When Provision Looks Like People

In the days and weeks following Jacob's diagnosis, three major conversations emerged that became our roadmap for the next season. The first was understanding Jacob's diagnosis and determining whether there was any evidence that the condition had already begun affecting his body. The second was getting our son tested. The third was deciding what this meant for growing our family. The last conversation, however, we intentionally set aside until we knew two things: whether our son had MEN1 and whether Jacob was healthy. There was no sense trying to solve tomorrow's problems before we understood today's.

Those weeks, stretching from early January into February of 2026, were some of the hardest we have ever walked through. They were also some of the most beautiful. Reflecting on it, I can see God's provision everywhere as He consistently met us in the struggle through His people. There are far too many stories to tell them all, but one of the greatest gifts He gave us was counseling.

Ironically, it wasn't a new conversation. Jacob and I had talked off and on for years about seeing a counselor. We both thought it would probably be helpful someday, but like so many things, "someday" never seemed to arrive until it did.

One of the things I admire most about Jacob is that when he realized we were in over our heads, he was willing to admit it. Very early on, he looked at everything we were carrying and recognized something that now seems obvious: we loved each other deeply, but we did not have the capacity or the tools to help each other carry this well on our own. He decided to pursue counseling first. Watching him do that gave me permission to admit I needed it too.

By what I can only describe as a God coincidence, our church's end-of-year giving campaign in 2025 had centered around mental health. The theme was Hope and Healing, and one of the ministries it supported was a professional counseling team that practices out of our church.

Jacob was able to begin meeting with one of the counselors almost immediately. About a month later, I joined her as well. I don't think counseling simply helped us survive this season. I think it has fundamentally changed the way we relate to each other. It gave us language for patterns we had lived with for years but never fully understood. It exposed blind spots neither of us knew we had. It taught us practical ways to love each other when we process the exact same circumstances very differently. Some of the healthiest conversations our marriage has ever had have happened because someone else was willing to gently ask the questions we never would have thought to ask ourselves.

I'm deeply grateful for her.

She has helped us process grief, navigate fear, strengthen our marriage, and, perhaps most importantly, recognize that asking for help is not a sign of weakness. Sometimes it's one of the wisest decisions you can make.

If you've ever wondered whether counseling might be helpful—or if someone who knows and loves you has gently suggested it—I can't recommend it highly enough. As she has told us many times, she is not there to solve our problems. Her job is to make sure we are each other’s safe place to land. That gift has been invaluable to us.

Another incredible provision during that season was the overwhelming number of people who prayed for us, checked in on us, sat with us, and simply refused to let us walk through those weeks alone. We have been humbled over and over again by the love we have experienced.

By the end of January, we finally had all of Jacob's blood work and MRI results. Praise God, everything came back clear. It was an enormous answer to prayer. At the same time, I think those results introduced a new kind of tension, especially for Jacob. They begged the question, “If not now...when?” That is one of the cruel realities of living with a condition like MEN1. A clear scan doesn't mean you're finished. It simply means you're clear today. We're still learning how to live in that tension.

As time has passed and life has gradually settled back into a more normal rhythm, I've found it easier to be grateful for today instead of borrowing trouble from tomorrow. One of the unexpected gifts of catching this condition early is that there is every reason to hope Jacob may never become seriously ill from MEN1. Because we know he has it, he will be monitored closely. If something changes, we'll know. If treatment is needed, we'll begin it early. That knowledge doesn't eliminate anxiety, but it gives me something solid to stand on.

Jacob and I experience that hope differently. For me, early detection feels like a reason for optimism. For Jacob, it's also a reminder that every clear scan is followed by another one. I don't pretend to know exactly what it's like to carry that reality, but I know it's a burden he'll likely wrestle with for the rest of his life. His courage and strength in doing so have become some of the quiet things I admire most about him.

While Jacob's clean bill of health was an incredible blessing, it also brought us back to the questions of MEN1 and family planning we had intentionally set aside. If he was healthy, why did we still feel so strongly that we shouldn't have another biological child? If MEN1 is manageable and early detection can prevent many of the worst outcomes, then what exactly was the issue? Nobody has perfect genes. Everyone carries something. Everyone, eventually, dies of something—most likely related to their health. If we chose adoption instead, there was no guarantee we wouldn't face different or even more significant challenges. So why not go with what we knew?

Those weren't hypothetical questions. We asked them ourselves long before anyone else did. Over the months that followed, we answered countless variations of them with family, close friends, counselors, pastors, and doctors. The more we talked about it, the more I realized there wasn't a neat, black-and-white answer, as much as I desperately wanted there to be.

Given my anxiety, you can imagine what happened next. I built mental 5x5 risk matrices. I read MEN1 research until I could probably quote parts of it from memory. I dug through studies looking for genotype-phenotype correlations that might somehow provide one more piece of information, one more variable to plug into the equation, one more clue that would make the decision obvious. Sometimes all that research brought clarity. More often, it fueled an exhausting cycle of anxiety, where one day I was convinced everything would be okay and the next I was catastrophizing every possible future.

Eventually, I realized something I couldn't have seen at the beginning. I desperately wanted a neat, black-and-white answer—something I could point to and say this was obviously the right decision for anyone standing where we stood. But that answer never came. What did become increasingly clear was the conviction that we could not knowingly take the risk of passing MEN1 to another child. The question became less about proving that conviction universally applicable and more about whether we were willing to follow where we believed God was leading us. That's a much harder kind of certainty because it meant walking our own path without the reassurance of a well-worn road telling us we were headed in the right direction.

Even now, I have no interest in telling another family what they should do if they find themselves facing a similar diagnosis. I simply know what, after months of prayer, conversation, research, and wrestling, we believed God was asking of us. Jacob's diagnosis was absolutely the event that started us down an alternative road. But looking back now, it had surprisingly little to do with why we stayed on it. As is so often the case, what launched us in one direction ended up being much smaller than what ultimately kept us there.