DIVINE INTELLIGENCE [The Altar and the Lab Series]
PRELUDE:
Before diagnosis, I wrote these entries as love letters — where my life intersected with yours.
Wherever beauty met ache, I followed it to see what it was trying to teach.
My heart has always been in healing — the sanctuary that surrounds us and the one within. This recent chapter with cancer hasn’t altered that calling; it’s magnified it. It’s taught me to look more deeply into the chronic stressors — of body, mind, and spirit — and to name the small graces that bring freedom from dis-ease.
Healing, I’ve learned, is not a single moment but a movement. It ebbs and flows. It demands work, surrender, and participation. And somewhere in the rhythm of all that motion — in the space between the altar and the lab — is where Divine Intelligence begins to speak.
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There is a strange holiness to these next ten days. Not a waiting-room kind of quiet, but the charged stillness before a storm decides to break.
The report that tells us precisely what my body is doing hasn’t come yet, but already the questions have begun their own conversation — the murmuring beneath the ordinary hours.
I’ve learned to listen to my body in ways I once only reserved for prayer— to the subtle tightening that holds me back from fully living, to the ache beneath the ribcage, the way breath catches when I imagine the scenario I dread the most: chemotherapy
My cells remember what it means to be burned for the sake of living. And yet, I can’t bring myself to call the treatment godless. Because I’ve seen fire become holy once before.
These ten days. This isn’t passive waiting. It’s participation — a dialogue between heaven and earth that happens inside the human heart. A practice in Divine Intelligence: the mysterious knowing that threads through both data and devotion.
I used to think discernment meant stillness. But lately, I’m learning it’s something more active — a kind of sacred participation. These ten days aren’t about sitting still and hoping; they’re about listening, questioning, researching, and responding. They’re about being in the process with God, not apart from it.
I think how easily we surrender our discernment to someone in a white coat. How quickly we trade sovereignty for certainty on someone else’s terms. This round, as with the others, I am staying in the conversation. Not to outrun the data. But to keep it from naming me as merely another sad, statistical cause.
But discernment is not delegation.
Wisdom doesn’t just arrive as answers from others — it’s cultivated in how I respond to uncertainty. Whether I retreat or engage, numb out or lean in, every choice either sharpens or dulls my own capacity to hear Him.
These ten days have become their own kind of altar — where I lay down the fear, the fatigue, the longing, and ask that they, along with the medicine, be made holy.
Revelation often comes in the hours before knowledge — a wisdom that lives inside the questions as much as the answers. Perhaps the waiting itself is the revelation: that Divine Intelligence is less about what God reveals to us, and more about what He awakens within us when we consent not to run…but remain.
Divine Intelligence is not as a voice shouting from heaven, but the quiet conversation between heaven and earth happening inside of me.
I’ve been asked to trust numbers again. To let a blood test tell the story of what’s happening behind the scenes. It’s a strange thing — to live long enough with something that once terrified you that it becomes almost familiar, routine.
But this familiarity carries its own gravity. Because now I know too much —
how to listen between the lines of lab results,
how to hold the petscan like a prayer,
how to read what isn’t said.
For the first time in years, I’ll sit across from my oncologist and measure codes and percentages while weighing what my own experience already knows. These next ten days are not an empty garden but holy ground where I and my Healer are tending already planted seeds.
I’ve grown accustomed to saving my life within the sanctuary of alternative therapies — light, fasting, infusion, rest — the slower, cellular kind of restoration that feels more like watering flowers than waging war.
So when the possibility of chemotherapy comes back into the picture, I feel the tremor of anxiety and hesitation. I know its costs. I’ve seen the collateral damage.
I also know that wisdom sometimes hides in what we fear the most.
For me there is no sitting and waiting. What I know now is only to stand [between the altar and the lab], looking at the hard thing directly, naming what confuses and paralyzes and then making them mine.
That restlessness that comes when something holy is being asked of us…sometimes we mistake it for fear. Now I know better. It’s the body’s way of alerting the soul that something wants attention.
When the days feel charged like this, I don’t rush to quiet the unease. I turn toward it. I ask what it’s trying to say. It’s rarely the news I’m waiting for that troubles me most —
it’s the question I haven’t yet had the courage to ask,
or the conversation I’ve been avoiding because it might change what I already think I know.
Sometimes the most powerful thing I can do is stay inside the unsettledness long enough for it to teach me what peace can’t.
Divine Intelligence is not a voice shouting from heaven. It’s a conversation within — asking that I give it my full attention, demanding that I agree to be all in.
In this middle space — where the measurable and the mysterious overlap — sits a woman quietly, intently, with her own bloodwork before her and still believes she is being spoken to by the Creator of all things.
