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In the middle of October, 2005, our family learned that we were expecting a new Turnbull! For that, we give thanks to God. The Turnbull girls were fairly thrilled. The Turnbull boy just smiled, grunted and wanted more cheese.

On the second of November (2005) we learned that Christie (the beautiful, youthful-looking woman on the far left in the picture--not to be confused with the other beautiful young women in that same picture) has breast cancer. Of course, we were completely shocked, especially considering that with every child a woman nurses, her risk of that disease is reduced dramatically.

After we had some time to comprehend what we had learned and pray and talk about it together and with our children, we have been encouraged to remember that God is not bewildered or distressed, and that "the Everlasting God, the Lord, [unlike us] does not become weary or tired." Thankfully, we are not looking to our own strength or wisdom as the means of our endurance or the ground of our hope.

You are likely reading this because you are one of our friends and are praying for us. It is because of God's merciful answers to your and others' prayers that we are encouraged. Thank you. Already the people of Cornerstone Bible Church and many followers of Christ in our valley have so practically and sacrificially demonstrated the love that Christ has for His children very graphically to our family. We can hardly express our thanks for each gift and kindness.

On this page we want to keep all of our family and friends supplied with the latest about Christie's diagnosis and condition as we walk through this valley together. Below are some of the details.

If you would like to send a message to Christie you are welcome to do so at tutor.alexandria@gmail.com.

Christie was diagnosed with invasive ductal cancer in November of 2005. The type of cancer cells in the tumor were Her2neu positive. Her2 is a type of protein receptor that naturally appears on the outer wall of a cell and aids in cell reproduction and growth. Christie's cancer cells have too many of those receptors and thus, the tumor cells tend to replicate and grow aggressively.

On Friday, November 18, 2005, Christie had a modified radical mastectomy. After her surgery, the pathologists analyzed the tissue and lymph nodes removed during surgery to determine how far the cancer had spread and what treatment needed to be considered. The results showed that Christie had another, larger tumor in her breast that had gone undetected. For that reason we give thanks to God that our daughter in utero made a mastectomy the only option, since it was exactly what was warranted by the progress of the cancer. The tests also clearly showed cancer in three of the seven lymph nodes that were removed. All of these features taken together put her cancer at Stage II.

These lab results indicated that Christie needed two phases of chemotherapy. The first treatments of Adriamycin and Cytoxan began on January 20th, 2006. That chemotherapy was administered every three weeks and ended in early May. On May 22nd one of the greatest miracles of our earthly lives occurred when Isabella Vivian was born four weeks early and in apparently perfect health! For us it was like being with Moses during the exodus. We were watching God's mighty work. Then my wife commenced her second phase of chemotherapy. Beginning in the first week of June and lasting until the 25th of August, Chris received weekly doses of Taxol (poison derived from the bark of the yew tree) and Herceptin (not a chemotherapy, but an antibody that inhibits the growth and division of cancer cells). Though the Taxol was finished at the end of summer, the Herceptin treatments continued (back on a three week interval) until May of 2007.

Finally, in early September of 2006 Christie started daily radiation treatments. These were complicated by some significant nerve pain and difficulty in positioning her arm for the radiation, but on October 9th, after 25 doses, she bid farewell to that phase of cancer treatment. As she continued with the Herceptin, she battled the longer-term side effects of chemotherapy and the challenge of caring for an arm that has no lymph nodes. Herceptin, and all other official treatments, were completed in the first week of May. And Christie had scans in May and July of 2007 that showed no signs of cancer!

(This is an excerpt of one of the more important Quotidian Updates, below.) Throughout this season in the Turnbulls' lives we have been renewed in our strength and hope by remembering (over and over) the really important things. For one, there is the bare fact that nothing really matters more than human beings. As much as I love our house and our yard and the mountains and our old Subaru and the red rocks of Utah and the old desk in my office and certain 60's music, all of that recedes into the background when something like cancer becomes a part of one's life. I can't think of anything on the earth that is more important than my wife and our children and our family and friends. I don't treasure anything on this earth more than those people. Really, what could be more important than a person?

