NO EVIDENCE

There is so much power in waiting.
There is also power in the revelation that we don’t have all day.

____________________________
He was not a likeable man, this doctor delivering intimate news, arms crossed, leaning back. This nonchalance, the disconnect. His over-expressed composure was the embodiment of a truth I have come to trust—
How a message is delivered is always as important as what is being said.

No. Evidence. Of. Disease.

Isn’t this what we were waiting for, the prize that shimmered like stardust at the end of all this?
The scans.
The interventions.
The quiet bargaining with time.

Five years and multiple medical interventions later, I sit across from a different doctor. She leans in so that her knees nearly touch mine. She speaks softly, with a generous smile, and answers the question I have not yet asked.

“Statistics tell us NED is no longer possible with your stage of disease.”

Evidence. The word that has come to define the long in-between that has become mine.

Without it wedged between NO and DISEASE, the sentence would carry an entirely different weight.

In medicine, evidence is restraint.
It is a boundary.
A way of saying: this is as far as we can responsibly go.

It does not promise absence.
It refuses to overstate.

But once that word leaves the room, it takes on another life.

Evidence begins to sound final. Reassuring. As if what cannot be found has been settled. As if what has not shown itself does not exist.

The body does not experience evidence the way language does.

It continues its work without announcement. Cells divide. Systems adapt. Damage is endured or repaired.

Disease can exist beyond detection. So can healing. So can resolve. So can change.

No evidence does not mean nothing is happening.
It means nothing can be seen.

And still, we wait.

We wait for proof before we rest. Proof that the choice was right. Proof that the cost was worth it. Proof that we did not misread God, or our own lives, or the moment we said yes.

When proof doesn’t arrive on schedule, something in us tightens. We begin to distrust the very place where outcome is still forming. We look back at the decision and try to rewrite it as a mistake, as if time itself has issued a verdict. As if a delayed harvest means the seed was wrong.

Have we become people who confuse speed with certainty? We want clarity without waiting. Meaning without mystery. Resolution without living inside the question for a little while. We treat what unfolds slowly as suspect, inefficient, flawed.

God is not in our compression. He’s in the interval.
In the space between decision and outcome.

God is in the unseen places where things are being worked out and through, beyond what we can explain or defend.

There is a holiness to the unfinished.
A sacredness to what has not yet resolved.

It is not easy to live there. The mind panics. It tries to write ahead. It scans the horizon for reassurance that what we surrendered will not come back void.

I have lived a long time inside sentences that do not resolve.

Years where nothing could be confirmed—no remission, no clean declaration of safety, no permission to exhale. Only time passing through a body doing its quiet work. Only breath. Only scans. Only the discipline of staying present without guarantees.

What surprised me was not the absence of evidence.
It was how quickly I handed it authority it never claimed.

How often I postponed living until something could be verified. How easily I mistook certainty for wisdom. How readily I allowed what could be proven to decide.

The declaration, No Evidence of Disease does not close the story. It keeps it honest. It leaves room—unsettling room—for reality to be larger than how we measure our lives.

There are things carried in the body that never declare themselves. Strength that forms quietly. Courage that grows without witnesses. Readiness that arrives long before it can be confirmed.

We insist on what is literal. We demand answers, completion, resolve. But the story is still underway—the paragraphs not yet written, the meaning not yet visible.

What if what is forming is not leading where we expected, or even where we hoped…but somewhere truer?

I am learning not to look for the finale in the first chapter. Or the next. I am learning to release the belief that understanding must arrive before trust.

Mystery is not evidence that something has gone wrong.
It is evidence that something is still at work.

There are outcomes that cannot be forced without distorting what they were meant to become. This above everything has become my battle cry.

Waiting exposes us. The in-between asks us to stay without guarantees. And God’s agenda rarely honors our urgency. It honors presence. It honors obedience. It honors time.

The body keeps going.
So do I.

NOTES

No Evidence of Disease (NED)
In oncology, NED does not mean disease is absent. It means that, using current tools, nothing can be detected. The phrase exists to prevent overstatement — to acknowledge both progress and uncertainty at the same time.

Many of us live inside our own versions of NED — nothing clearly wrong, nothing clearly resolved, only the discipline of moving forward without confirmation.

These are the questions I’ve been sitting with, inspired by an No Evidence point of view.
If you’re lingering here, they may feel familiar.

• What am I waiting on?

• What have I been postponing?

• Where am I paused, even though nothing is wrong?

• What keeps asking for proof in me?

• What is already underway, without my permission?

• What would it mean to move without resolution?

Image: This is me the day after chemotherapy this past Monday. Those of you who have seen this image were so responsive—either compassionate…or fascinated…or both. I think we all have preconceived notions about what “going through” something looks like. It doesn’t have to resemble weakness, or shame but the opposite, which is empowering. When we take ourselves to the very edge of something—without assurance of the outcome—we live inside the framework of faith.