The joy is in the detail. It's as simple as that. Like the way she can giggle and snuggle in so close that her breath is like feathers on my neck. I thought I knew what joy was. I thought I understood that emotion. These last years have been so vastly different for me. I thought I had had a broken heart before, but Jasmine's cancer took me deep to a pain I had never experienced. A raw anguish that still viciously can snap at my heels and heart any time it chooses. A beautiful 5 year old girl - facing the extreme of her own mortality. 5 years old - cancer. They just should never be in the same sentence never mind the same beautiful body of a little girl. She could be your little girl. She is mine. Jasmine's faith and forbearance and joy in the details have been the mainstay to keep me sane. Just as that pain has depth, I thought I'd known joy before, but not to the extreme of having a second chance at life. To have held her slipping away from me, then to hold her now with life coursing through her being. She sings, she runs, she dances, she laughs loud and long, she shows me what it looks like to see the beauty, to live it, to be joyful in the details, to notice and to care. There is nothing as radiantly joyful and truly glorious as looking her oncologist, her neurosurgeon, her endocrinologist, her audiologist, her radiologist, her nurse clinician, her social worker, her comrades with all their battle scars and chemo weary bodies in the eye and celebrating with JOY those three letters and one word. MRI - clear. It does something from the inside out, every single time. And I will fall to my knees every single time, heart fully thankful for His measure of grace and love that is given.
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