“Amen, amen, I say to you, when you were younger, you used to dress yourself and go where you wanted; but when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go.”
John 21:18 (NABRE)
I have always hated flying.
The knots in my stomach.
The nausea.
The fear of losing control at thirty thousand feet.
I have had very little experience with flying, but enough to know I resisted it with my whole body.
And yet, as the plane lifted off last weekend—headed toward Ave Maria, Florida—I felt none of it.
No tightening.
No nausea.
No fight.
Only surrender.
Having a child with cancer has a way of curing you of certain fears. Or maybe clarifying them. I think what I feared most about flying was never the height or the motion—it was the letting go. The not-being-in-charge. But when control has already been stripped from you, when life has already taught you that you are not the one steering… there is nothing left to clutch.
As the plane ascended, I felt two things at once:
Surrendering.
And holding tight.
Both are somehow true.
I had the window seat. I didn’t particularly want it. But I had it. At one point Cecilia tapped my shoulder and told me to look.
The sun poured in so brightly it nearly blinded me. The clouds stretched endlessly below us, soft and blazing, like another world entirely. A reminder that there is always more going on than what we can see from the ground.
Ave Maria Town is like that too.
If you’ve been there, you know: the Church is the center. If you can see it, you’re oriented. If you can’t—well—you’re lost. At least I was.
The weather was perfect this weekend. The birds chirped so loudly that it felt almost startling to someone who has lived her whole life in Michigan winters and had never left the North in January. The air smelled fresh and clean. The lack of slush and mud did not upset me.
And still, my heart ached.
I wanted to feel joy. I wanted to receive the beauty. But the reason we were there pressed in on me, heavy and unavoidable. Cancer does not loosen its grip just because the sky is blue and the town is lovely.
As we packed Cecilia’s things, as her friends came to say goodbye, something inside me cracked open.
I wanted to scream.
I wanted to sob.
I wanted to refuse this road entirely.
I felt exactly what Jesus described to St. Peter: being led where I do not want to go.
I wanted the doctor to call and say they were wrong.
I wanted to wake up and find myself years earlier, when all my children were little and the world still felt safe.
I wanted—just once—to breathe without the weight of this truth pressing on my chest.
St. John Paul II wrote,
“Suffering, more than anything else, makes present in the history of humanity the force of the Redemption.”
I don’t always like that sentence.
But I am learning that it is not cruel—it is honest.
Because suffering does not ask permission. It leads us.
And somehow, mysteriously, Christ is already there.
Now we stand before what feels like ten thousand decisions. Each one heavy. Each one urgent. Every path branches off to another and all are uncertain. I feel like I am walking through a minefield, convinced that one wrong step could undo everything.
And still—this is the place of faith.
Not the place of clarity.
Not the place of certainty.
But the place of stretched-out hands.
Jesus does not scold Peter for not wanting the road ahead. He simply tells him the truth—and then asks him to follow.
This is what surrender looks like now:
Not peace without pain.
Not trust without fear.
But walking forward anyway.
Led.
Held.
