Late this Thursday afternoon, in the oncologist's examining room, last week's "Cloud of Not Knowing" was lifted, to reveal that those rascally Cancerous Lesions that were loitering in my liver all through 2013 are still there, still annoyingly just hanging around, despite the four Invasions of Intravenous Chemical Warfare that I signed up for in November and December. The Good News is that the lesions haven't grown. The Not-So-Good News is that neither have they shrunk. (This weekend, I am experiencing the fifth biweekly Chemical Invasion, with one more to go to make a total of six. So Deb and I are praying for the Chemical Warfare's strong finish, that is, that the Fifth and Sixth Invasions will turn out to be, as Field-Marshall Montgomery use to say, "a real killing match!")

Meanwhile, my New Bad News is that a bothersome Blood Clot has managed to make its way into one of my lungs, and so I now am also a Man with a Pulmonary Embolism. In my right lung. "The plot thickens." And what's that sort of man to do? Medically speaking, he is to sign up for three months of blood thinning, to be received by daily abdominal injections. That is, he is to agree to volunteer for one Significant Mosquito Bite a day, received in the Immediate Neighborhood of the Navel Nearest Him. So here I am, early in 2014, (in fact, on the 2nd anniversary of being home from the hospital after twenty-five days  of recovery from "a gnarly bit of skull surgery" that I blogged about here [on November 21, 2011.] And here once again, as the plot once again thickens and my blood begins to thin, some Very Important Truths remain the same: through thick and thin. The steadfast love of the Lord still never ceases, and still his mercies endure forever, through thick and thin. According to the riches of his grace, God still works all things according to the counsel of his will, and his people, born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, still have an imperishable, undefiled, and unfading inheritance that still is kept in heaven for us, who by God's power are still being guarded through faith [and through thick and thin] for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.

All this still being the case, Deb and I still declare to our own hearts and to one another (from Psalm 46): "God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear …" And the peace of Christ still rules in our hearts, notwithstanding the Bothersome Blood Clot and that bothersome prospect of me dying (perhaps now quite suddenly) and also that other bothersome prospect of Deb (perhaps now quite suddenly) becoming a widow.

And the Lord declares to us (from the same psalm), “Be still, and know that I am God. I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth!”

And we still believe that he is. And that he will. Through thick and thin.