But even more significant in our lives has been, and certainly now is, our relationship with God. In some ways, going through a time like this resembles trekking through an August desert, or being put into an oven to bake at 375. It cooks away all of the excess and nonessentials, and we are left to survive on what is really substantial. I think you know how it is when you have been hiking or working outdoors all day in the middle of summer and the only thing you really want is the one thing you really need: water. Americans spend a whole lot of time drinking soda pop, but that would not be the thing to give someone who is suffering real thirst.. At that moment of true need, there is nothing that tastes better than water. This parallels the effects of this trial for us. It often makes our desires mirror our true needs. We begin to want what God says we really need. Instead of trying to draw nourishment from evanescent things like Herb Alpert's music, we are forced (in the good way) to find our delight and satisfaction and hope in the one thing that lasts forever and is unperturbed by small things like cancer: God Himself. This fact makes the words of Christ in John 7:37 and 38 even more pointed: Jesus stood and cried out, "If any man is thirsty, let Him come to me and drink. He who believes in Me, as the Scripture said, 'From his innermost being shall flow rivers of living water.' "

It is during this season that we are reminded of the essentials that bring us spiritual life and hope in the face of death. Here are some of the most important I know:

1. That God created the world and everything in it and that because of that He has the rights (as all inventors and creators do) over what He made. I belong to Him and Christie belongs to Him and He can (and should) do with our lives in accordance with the good purpose for which He made us. As the Scripture says, "it is He who made us and not we ourselves."

2. That God, who made the world and us, has also mercifully revealed Himself to us. He is holy and righteous and good. This is the great hope of people living in an imperfect world (like you and me)! God is good and just and will ultimately make all things right. His excellent character means that evil will not go unpunished and that suffering is not the end of the story, although it may be a significant part of the middle. As the Scripture says, "proclaim the name of the Lord; ascribe greatness to our God! The Rock! His work is perfect, for all His ways are just; a God of faithfulness and without injustice, righteous and upright is He."

3. That His goodness and righteousness are not only our one true hope but also the ultimate standard by which all men will be measured. God's character is the pattern that we were made to imitate. When we go astray from His ways and His goodness in the way we think or act or treat our neighbors, we are missing the mark and naturally guilty. This going astray is what the Bible calls "sin" and has just as much to do with what we omit as what we commit. For example, the Scripture says, ""You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind." In this excellent command I see God's goodness as well as my own breaking of that command.

4. That cancer is a great metaphor of sin. Cancer is a cell that is meant to be part of a larger organism, that decides to live for itself and grow at the expense of the organism. In the same way, I have sinned personally against my Creator (ask my wife for details) and--it may be hard to believe-- Christie has also sinned. In fact, the Scripture says, "all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." And just like cancer, something has to be done about sin. It cannot be allowed to grow and prosper. If it does it will kill whatever it touches. That is why it makes sense when the Scripture says that "the wages of sin is death." Death is a final separation, and sin will ultimately separate me forever from the people I love and God who made me. This is probably the most culturally uncomfortable teaching in the Scriptures: people like you and me will spend the rest of forever separated from God and everything that is good (since all good things come from ultimately from Him). But it is realizing the accuracy of this truth that allows us to even begin to see another facet of God's goodness.

5. That God is merciful and kind beyond all comparison. The wonder and scandal of the Scriptures is that they tell the story of a God who loved us so much that, "while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." Who would give his life for a friend? Many heroic men and women have done so. But the amazing thing about God is that He gave His life for His enemies. Christ offered His sinless life in the stead of those who deserved to die because of their sin. That's me. And, to add to the wonder of this story, after His death (because He is God) Christ rose from death as the conquering Saviour. Can you see how that is the decisive hope for the Turnbulls? If Jesus Christ loved us so much that He would offer His life for ours, how will He not also be faithful to help and keep us through such a trial as this cancer? If Christ shattered death itself through the power of His own indestructible life, how can we refuse to have hope in the face of death?

6. That God also sovereignly and mercifully applied these truths to our lives personally. It wasn't just enough for us (or anyone) to know about these ideas. God kindly brought us to the point where we acknowledged that we had indeed ignored and disobeyed God and that we, personally, were rightly vulnerable to His righteous judgment. Then we could actually see Christ not merely as some figurehead of a major world religion, but we could embrace Him as the living God who saves us and gives us life. As the Scripture says, "God commands all men everywhere to repent." That word, "repent" means to turn away from sin and to march toward God. This all happened at a particular point in both of our lives. On our side, it involved admitting to God our sin, and committing our lives to Him and thanking Him for His forgiveness. That personal interaction with God has become a daily way of life. Paul ideally describes this type of life (in the book of Galatians) when he says, "I have been crucified with Christ and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me, and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and delivered Himself up for me." Of course, this is the very kind of life that we are pursuing and that we seek for every one of our friends and family. (By the way, I didn't make this stuff up; it's is all in the Bible. And if you have a relevant question about these matters, please ask.)

