain-ridden hour as precious.

Crushing disappointment doesn’t get the final word. Not when we serve a God who promises beauty for ashes and joy in the morning. Not when He reminds us that He is our portion, not a perfect evening, not our best-laid plans. Him.

So, I went to bed that night not having seen the people I love, not having laughed over silly bingo cards, not having been part of the fellowship I was so looking forward to. But I went to bed held. Known. Carried. And even in the disappointment, maybe especially there, I was not alone.

And that’s enough.

Paramedic

Sweaty Palms and Steady Courage: The Cost of Doing What’s Right

Hannah

There was a day when I had to report one of my partners on the ambulance for the way he treated a patient. It was a partner I liked a lot. Everyone liked him. I remember standing in the supervisors’ office with my palms sweating and my heart pounding in my ears. He was one of the “good ole boys.” I knew it would probably damage our good relationship, and the backlash would likely affect my relationship with other coworkers as well.

The weight of my decision was heavy, and it certainly would have been easier to not say anything at all. But I had taken an oath to do no harm. I signed up to render aid with wisdom and compassion, and watching my people be abusive and degrading in silence would have been a terrible injustice. I could have just vowed to be better than that. I could have just told him I didn’t like it. Sometimes we need more than just words though; we need action. Marches for peace are great. Changing your social media profile to support a good cause is thoughtful. But that does not actually change anything. We need to act.

Friends, speaking up and putting a foot down is a really difficult thing to do. It’s scary, and it’s risky, and it is definitely not the norm, but our nation is hurting and if someone does not start standing up I fear for the future of our “United” States. We have to be people of action. That may mean turning in your partner. It may mean confronting someone you see abusing their power. It may be saying no to that one family member’s off-colored comments. Whatever it may look like to make a stand instead of turning a blind eye, we need to be doing that.

Eventually you will not feel alone standing up for justice, because when everyone starts doing it you suddenly are not the only fish swimming upstream anymore. You have the power to turn the school around. It starts with each and every individual calling it out when they see it, and saying “no more.” We can do this. I will be there standing beside you, sweaty palms and all.

Please leave me a comment, it lets me know you’re listening!

faith

Waiting on the Whole Story

Hannah

I first experienced deep heartache in my teenage years as my parents engaged in a messy and traumatic divorce. I was blessed to have a wonderful youth pastor and his wife and my small group leader who walked through that with me. This was when I first felt the pull in my heart that I wanted to be for young people the person that I needed so badly in my youth. That feeling has never lessened; for years I have continued to feel that God has called me to work with youth in some capacity; being a safe place and a compass to point them to Jesus in these years that have such an impact on their future.

Suspecting that I should be a small group leader for teenage girls, I reached out to the youth pastor at my church and let him know I wanted to be involved. I went through the application process to be a leader, and a few different times had a prospective time frame of when I would start being involved with the teens. Unfortunately the timing always got derailed with my body waging war against different complications, or sudden progression in my disease.

This was discouraging to me, as I was anxious to jump in already and do what I had been yearning to do for years. Our youth pastor was kind and laid back, letting me know it was no big deal, and to come when I was ready. In the interim he had me share my story with the youth group, which was meaningful, but I still felt I was missing out on doing what God had called me to do.

Eventually I started having more bad days than good days physically, and youth group just had to take a backseat to my health. I didn’t understand why God would ask me to do something and then let me be prevented from doing it. I was certain he had been calling me to work with youth, so it led to much confusion.

Fast forward to the day I got the proverbial slap upside the face. Through various happenings it came together that I was meeting with a small group of teenage girls once a week at my house to lead them in a Bible study. The thought that washed over me this particular day had me feeling a little sheepish. The whole time that I had been trying to get God’s attention because I felt like he had forgotten about his prompting for me to work with teenagers, he had been orchestrating the actual plan right under my nose.

God has me exactly where he wants me; in my home, sitting down with a group of girls to teach them about him. It doesn’t look like the checkboxes I created. It looks perfectly as he planned it all along. I did not have to fill out an application, or drive across town, or have a certain size group; in his kindness God brought the opportunity right to the comfort of my own home, using the means I already have, in /his/ time.

Dear readers, don’t give in to discouragement when you know the Lord is leading you to something but it seems unattainable. Back up a little. Zoom out. Look for where his hand is working. Instead of putting him in the boxes you build, let him show you what he has in mind; it may be buckets full of goodness better than you had even imagined.

community

When the Doorbell Doesn’t Ring: The Quiet Abandon of Terminal Days

Hannah

When you’re first diagnosed with a terminal illness, there’s often a flood of support—texts, calls, check-ins, care packages. People cry with you. They tell you they’re here for anything. They swear they won’t disappear.

