Lessons From The Lifeboat

Photo by Kathleen Rodgers

It’s a typical Friday night as Bridget Bryan moves around her kitchen, grabbing plates down from the cupboard and filling glasses with ice. She glances around to see if she’s missed anything, pausing to give me a smile and a slight shrug as if to say, “Guess there’s nothing else to do.” Her husband, Zach, is just outside trying to keep the wind from blowing out the flame on the grill so he can finish cooking tonight’s dinner—hamburgers.

Zach and Bridget look like every other newlywed couple by most outward appearances. They have friends over for dinner, spend the weekends making their new house feel more like home, and visit with their respective in-laws. They work through the same issues that every newlywed couple does. But as Zach comes inside with the burgers, tugging his beanie back down over his bald head, I’m reminded that they’re still on their way out of the stormiest start to a marriage they could’ve imagined. Later on, Zach and Bridget will sit on the couch together and tell me about the difficulties they’ve been through over the last few years, but for now, we’re just three friends gathering around the table to share a meal.

When I first approached Bridget about sharing their story, Zach was still in the middle of his second round of chemotherapy treatments. She was hesitant at first, uncertain that anyone could be encouraged by the trials they were facing. So often, we share the stories of our hardships once they are wrapped up in a neat bow, and we have the benefit of hindsight to see what God might have been teaching us more fully. But we need to hear from people who are still in the middle of it, to know that we’re not the only ones clinging desperately to our lifeboat while the storm rages around us. Sometimes we need to see the examples of people who can do nothing more than pray and hold onto the hope of God’s promises.

Heading Into the Storm

If you’re one of the church’s Sunday morning volunteers or a youth parent, then you know Bridget through her role as the Family & Youth Associate here at First Baptist Starkville. What you may not know is that her new husband has just finished his second round of chemotherapy after being diagnosed with colon cancer in 2020. Zach, who is in the National Guard 20th Special Forces Group (Airborne), arrived home in April of 2020 after being in Niger, Africa, for an eight-month deployment. Having ignored a chronic stomach pain for some time, Zach finally went to the doctor, where scans showed a large mass in his lower intestines. His doctors quickly scheduled surgery to remove as much of the tumor as possible and followed up with chemotherapy.

“The first time I got the diagnosis, I was mad at the world,” Zach says matter-of-factly as he leans back on the couch. He attributed his initial anger to the lack of fairness about the whole situation. After all, he was a fit young man who took care of himself, who didn’t drink too much or smoke, yet he had just received one of the worst diagnoses he could imagine. Zach recalls sitting in bed late one night, unable to sleep, and scrolling through Facebook. Just as he was thinking about turning in, he decides to scroll down one more time and comes across a post that says, “God will put your whole life on hold just so He can talk to you, and when He does that, be sure to listen.”

That is the moment that Zach says he adopted a new attitude. He thought to himself, “This is it, this is God putting my life on hold. I need to listen and ask God to show me what I need to learn throughout this process.”

After a tough six months of chemotherapy, Zach was given the all-clear, and life seemed to return to normal. While the beginning of their relationship had seen a long deployment and an equally long illness, now Zach and Bridget could finally begin to enjoy some normalcy in their lives. Their relationship could continue to grow without an ocean in between them. They could go on dates, see friends, and spend time with their families. Then, one unassuming day in July of 2021, Zach finally asked Bridget to marry him—and Bridget finally managed to say “Yes!” They announced their engagement and quickly set to work planning their wedding.

Unfortunately, their excitement was short-lived. A mere eleven days later, Zach received a call that a routine PET scan had revealed another cancerous spot. Once again, Zach would need to undergo surgery and another vigorous round of chemotherapy. And once again, Zach would need to adopt the same attitude of listening and looking for God’s guidance as he had the first time.

Navigating the Waves

But after experiencing one setback after the other, would keeping that attitude be easier said than done? How exactly do you find it in you to be excited for the future when it feels like you keep coming up against one thing after another? How did Bridget and Zach find joy in starting their lives together while still carrying the weight of another cancer diagnosis?

“We were very open with each other about it,” says Bridget, looking to Zach for confirmation. He nods in agreement, saying, “We had a discussion at the beginning of this and said there will be times when we’ll need to be tough, and we’re going to be tough, and there will be times when we’re overwhelmed and sad.” They agreed from the start to give themselves time and space to cry, be mad, or yell at the top of their lungs if they needed to. “But after we’re done,” Zach continues, “we’re not going to let that control us because that’s not who we are.”

“Zach tended to follow that part a lot more than I did,” Bridget says with a laugh.

So, after recovering from another surgery, Zach married Bridget in a small ceremony, and the two moved into a new house. As they began to adjust to a new marriage and navigate this second round of chemo, Zach and Bridget’s world narrowed down to just the two of them very quickly. For the first few weeks of treatment, Bridget would accompany Zach to his appointment and then stay at home with him for the four or five days after that it would take for him to recover. After a few weeks, Zach’s parents were kind enough to take turns staying with him after chemo, giving Bridget the ability to return to work and return to a bit of normalcy.