Thank you for your prayers. We hope to keep this page up-to-date with essentials that will help you pray for her and us.

(Note: the Quotidian Updates are arranged with the most recent entry first so that one does not have to scroll down a long page to find the day's summary.) Also, don't forget to hit the Refresh button on your browser to load the latest changes to this page (see below).

In an effort to make this page more friendly for those who have trouble loading this entire thing, I have archived each month's Updates on separate pages below. Thanks for your patience in the meantime.

Saturday, December 29, 2007 Thank you for continuing to pray for Christie Turnbull even though you did not have up-to-the-minute (or even up-to-the-month) news about her doings and her welfare. You should know that God is faithfully answering those prayers. Christie is getting along swimmingly. Her shoulder continues to be free of pain. She has had two appointments with Dr. Smith (her oncologist) since I last wrote and both of those were smooth and uneventful. Her blood work looks nearly perfect at those appointments and we thank God for His provision that way. She is on a disciplined campaign of exercise and careful eating designed to hedge against cancer recurrence. While she unselfishly fixes yummy pancakes or tender pork chops or even her famous apple pie for our consumption, she brings her store of nuts, fruit and lots of salad to the table for herself. I am continually impressed with her dedication.

The one really lingering and bothersome effect of the chemotherapy is sleeplessness. It's not really sleeplessness; it i

s highly punctuated sleep. She wakes up countless times at night and only in the very early morning is she able to have an hour or two of continuous slumber. You would think that this problem would have transmuted my wife into a creature resembling the one in the picture to the left. However, such reasoning, though logical, turns out to be specious in her case. I am convinced it is because she has so consistently chosen to trust the Lord through her sufferings that, even after a particularly awful night, she is patient, content and nearly perfectly cheerful. In fact, she has great resemblance on most days to the creature on the right (but without the wings).

Since it has been such a very long time since our last installment, here are a few highlights from Christie's life over the past months.

The summer provided us the opportunity to take two delightful trips. It was really quite satisfying to be able to travel without having to schedule things between weekly chemo treatments. It is almost as though that invisible IV line that tethered Christie to the clinic was cut in two and she was free! In early June we s

tayed with the O'Bryans, a very brave family who without two moments of hesitation hosted the nine Turnbulls for most of a week. A massive and ordered garden, a fort, and a real, live pond complete with homemade rowboat were just a few of the things at the O'Bryan house that wowed us. I was teaching a brief seminar on essay writing for high school students in Moscow, Idaho and we managed to spend good time with our hosts and their great kids (see at left) as well as other good friends we had known from the days when we lived in the Palouse.

The middle of summer included swim team for two of our daughters, picnics for all, gardening for the grown-ups, teaching a grammar class, and studying for me. (I am renewing my teacher's certificate and get to take three classes of my choice to fulfill the requirements for continuing education.) We didn't want it to be, but the summer was stuffed full.

The big highlight for all of us was our biennial (every two years) trip to southern Utah in August. I know that some people consider us foolish for traveling to the desert in the hottest month of the year; but it is actually the case that we are foolish. In reality, I am the fool; the other people in our household are merely forced accomplices. For one thing, August is the off-season in Utah and so rates and prices are cheaper than at other times. The real reason we go, however, is that we are compelled to by the sheer beauty of the place. There really isn't any other place like it and there certainly is no other place better. Every time we get to spend a couple of weeks there I am re-introduced to the glory of that country. Being there reminds me that there is a great God who made all things and that in some parts of creation, as it is in southern Utah, He left His shining fingerprints all over it. Just as it is when one sees the light of the s

un turn nondescript clouds orange in the early morning, or beholds the tranquility of a mountain lake as it perfectly mirrors the mountains and sky, so the desert in its glory isn't just beautiful, it is actually encouraging. That is one reason we know that God made the world: its beauty not only pleases, it edifies.

