There’s a particular kind of fear that shows up when someone you love is sick and nobody can tell you what happens next. Not the fear of bad news. Bad news at least gives you something to do. This is the fear of the in-between, when the people who are supposed to have answers keep telling you “we’ll see.”

We landed there when our daughter was a teenager. A doctor found something on a routine exam, the kind of finding that makes you sit up straighter in the chair. Testing confirmed it: a hole in her heart. We took her to a second doctor after that, a cardiologist with a reputation that meant something, and he confirmed it too. He told us plainly that her particular defect wasn’t going to close on its own. She would need open heart surgery. In the same conversation, he told us she shouldn’t get pregnant with it untreated or she would certainly die.

You’d think that’s the hard part. It wasn’t. The hard part came next, when insurance told us they wouldn’t approve the surgery until she’d had two documented strokes.

Two strokes. In a teenage girl. Not a worst-case scenario they were hoping to avoid, but a box that had to be checked before they’d pay.

LoriAnn and I were not willing to wait for that. I don’t know how else to say it plainer. We weren’t going to sit around hoping our daughter would have the first stroke on schedule so the second one would get her into an operating room. But “not willing to wait” doesn’t make a six figure surgery appear out of thin air. It just means you’re standing in a gap with no bridge, watching the clock, knowing the price tag is real and the timeline is nothing.

That’s the part I actually want to talk about, because I think a lot of you reading this know that gap better than you’d like to admit. Maybe not with a heart surgery. Maybe with a market correction that hit right as you were three years from retiring, or a long term care diagnosis with no clear cost ceiling, or a kid who needs help you didn’t budget for and can’t bring yourself to say no to. The specifics change. The feeling doesn’t. You’re standing somewhere the need is certain and the resources are not, and nobody official is going to step in and make that easier on your timeline.

What got us through it wasn’t a plan, because we didn’t have one yet. It was deciding, out loud, together, that we’d face it as a team instead of letting the fear sit between us. LoriAnn and I had already been through one hard season together. We got married six weeks after she lost both her parents, with her two teenage sisters suddenly needing a home. We’d learned the hard way that waiting for certainty before you act is sometimes a luxury you don’t get. We leaned on that. We leaned on our faith too, hard, in the unglamorous way where you don’t get a sign or a feeling of peace right on cue. You just keep showing up and trust that you’re not actually walking through it alone, even on the days it feels that way.

I’m not going to walk through every detail of how things eventually turned a corner. Some of it is private. But I’ll tell you this: we didn’t get the how before we needed to act. We got the why, and we walked on that alone for longer than felt comfortable.

That’s the part I wish I had fully understood back then. You don’t get to wait until you understand how something is going to work out before you’re allowed to move forward in faith. Faith doesn’t usually come with a blueprint. It comes with a reason solid enough to keep putting one foot in front of the other while the how stays hidden. We knew why we weren’t willing to sit and wait on a stroke that might never come, or might come and take her from us. We did not know how it would resolve. The why and the how don’t show up on the same schedule. The why has to carry you until the how catches up.

And the answer, when it came, didn’t come on our timetable. It came on its own. I’ve prayed plenty of prayers in my life that got answered on a clock I didn’t set, and a few that got answered in a way I never would have chosen if I’d been handed the pen. This wasn’t one of those. But I’ve learned not to count on the answer looking like what I asked for, or arriving when I think it should. Sometimes you get exactly what you prayed for, years late. Sometimes you get something else entirely, and it takes a while to see it was the right thing all along.

What I can tell you is that our daughter is healthy today. She’s married, raising a houseful of kids, and expecting her sixth baby at the end of this summer. The fear we carried for that stretch turned out not to be a preview of the ending.

If you’re standing in a gap like that right now, financial or otherwise, with no clear timeline and no guaranteed price tag, here’s what I’d ask you to take from this: you don’t need the plan before you have the resolve. The resolve to face it honestly, together with whoever’s standing beside you, and to keep walking even though you can’t see the how yet, that part you can have right now. Hold onto the why. The how, and the answer, tend to show up later, and rarely on the schedule we’d have picked.

If this one hit close to home, I’d love to hear about it in the comments. And if you know someone walking through their own version of the in-between right now, this might be worth sending their way.

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