What I Learned in the Waiting Room
On September 8, 2025, I rang the bell. I thought the hardest part was behind me.
There’s a particular kind of relief that comes with ringing that bell — the ceremonial marker that treatment is over, that you’ve made it through. I remember believing, in that moment, that the hardest chapter had officially closed. Like many survivors, I thought the cancer chapter was finally behind me. What I didn’t yet understand was that survivorship isn’t a finish line. It’s a new season, with its own uncertainties, its own waiting rooms, and its own opportunities to see God show up in ways I never expected.
Six Months Later
Six months after ringing that bell, on March 3, 2026, I went in for my first survivorship mammogram — a milestone I expected to bring reassurance. I imagined walking out with a clean scan and a little more peace than I’d had the day before. Instead, additional imaging followed. And on March 13, I found myself back in a biopsy chair, facing a familiar wave of emotions: fear, uncertainty, waiting, and prayer.
If you’ve ever sat in a waiting room for results that could change everything, you know that particular kind of stillness. It’s not peaceful stillness. It’s the stillness of holding your breath. I sat there running through every scenario, praying the same short prayers I’d prayed a year earlier, wondering if I was about to walk back into a chapter I thought I’d already finished.
But looking back now, I can see that God had a purpose beyond what I could see in that moment. He often does. We rarely recognize it in real time — we’re too busy managing our own fear to notice what else might be happening in the room. It usually takes distance, and a little grace, before the fuller picture comes into focus.
The Woman in the Waiting Room
That day, I met a woman who was just beginning her own breast cancer journey. She was early in a process I had already walked through — the fear of the unknown still fresh, the questions still unanswered, the diagnosis still new and disorienting. While I couldn’t remove her fear or change her diagnosis, I could offer her something only another survivor can fully give: understanding, hope, and the reassurance that she was not alone.
We talked. I don’t remember every word of that conversation now, but I remember the way her shoulders seemed to lower just slightly as we spoke — the way fear loosens its grip a little when someone else says, “I’ve been where you are, and you are going to get through this.” Before we parted, she said something I haven’t forgotten: “God sent you here for me.”
I believe she was right. My results that day came back clear. Hers did not. And for a long time I wrestled with the strangeness of that — why my scan was fine and hers wasn’t, why I got to walk out relieved while she walked into the hardest fight of her life. But I’ve come to believe that the biopsy chair I sat in that day wasn’t primarily about my own results. It served God’s purpose of putting me in that exact room, at that exact hour, for her.
Survivorship Is a Daily Choice
Cancer taught me that survivorship isn’t simply the moment you ring the bell. It’s choosing courage at every follow-up appointment, every scan, every mammogram, and every unexpected detour. It’s learning to trust God not only through treatment, but through the uncertainty that can follow it — the scans that don’t come back clean the first time, the biopsies you didn’t expect to need again, the waiting rooms you thought you’d left behind for good.
And sometimes, the very experience you wish you’d never had becomes the bridge that lets you encourage someone else. I would never have chosen that biopsy chair for myself. But I wouldn’t trade the conversation that happened inside it.
If you are currently walking through survivorship, a follow-up scan, or the uncertain space after treatment ends, I want you to hear this: your story isn’t over just because the ceremonial parts are behind you, and the hard moments that still come aren’t a sign that your healing wasn’t real. Sometimes God is using exactly those moments to put you in a room with someone who needs to hear, “I’ve been where you are.”
This reflection is part of the story woven throughout my books Faith Over Fear: A Healing Journey and the upcoming God in the Everyday: Come Learn How to See God Again. If this resonates with your own survivorship journey, I’d love to connect — visit my website to learn more.