On our way down we stopped at Great Falls, Montana for a cousin's wedding and then proceeded through Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons. In Yellowstone we snapped a picture of our kids on a very important bench (right). It is a bench fraught with family significance. The summer before we were married, on the way to Campus Crusade's Institute of Biblical Studies in Colorado, I stopped to see Christie where she was working in Yellowstone National Park. One evening we had one of those big relational talks th

at people who are soon to be engaged are wont to have while sitting on a bench in front of Hamilton Stores in Canyon Village. A lot has happened over the intervening 18 years since we sat there. God has greatly blessed us. For me, that is most forcefully illustrated by the people who are sitting on that bench in this picture.

When we made it to Utah, we spent a couple of great

days at Capitol Reef National Park that included, of course, superb, if sweltering, hikes (right). While there we had a picnic in one of the most scenic parks in America (left). Then we traveled east through a canyon that I had never seen that was most certainly misnamed "North Wash." This is the unimpressive moniker given to a place less well-known but equally as grand as any national park in that region. Unfortunately, I was so awed by the place that I forgot to take a picture. But to the lower left you can see the country just adjacent to North Wash, near Fry Canyon. By the way, all of these pictures are shameless advertisements for the greatness of God and His world.

We furthered a family tradition by camping at Windwhistle campground north of Monticello. It was a perfect night and the evening light on the rocks made the sandstone glow. If you look carefully (below) you can spy our tent behind that big Juniper tree. When we broke camp in the morning, and lifted up the tarp we saw that we had been visited by a scorpion who apparently had an affection for young children (below on the left). And finally, we settled in at Moab, whence we made many sorties into the countryside.

Upon our return home to Leavenworth in mid-August, we plunged right into school. The schedule this fall has been the most intense of our eight years of homeschooling. Perhaps it is the addition of a fifth homeschooler to the line-up (our four-year-old turned five in August) or it may have s

omething to do with the fact that we now have a 14-year-old daughter doing high school work this year. Whatever it is, it is a great challenge, and Christie continues to manage it well. Sometimes it is like riding an unbroken mustang. Entropy and chaos are like two great hulking monsters crouching at the door. Their desire is to master us. You should see with what vigor my wife can beat them back, as though with the cricket bat of moral goodness, organization and steadfast trust. For example, with the youngest two usually jogging from one room to the next playing pirates or cowboys or soldiers and with the oldest two seeking the quiet necessary to practice Haydn or push through their Algebra, and with three other students at various stages in the middle, the sheer variety of curricular needs and personal interests is enough to tax the old bean severely (as P.G. Wodehouse would say).

Because we had too much money in October, we wondered what to do with it and decided to give it to the orthodontist on our eldest's behalf. She got braces and so we got he

r the long-awaited dog. She says she has been praying for a dog for seven years. Dad thinks it was more like five. At any rate, we have all fallen in love with "Scout." She (the daughter) wanted me to be sure to show you all the picture. She (the dog) is (amazingly) a purebred standard poodle and is going to get very big!

Isabella, our wunderkind, continues to grow completely normally and to enjoy excellent health. Her three-year-old brother has become something like her personal trainer. He has shown her how to run at full speed into walls in order to raise a lump on the forehead. He has given her lessons in the art of leaping off the edge of the couch as high as possible and landing on the belly upon a hard floor. He has also trained her to be ready for the unannounced shove to the back that can send an innocent sister sprawling. Almost all of these injury-trending skills are acquired with more laughter than tears. She does not suffer. Every achievement or funny antic or strange utterance is received with applause and recognition by all of her older siblings. I fear the child may become spoiled. Pray for her soul and for her parents.

Thanks for your prayers for us. May the Lord bless you and your family not only now during the holidays, but as you walk with Him each week. His mercy is life itself.

I lift up my eyes to the hills—where does my help come from? My help comes from the LORD, the Maker of heaven and earth. He will not let your foot slip— He who watches over you will not slumber, indeed, He who watches over Israel will neither slumber nor sleep. --Psalm 121: 1-4

It is good to give thanks to the Lord, and to sing praises to Your name, O Most High; to declare Your lovingkindness in the morning, and Your faithfulness by night . . . For You, O Lord, have made me glad by what You have done, I will sing for joy at the works of Your hands. --Psalm 92:1-2, 4

For the word of the Lord is upright; and all His work is done in faithfulness. He loves righteousness and justice; the earth is full of the lovingkindness of the Lord. --Psalm 33:4-5