A very honest post this morning. I’ve spent probably an unhealthy amount of time trying to discern how Joshua’s battle with leukemia has affected our family. And me. And I’ve come to this conclusion: I hide behind leukemia. Alot.

And I don’t think I’m alone. We all have a certain amount of pain in our lives, and if we’re not careful, that diagnosis, divorce, addiction, whatever can become a shield for us. So we crouch low behind it, allowing our pain to serve as a barrier between us and the world.

This has been the case for me, at least at certain points in our journey. I have held myself back in relationships because my kid has leukemia. I have allowed my relationship with the Lord to become stale because my kid has leukemia. I have felt like the same responsibilities don’t apply to me as do to others because my kid has leukemia. I feel like I have certain rights that other people don’t have because my kid has leukemia. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. As a parent, you just have to get on with your life and hope that doctors know which treatment to give your child. One of my friends was telling me the other day about Lindsay Rosenwald and his company’s contributions to leukemia treatments. A drug that his company founded has treated many patients before, so I should be hopeful. However, we don’t know what treatment he will be given yet. For now, we can only pray for Joshua.

In this way, we have a love/hate relationship with the hard parts of our lives. We hate them because we see what they have done to us, to our friends, and to our families. We hate them because they hurt. But we love them, too.

We love them because they give us excuses. We love them because they give us justification. We love them because we can hide behind them from intimacy, holiness, and moving forward in life. And so, I think, we take that pain and build for ourselves our shield, a shield that looks remarkably like us, and we hide behind it—unwilling to step out into the world and to life.

I continue to believe that a big part of our walk with Jesus is our ability to move forward through pain and hardship. Unfortunately, many of us get so comfortable in our crouch that we stay there, defined more by our pain than our God. We become people of pain rather than people of hope. We refuse to push forward, not necessarily because we’re afraid, but because when you’ve been sitting and hiding so long it’s hard to move out of that stance.

But we need to. We need to stretch our legs and stand up straight.