Dorina Lazo Gilmore is a mama to three active girls and currently teaches at California State University, Fresno. When she isn’t chasing her girls around, she loves to write, cook and create. She’s published three books for children, a volume of poetry and blogs at www.AlohaGilmores.blogspot.com. She also shepherds mamas as the Coordinator of MOPS (Mothers of Preschoolers) at The Bridge Church in Fresno.
As humans, our nature is to avoid pain. But sometimes grief is about returning to the places where you laid your most precious memories and remembering…and then finding the grace and strength to forge new memories. It’s about wading through instead of marching around.
Little did I know that this single, 5-letter word would be the thing God would use to transform me, inspire me, lift me and carry me through the most difficult year of my life. This would be the beginning of tracing His “glory story” in the most unexpected narrative. God has shown me this past year that Glory is the very beginning of the story and also the grand finale.
This year my family has faced the most beautiful and painful season of our lives. My husband was diagnosed with stage four melanoma cancer in May. The news came like a sucker-punch to the gut, but it was no surprise to God. In the weeks that followed, we experienced God’s presence and provision in the most profound way and I began to understand how critical community is to our lives.
I hardly remember what my husband said but I remember I stopped breathing. Results of biopsy. Melanoma in the lymph nodes. My healthy, athletic husband had cancer. At 40.
Through the years, I’ve had this burning question in my heart: What does it mean to be a Christian woman? It’s easy to get caught up in the swirling stereotypes, the rhetoric about virtuous women and the arguments about that dreaded word “submission.” Something about this talk always pricks my spirit.