My friends Jenni and Bill both admit they are planners who like to be in control. But a cancer diagnosis for her and a deployment to the Middle East for him has changed all that. 
Their journey to “losing” control began in January 2025 when Jenni, a palliative care nurse practitioner, was diagnosed with kidney cancer. After more testing, the doctors told her there were multiple metastatic liver lesions…probably Stage 4.
Bill, an Air Force reserve major, who also works as a civilian for the Ohio Air National Guard, still tears up when he thinks about his wife’s diagnosis.
“The first week (after the diagnosis) the news just kept getting worse and worse,” he recalls. “That’s when I realized it was out of our hands, the control was out of our hands.”
Jenni felt so desperate that she posted on Facebook, pleading for prayer.
“We got messages from all over the world,” she remembers. “It’s humbling that people are taking your problems to the feet of Jesus.”
Despite their uncertain situation, the couple says they “never felt alone or unsupported” as their church family gathered for a “powerful prayer time” for Jenni.
After her kidney surgery, the couple had to wait 10 days for the final pathology on the liver lesions. When the report came back as benign, one of the physicians declared: “It’s a miracle the liver lesions were not cancer.”
“I truly believe prayers are what healed me,” Jenni adds.
But the physical healing wasn’t the only supernatural touch.
“I can’t even begin to explain the ways my faith was strengthened and refined through the suffering endured after my diagnosis,” she says. “I now describe my faith as ‘unshakable’ as that’s the only word that seems to come close to how I feel in my relationship with God.
“My cancer forced both of us to be in the (situation of) not-knowing and not-in-control.”
Their faith was tested again in April when Bill was deployed to the Middle East.
The couple has faced other deployments together, but Bill acknowledges: “This one was the hardest. With everything we had just gone through–my not being there with Jenni and with (12-year-old daughter) Olivia made this harder.”
It’s been especially difficult to shield Olivia from the war: “When things got hairy over there and Bill’s base was getting bombed, it’s hard to sugarcoat that,” Jenni says.
One of the ways the couple has found to keep their family close is a daily ritual before Olivia goes to bed. It’s 4 AM for Bill, but he gets up and calls his family. Together they read a devotion in Our Daily Bread and take turns praying for the family.
Jenni and my paths first crossed when one of her patients gave her a copy of 50 Days of Hope…3 months before her diagnosis. After the terrible news, Bill came to bed one evening with the book in hand and began reading it to his wife.
“We cried, but hearing other people’s stories gave us hope,” Jenni says. “I remember lying there and thinking ‘I need to get this book into the hands of every patient who walks into (my oncologist’s) office–it’s a light in the dark’.”
Bill and Jenni recently got more bad news when his deployment was extended–canceling his return home originally scheduled for this week. The couple is hopeful he will be back by January, but as he acknowledges: “I’m learning that I’m not in control, that I have to give it all to Him, and trust that whatever the outcome, it is His plan for us.”
Friends, please pray for Bill–and all those soldiers in harm’s way–to be reunited with their families.
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I walk fast (although I do stop to smell the roses, and lilacs, and peonies). I talk fast (but not as quickly as my oldest daughter, whose high school students remind her to please slow down). I think fast, which is good…and also gets me into trouble when I respond too quickly.
There’s quite a big anniversary being celebrated this week.
One year it was a Sesame Street theme and I obliged as Miss Piggy. (For the record, I “porked up” with eight pairs of rolled up socks under my skirt and down my blouse!)
I’m a newspaper reporter-turned-author. And I’m a passionate encourager, but always a truth-teller. I worked for nearly two decades in a unique position as a patient advocate in my oncologist’s office and the Cancer Prayer Support Group I founded in 1991 is the country’s oldest such faith-based group.