After each treatment, Zach would spend days in bed, only getting up to use the bathroom or when Bridget could wake him up long enough to eat something. “Your brain is only focused on breathing, making sure your heart is pumping, are you hungry, are you thirsty, do you need to go to the bathroom. Basically, the lights were on, but no one was home,” says Zach. Bridget recalls how lonely those first couple of months were, getting slightly choked up as she talks about how difficult it was to watch Zach recover and how helpless she felt to do anything for him. “I would just feel so down,” she says, “because you don’t have your husband, your best friend, because he’s so out of it and not himself.” After a few weeks, Bridget’s mother started coming to visit with her on Sundays to help alleviate some of that loneliness.

One of the things that the couple says helped them get through these last few months is the foundation they built early on in their relationship, especially while Zach was overseas. “I’ve always said that the deployment was so hard, but it was also such a blessing,” says Bridget. They both agree that even though being long-distance at first was hard, the limitations helped them get to know each other mentally and emotionally.

“When we could talk,” Bridget continues, “we talked about things that really mattered, learned each other’s flaws and strengths, and learned to resolve arguments quickly, because if you didn’t, you never knew how long it would be before you got the chance to talk again.”

“I think a really good way to put it is that at the beginning of our relationship, we had to be strong mentally because we were absent physically,” Zach interjects, noting how that helped them through these last few months when he was present physically but absent mentally because of the chemo. It’s what helped him be able to reach out to check on Bridget and reassure her, even when his mind was still foggy from chemo.

Bridget and Zach also attribute a lot of their ability to get through these last few months to the power of prayer. They’ve seen God work through their own prayers, those of their friends and family, and even prayer groups from churches they’ve never been to. “It was a big thing for us, and I know that’s why it wasn’t as bad as it could have been,” says Zach, noting that though it was rough, he didn’t get as physically sick as he did the first time he went through chemo. And they’ve both remained untouched by COVID through all of this.

Prayer was a comfort for the two of them, especially because of how isolated they had to be from their community. The chemo left Zach with a comprised immune system, and with the threat of COVID, the couple limited who they saw and where they went. It was difficult for them, especially Bridget, to not feel lonely and anxious. That isn’t to say that people weren’t trying to reach out. Bridget recalls how often people would offer to bring them dinner, and though she really wanted to accept, the necessity of the situation made it difficult. “I didn’t want people going out of their way to bring us anything,” says Bridget, “because we just weren’t in a place to have people visit, so it felt strange to have people bring food and then leave, so I would just tell them not to and then eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.”

Being reminded that people were praying for them helped them still feel connected. Bridget and Zach both admit that even though they are firm believers in the power of prayer, they would still find it hard to ask people to pray for them. Whether out of fear of pity or the exhaustion of having to explain everything that was going on, when it came time for prayer requests, they would keep silent. However, people would still reach out to ask how they were and tell them they were being prayed for. “It was cool to see how people didn’t forget, even when we weren’t bringing it up,” Zach says. Even if the two feared that being out of sight might mean they were out of mind, it didn’t happen because people were steadily reaching out and praying for them.

Learning to Sail

While the power of prayer has been a big lesson for the young couple, it isn’t the only thing they’ve been learning. “The biggest thing for me has been remembering that it’s not our plans, it’s God’s plan; it’s not our timing, it’s God’s timing,” says Bridget, as Zach nods in agreement. They need only look to the very beginning of their relationship to see the truth in that statement. The two of them had tried to date back in 2015 after being introduced through mutual friends. “It was legitimately “right person, wrong time,” because I was not yet the person I needed to be for her,” Zach says. The delay gave the two of them the necessary time and space for God to grow and mature them into the people they needed to be.

They were able to reconnect years later and use what God had taught them to build a healthy foundation that would see them through a deployment, a cancer diagnosis, and two rounds of chemotherapy, on top of the normal struggles of life, like misunderstandings with friends, tensions at work, and the passing of close family members. It’s the kind of growth and maturity that helped Zach be able to recognize the struggle that Bridget was going through and support her in seeking help for depression and anxiety. The two of them can look back on those formative years and see how God’s perfect timing brought them to the place where they are, even with every roadblock and every storm they’ve gone through.

There may still be times when they’re uncertain why God brought them through all of these difficulties, but they can see some of the ways God is shaping them through these storms. “Patience is a huge one, just trusting in God’s timing,” Zach says, “but also the humility to learn to be dependent on other people, on Bridget, on God.” Zach also talks a lot about learning to be resilient, to wake up every day, and see that as a reason to pray and be thankful. It’s a lesson he is helping Bridget learn as well. “Zach reminds me all of the time that it hasn’t only been bad stuff, we’ve had a lot of good things in our lives too,” she says as she gets up to clear the kitchen table and put a tray of cookies in the oven. With our interview done, the three of us decide to move back to the kitchen table for dessert and game time, taking Zach’s advice to appreciate the little things to heart.

Have a story of God’s faithfulness you would like to share in the next issue of Redefined? Tell us about it here!