got nothin

So my best friend Ruth and her husband, Boaz (go with me here, Ruth and Boaz are biblical folks, and they're great, read about em if you have a chance, but don't read the wikipedia article on them) seem to be material for Extreme Makeover Home Edition.

Ruth and Boaz got married a year ago. This past February, Ruth found out she was pregnant. She's due at the end of July. And she already has twin girls (age 13) and Moo (also a girl), who is now 11. Boaz has two kids, ages 7 and 3 or so, both boys. Huge blended family. Anyway, not long after that, Boaz fell down the stairs and had a siezure. Went to the hospital, blah, blah, blah, found he has a brain tumor. A stage 2 cancerous brain tumor. They went in a took out a mass the size of an egg, but didn't get it all. Then they went on with radiation and chemo, but that was too much, so they radiated the heck out of it. That didn't kill it all. He just had an MRI and it's coming right back. So now they're thinking they might do more surgery this week. And we're all worried.

This on top of a bunch of other crap. Some of us know what fun adolescent girls are. Some of us know how angry ex-spouses can really make our lives incredibly complicated. In this case, when Boaz went to go get child support reduced (because he can't work!), the ex turned around and filed to get the kids full time because Boaz "can't provide a healthy environment" for them. Which is bull. When the kids stay with Boaz and Ruth, they are well kept, fed healthy meals, and are in a stable environment. (Meanwhile, mother's living with and is pregnant by a live-in boyfriend. I have no kind words for this kind of stone-throwing on her part.) So that's value added to the whole situation.

They have 7 people currently in a 4 bedroom house. All the girls share a room, both boys share a room, and since Boaz's mother moved into an assisted living, Boaz and Ruth can now live upstairs out of the basement in her old room, and the other room (which is the size of a large closet) is going to be the nursery. The house isn't painted or is half-done in a lot of places, it needs work. They want to unload it and find a bigger place. Or fix up what they have.

They have a pretty good attitude about it, but I can tell they're shaken since the radiation has done nothing to abate his cancer. And it didn't really strike me until Keaton (that's what I'll call the newbie) was quiet. He gets that way sometimes. But he brought it up this time, how he felt terrible about their situation. How he wished he could do something about it. These are people he doesn't even know well, and he has more fear for them than I do. What's wrong with me? Is it that I just shut it out? Or is it that I hadn't realized it was as serious as I thought? Or was I just trusting that God would take care of it (yes, I'm a Christian, but I'm not going to ram it down anyone's throat, so relax). I don't know, but I'd like to come up with a creative way to do something extremely helpful to them. I just don't know what...

Ideas and thoughts/prayers for them are welcome.