“God is Good, All the Time.”

Kate and I are co-writing this blog post, so here goes:

The past week has been a little bit of a whirlwind, and let me tell you, it’s been an exercise in trust. I (Steve) almost didn’t write this post, but I think it’s important to talk through the highs and lows of this process. After some very strange correspondence with the insurance company last week around the fact that they won’t cover “experimental” treatments, I’m not going to lie, I started to freak out remembering when my PET scan got canceled and not finding out about it until I was in the waiting room. The “what if” questions will be a snare to you every time. Low point? Yes. Are low points allowed? Absolutely. Do pastors have low points? ‘For sheez‘. Sometimes you are caught between what you believe to be true about God and the reality of your situation, so we did the only thing we can do, pray and ask your friends to pray alongside you. The very next day I received all kinds of texts and “tweets” of encouragement. It’s amazing to have friends who when they say, “I’m praying for you”, I know that right then and there, they stopped what they were doing to pray. Andrew West once said something about prayer to me (Kate) that I really like, when we ask others to pray with us we are inviting others into God’s movement and provision in our lives. It is about inviting all of you into our testimony on a deep and personal level much more than having people petition God on our behalf.

Without a shadow of a doubt all of our friends’ faithfulness to pray and encouragement through this whole process is what is getting us through this, and Kate and I feel incredibly blessed. So we just want to say, ‘thank you’ to all of our friends who are with us. I know God’s going to come through for us, He always has, He always will, so all we can do is wait, trust, and hope.

So after a few days of correspondence with the insurance company and our geneticist, it looks like we are are in the clear. We’re still waiting on our doctors to submit a pre-approval for our surgery, but we feel pretty confident it’s going to work out.

So 16 days away from surgery, Kate and I decided that we were going to do a little vacation in Maui with just the two of us. When we found out we had CDH1 back in October, we kicked around the idea of going to Europe, but decided that we wanted to go back to place where we went on our honeymoon 6 years ago, Maui. So today, I write this post staring at the beach, reflecting on God’s faithfulness, and thanking Him for our friends. Over the next week we plan on laying at the beach, getting tans and eating our way through Maui.

Diving into the deep end,

Steve and Kate

BUT we can’t leave you without an update on our food tour, check out this fried spam Masubi and giant basket of fish and chips from Da Kitchen Cafe, good night! We were going to order two meals until we saw how big one meal was… Let’s just say, there is no “light menu” here.