Time moves on. So do they. There are seasons to our lives, and some people who may have been able to be more present in the beginning do not have the time and flexibility in this next season they are in. Perhaps others who weren’t available initially are now able to be more present as they enter a slower season of life.

What no one tells you is that terminal illness is not a straight descent. It’s a long, unpredictable goodbye filled with plateaus and crashes, slight recoveries and devastating setbacks. It’s not dramatic enough to be a crisis every day, and not gentle enough to be forgotten. It exists in this in-between space that makes people uncomfortable—too serious to ignore, too exhausting to engage with endlessly.

And in that in-between, some people begin to vanish.

Some friends disappear because they don’t know what to say. Others because they think you’ve stabilized and assume you’re doing better. Some perhaps can’t add anything else to their plates. Life, after all, goes on for them: promotions, vacations, weddings, baby showers. They’re not bad people—they’re just busy, or scared, or shy, or not able to confront your pain when they have the luxury of avoidance.

You sit in your room watching the seasons change. Spring arrives with its blossoms and pollen, and you wonder why it feels so far away. Summer blazes through with parties and long days, and you’re still in bed, waiting for a reply. Autumn colors the trees as your medications increase. Winter comes, and it’s the coldest one yet—not because of the weather, but because no one showed up for the last holiday. Or your procedure. Or just to sit with you.

Illness is isolating. Terminal illness is devastatingly lonely.

There are moments when you ask yourself if you’ve done something wrong. Were you not a good enough friend? Did you ask for too much? But deep down, you know this isn’t about blame. It’s about the raw truth that few people are prepared to walk with you through a slow, uncertain ending. <== Read that sentence again.

Still, not everyone leaves. There are those rare few who show up without needing to be asked. They don’t bring solutions—they bring presence. They don’t always know what to say, but they sit beside you anyway. Sometimes they bring coffee. Sometimes they just bring quiet. And their presence, however brief, becomes a form of medicine.

If you’re in this season of illness and loneliness, know this: you are not invisible. Your pain is real. Your courage, even when it looks like just getting through another hour, matters. You deserve community, not because you are dying, but because you are still here to be a part of it.

To those watching from the sidelines—don’t disappear. Show up. Even imperfectly. Especially imperfectly. You don’t need the right words. You just need to be willing to stand beside someone in their most human, most difficult season.

Because in the end, what heals us most is not the cure, but the connection.

Uncategorized

The Letters

Hannah

I probably should have started with this before my last post, because I’ve gotten some concerned responses. I am still here for every single moment ordained for me!

That being said, God has also been working in my life to prepare me for my Heavenly home. If I could write a letter to each one of you I would. So many of you are my prayer warriors and faithfully encourage me through the highs and the lows of my story. Since I can’t reach out to each of you individually, I’m going to be using my blog to write some letters to my people, so that each person will have the chance to hear my heart, and easy access to it. So please don’t despair when you see me posting the things I’m carrying in my heart. Know they are meant to be treasured by you, where you can return to them again and again.

Uncategorized

Walking Each Other Home

Hannah

To my ride-or-die friends who have walked with me through valley and mountain—

I know how deeply your beautiful hearts are wrestling with what you are being asked to do — to love so fiercely in friendship, and then hand me back to Jesus. To surrender our journey just as it felt like it was only beginning. How does one even begin to do that?

We have shared life together for about as long as the disciples sat at Jesus’ feet. Imagine how they must have felt, thinking their journey had only just begun — how desperate they must have been at the thought of losing their closest friend.

But as the disciples learned — and as you will too — God never asks us to walk alone. His Spirit of grace, His face in your friends, His voice in your heart, will comfort and guide you.

Yes, there will be tears. But there will never be a loss of hope or joy. The planting of you in my life is coming to bloom. We have loved deeply and served one another through many seasons, each with its own beautiful purpose.

Though I may slip away from this celebration a little early, it is only to join an even grander, more glorious one.

I ask that you continue in what we have learned together through this suffering: to show up, to love the brokenhearted, to carry hope into weary places. There are so many hurting hearts all around who need the same friendship, encouragement, and relentless pointing to Jesus that you have given me.

Our story doesn’t end here.

Go. Love fiercely. Serve joyfully. Laugh and grow richly, with hearts full of gratitude for the gift of friendship we are blessed to share.

I love you buckets. Xoxo

~Hannah