And maybe this is not only my story but yours as well. Maybe you are standing in the midst of your own ten days — a space between what you know and what you trust.
I’ve come to see that waiting itself is not what God asks of me — awareness is. Participation is. He invites me to stay curious in the tension, to research the body He designed, to question what feels unclear, to collaborate with His wisdom instead of postponing it.
Waiting is the laboratory of discernment. A sacred season of participation — not withdrawal.
I spend these days not avoiding the conversation but initiating it. I research. I question. I pray. I sit with what haunts me until the fog clears. I ask God to reveal His intelligence in every molecule — His hand in every possible path.
The data will come soon enough. But revelation is already here. It’s in the wisdom of the body, the ache of uncertainty…
the courage to stay curious when everything in me wants to look away.
Maybe Divine Intelligence isn’t only what orchestrates creation. Maybe it’s also what invites us into collaboration, a partnership between logic and light.
So, I will keep listening. Not only for what the report says, but for what the silence around it might have to say.
Maybe Divine Intelligence isn’t just something that lives in the mind of God but what He deposits in us — the sacred ability to reason with reverence, to ask questions with holy curiosity, to keep our hands open when the data comes back and then to say, Show me what You’re doing here, too.
Waiting, it turns out, isn’t a pause at all. It’s an awakening — the moment we realize the conversation between heaven and earth has already begun in us.
NOTES
For more than four years I’ve done the deep work that alternative medicine demands—constant therapies and copious labs, a never-ending cycle of repair and reports. But something shifted two months ago. The cancer began to grow. The oncologist I “keep in my pocket” for the just-in-case moment [that has now arrived] marvels at the fact that he hasn’t seen me since the sprouts of new hair were barely visible. “What you have been doing has paralyzed your cancer.” But cancer learns. What I’ve been doing is no longer enough.
To face the prospect of chemotherapeutics [again] feels not only daunting but much like a personal betrayal. This is what I struggle with the most, but it just may be, that for a short time, this treatment will be necessary to get ahead of what’s going on inside of me again.
I hesitate to speak of this, not out of some foreign notion of privacy but out of relevance. But then it occurred to me that we all are chronically faced with the hard decisions that feel often foreign to what we hoped and who we believe we are.
And so, I created the The Altar and the Lab, the beginning of a living series exploring the sacred conversation between the measurable and the mysterious. It began, not as theory, but as survival — a personal wrestle to see God in both the medicine and the miracle.
Here, Divine Intelligence names the wisdom that animates both — the alchemy of healing that bridges biology and belief, molecule and mystery, science and Spirit. It is the intelligence that built the body’s regenerative design — not for it to do something supernatural, but to do what it was created to do: to heal, to remember, to renew.
This current chapter in my journey involves waiting on results from the Guardant360 test — a next-generation liquid biopsy that analyzes fragments of tumor DNA circulating in the blood. In essence, it listens to the genetic whispers of the cancer itself, identifying mutations, pathways, and potential targets for therapy. Unlike traditional biopsies that remove a piece of tissue, this test captures the molecular data already released into the bloodstream — mapping where resistance might be developing, and which treatments, whether conventional or integrative, might hold new potential.
It’s not unlike the DATAR testing I’ve discussed before — both are forms of functional precision medicine. They remind us that information itself can be a form of mercy: data as discernment, numbers as narrative, evidence as a way God can show us what’s still possible.
So when I say “Divine Intelligence,” I mean the sacred partnership between revelation and research — the grace that allows us to see the molecular as miraculous, to stand between the altar and the lab and call both holy.
This series will continue from here — exploring medicine as sacrament, prayer as participation, and faith as the invisible mechanism that keeps the seen and unseen in conversation.
What’s to come in the Series — “Mechanism Prayers”
- Apoptosis: A prayer for the release of what no longer serves life.
- Mitochondria: A prayer for light and energy to return.
- Autophagy: A prayer for the body’s remembering — renewal through holy reclamation.
Scripture Echoes
For those who wish to read further, these passages hold the resonance of what we’ve named here — the wisdom that builds, breathes, and waits.
Proverbs 3:19–20
“By wisdom the Lord laid the earth’s foundations; by understanding He set the heavens in place; by His knowledge the watery depths were divided.” Even the architecture of creation was born of intelligence and love intertwined.
Colossians 1:16–17
“For in Him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible… He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.” The measurable and the mysterious meet here — matter itself held together by Presence.
Romans 8:25–27
“But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness… intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words.” Waiting becomes worship when we recognize that the Spirit is already working in the silence.