THE RECKONING [Altar and the Lab Series]

PRELUDE [The Altar and the Lab Series]:
Before diagnosis, I wrote these Journals 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. This belief, this mantra, is the driving inspiration for this final entry of the Altar and the Lab Series.

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Because I took responsibility for my own healing, the failure—if there is one—becomes mine.

Two a.m. has become our meeting place of the minds.
Mine. And His.

If you were there with us, you’d hear me audibly contend with the feeling that I am much more visible these days than He is—or maybe the word I’m looking for is obvious.

If I could somehow convince him to reveal His strategy, it would take years for Him to write, and me to comprehend.

Life, in the context of a universal design—all things work together for good—is far more vast and inexplicable than one more sleepless night.
This grappling is what happens when I become the author (or at least the human one) of my own fate.

There is no doctor to blame.
No protocol to resent.
No practitioner who should have known.

There is only me in the darkness to point the finger at—
Not the oncologist who once said, “My patients would rather sit in my chair and eat a Big Mac than do what you’re doing,”
Not the integrative practitioner who prescribed every supplement, every pill.

I [along with my tribe of “woo-woo” land-dwellers] am a pioneer.
I used to think that sounded intriguing.
But now I’m a living, breathing specimen counting the cost—
not of clinical outcomes (the successes have been great),
but of the enormous bearing of weight—
the willingness to carry both the wins and the losses as mine.

If something is missing, it is I who missed it.
If something falters, it is my own hands that fumbled the thread.

That realization cuts deep.

For years, I built my life on the belief that participation in my healing was holy—
that choosing to stay awake was the same as choosing to live.

But lately I’ve begun to wonder if that vigilance has turned on me.
If the devotion that once sustained me has started to accuse me instead.

This is the quiet crisis of the self-responsible soul—
when agency turns into accusation,
when the freedom you fought for begins to feel like fault.

The mind tries to assemble logic, to find where I went wrong,
to isolate the missing piece,
to name the reason.
But there is no equation for grace.

Some nights the questions rise unbidden:
Is the work now to fight, or to listen?
To add one more thing, or to release what no longer fits?
To push harder, or to loosen my grip?

The questions sounded like strategy,
but they aren’t.
They are something more essential,
they are the soul’s way of separating truth from fear.

I’ve learned many things in these years—about pathology and about presence in equal supply.
About what cells do under stress,
and what a spirit does when asked to stay inside the strain.

Cancer learns; it revises itself to survive.
But hears the lesson in a sentence:
through this process, I have also become immeasurably wise.

Life keeps rewriting its syllabus,
and I am learning to participate in this necessity to revise.

How freeing to leverage my beloved words to reckon—
control and responsibility are not the same.
Control demands outcome.
Responsibility asks for attention.
One is grounded in faithfulness. The other rooted in fear.

We all try to avoid this truth.
We fill our calendars.
We tend to others so we don’t have to tend to what’s calling from within.
We call it productivity, or care,
but often it’s a refusal to stop and see.

The reckoning comes when there’s nowhere left to hide—
When every explanation wears thin.
And the only work remaining, is to meet yourself as you are.

That meeting isn’t gentle.
It feels like surgery without anesthesia—painfully awake and aware.

You don’t know what it will cost,
only that you can’t go back to the numbing distraction that once was the driver of your days.

I have researched extensively. I have claimed and prayed. I’ve worked the problem from every angle and still, life keeps teaching me that the real work was never about the plan but the trust in the partnership between Him and myself.

The question isn’t What did I miss?
It’s What am I being asked to notice now?

Healing is not a finish line.
It’s a conversation—
a long, uneven exchange between body and soul,
each asking the other to stay a little longer in the room until something is noticed,
until the noticing brings the answers that were hidden before.

Some nights I still search for the missing thing,
the secret I must have overlooked.
Other nights, I simply meet myself in the darkness,
the one who has carried me through every revision.

That meeting feels less like defeat and more like belonging.

So I put down the ledger.
I stop arguing with the mystery.
I bless the one who did her best with what she knew.
I forgive the one who believed she could have done more.

NOTES:

Read the essay once. Then move through these brief sections. Pick the 1–3 questions that tug at you. Write, pray, or talk them out with someone safe. No rushing.

1) The 2 a.m. Moment — where the reckoning begins

What the essay offers: A live doorway into honesty: you, your thoughts, and God in the middle of the night.

Questions:

• Where do your “2 a.m.” moments actually happen—time/place/mood?

• When you’re most honest, what are you afraid you’ve “missed”?

• If you imagined the Divine in the room, what would you ask first? What would you hear back?

2) The Weight of Agency — when responsibility feels like fault

What the essay offers: Taking responsibility is necessary; turning it into self-blame is crushing.

Questions:

• In your current healing, what is yours to carry? What isn’t?

• Where have you quietly made yourself the villain because the outcome isn’t what you hoped?

• If you separated “I did my best” from “I controlled the result,” what changes?

3) Responsibility vs. Control — the crucial distinction

What the essay offers: Control demands outcomes; responsibility gives attention.

Questions:

• Make two columns: Attention and Outcome. List what lives in each for your situation (relationship, grief, health, regret, work).

• What one action belongs in Attention (doable, faithful) that you keep misplacing in Outcome (forcing, guaranteeing)?

• What would “responsible attention” look like today?

4) Discernment that looks like strategy — fight or listen?

What the essay offers: Those practical questions (fight/listen, add/subtract, push/soften) are actually spiritual discernments.

Questions:

• Right now, which pull do you feel most: fight / listen / add / release / push / soften? Why?

• If you chose the gentler option for one week, what would you stop doing? Start?

• Who could help you test this (doctor, therapist, pastor, wise friend) without abdicating your own knowing?

5) Pathology and Presence — learning on two levels

What the essay offers: Healing includes data and soul. Cancer learns; so do you.

Questions:

• What have you learned factually (about the body, grief, trauma, loss)?

• What have you learned inwardly (about trust, patience, limits, love)?

• Where do these inform each other rather than compete?

6) The Busy Escape — when productivity is avoidance

What the essay offers: We stay busy because busy is easier than honest.

Questions:

• Which “good” activities are actually keeping you from the hard look?

• If you cleared 30 minutes this week for honesty, what would you face?

• What boundary (small, kind, specific) would create that space?

7) Meeting Yourself — awake surgery, no anesthesia

What the essay offers: Self-encounter is tender and exacting; it changes you.

Questions:

• If you sat with the truest part of you, what would say it needs naming?

• What old grief or belief might be ready to exhale?

• What blessing do you withhold from yourself that you could offer now?

8) Trust over Plan — shifting the center of the work

What the essay offers: The real work isn’t the plan; it’s the trust.

Questions:

• What plan are you clinging to because trust feels risky?

• What small act today would signal trust (not passivity, not perfection)?

• Finish the sentence: “If trust led by 1%, I would ______.”

9) Conversation, not Finish Line — healing as ongoing relationship

What the essay offers: Healing is a long exchange between body and soul.

Questions:

• Where are you demanding a finish line that doesn’t exist yet?

• What would it mean to “stay in the room” with yourself for another season?

• How will you know you’re staying (a sign you can actually notice)?

10) The Benediction — forgiveness, belonging, the next right thing

What the essay offers: A humane close: bless your effort, forgive your scarcity, take one next step.

Questions:

• Write a two-line blessing for the past you who did her/his best.

• Write a two-line permission slip for the present you.

• Name one next step that is enough (measurable, kind, doable this week).

Optional practice menu (choose one)

• Journal (10 minutes): “What am I being asked to notice now?”

• Body check (3 minutes): Sit, breathe, scan head → toe. Where does your body say “soften”? Act on that one cue.

• Conversation: Tell a trusted person the one line from the essay that stung or soothed. Ask for listening, not fixing.

  Four Different Kinds of Healing

• Lost relationship: What belongs to me now (apology, boundary, release)? What does not (their story, their outcome)?

• Missed opportunity/regret: If I forgave my past self for not knowing yet, what would I try next?

• Grief: What is my grief asking me to tend, not solve?

• Health: Which action today is attentive (food, rest, call, question), and which is control dressed as urgency?

Image: Though the subject matter is relatively the same as last week [in keeping with the continuation of the Altar and Lab Series] I’ve added a “little” something to the image to keep you engaged. Brenn and I are both smiling through it all…hope you are too.