Sermon Illustrations on Cancer

The Dangers of Smoking

Verlyn Mack of Hammond, Indiana, was a 3-4 pack a day smoker, 18 years ago was told he had cancer and only 2 years to live. He wrote his obituary but did not die. He now talks to young people about dangers of smoking - formaldehyde in tobacco and asbestos in the wrappers. Verlyn is religious and believes God wanted to keep him around to talk against cigarettes and smokeless tobacco. He has spoken to over 40,000 people in clubs, churches, schools, etc. Cancer took half his voice box, took away some nerves in face and neck, his spine has had 27 cobalt treatments, and his stomach has swollen.

John Piper Resolves To Glorify God Through Cancer

1 Thessalonians 5:9

The man who has long proclaimed that “God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him” is now facing a major test of his faith with every intention of proving God worthy.

John Piper, author of “Desiring God” and pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, was diagnosed with prostate cancer in late December and will undergo surgery to remove the organ in February, according to a letter he wrote to his congregation and posted on his website, desiringgod.org.

“This news has, of course, been good for me,” he wrote. “The most dangerous thing in the world is the sin of self-reliance and the stupor of worldliness. The news of cancer has a wonderfully blasting effect on both. I thank God for that. The times with Christ in these days have been unusually sweet.

“For example, is there anything greater to hear and believe in the bottom of your heart than this: ‘God has not destined us for wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us so that whether we are awake or asleep we might live with him’ (1 Thessalonians 5:9-10)?” he added. “God has designed this trial for my good and for your good.”

Doctors told Piper the cancer does not appear to be aggressive and it is unlikely that it has spread beyond the prostate, thus it is possible to be cancer-free with successful treatment. Piper, in his letter, asked that people pray that God would “grant that this light and momentary trial would work to spread a passion for [God’s] supremacy for the joy of all peoples through Jesus Christ.”

[see also HolwickID #30878]

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[Original illustration at this number was deleted for being obsolete]

Cancer Is So Limited

John 14:1

Cancer is so limited:

It cannot cripple Love,

It cannot shatter Hope,

It cannot corrode Faith,

It cannot eat away Peace,

It cannot destroy Confidence,

It cannot kill Friendship,

It cannot shut out Memories,

It cannot silence Courage,

It cannot invade the Soul,

It cannot reduce Eternal Life,

It cannot quench the Spirit,

It cannot lessen the power of Resurrection.

If a disease has invaded your life, refuse to let it touch your spirit. Your body may have a great struggle, but keep trusting “GOD’S LOVE”. Your spirit will remain strong.

A Miraculous Healing of Cancer

Acts 3:16

Illustration of miraculous healing of cancer:

It was March, 1980. Marie Hermann was 61 years old, and she had a football-sized metastatic tumor in her abdomen. She also had other tumors in her neck, liver, bones, and chest. The chemotherapy had caused her thyroid glands to fail. In the next 6 months she lost 82 pounds. Her husband, who was a doctor, thought she was going to die in a few short weeks.

On September 28 of that year she went to church at Bethel Temple. It was not a charismatic or Pentecostal church. But on that particular Sunday the pastor asked the 1000 members to join hands and pray for the healing of those in the church. He never mentioned Marie, but she prayed with everyone else.

She says she would have been pleased to hold down her supper that night. She didn't. She got sick as usual. But the next morning her nausea lifted [inexplicably]. She ate breakfast, then lunch, with no problems. Her husband was skeptical of any spectacular or miraculous recoveries. He checked her abdomen and was surprised that he could feel no cancer.

Ten days later she saw her cancer doctor. No cancer was found anywhere in her body. The doctors were baffled. Cancers have been known to go into remission, but never this quickly and completely.

Had Marie been healed by God?

Bidding From the Heart

John 1:29

Jayne Fisher watched anxiously as her 17-year-old daughter Katie pulled her unruly lamb into the arena of the Madison County Junior Livestock sale. With luck, Katie wouldn’t collapse, as she had during a livestock show the day before.

Katie was battling cancer. This was her first chance in months to be outdoors having fun, away from hospitals and chemotherapy treatments, and she had come with high hopes for earning some sizable spending money. She had wavered a little on her decision to part with the lamb, but with lamb averaging two dollars a pound, Katie was looking forward to a lot more than pin money. So she centered the lamb for viewing, and the bidding began.

That’s when Roger Wilson, the auctioneer, had a sudden inspiration that brought some unexpected results. “We sort of let folks know that Katie had a situation that wasn’t too pleasant,” is how he tells it. He hoped that his introduction would push the bidding up, at least a little bit.

Well, the lamb sold for $11.50 a pound, but things didn’t stop there. The buyer paid up, then decided to give the lamb back so that it could be sold again.

That started a chain reaction, with families buying the animal and giving it back, over and over again. When local businesses started buying and returning, the earnings really began to pile up. The first sale is the only one Katie’s mom remembers. After that, she was crying too hard as the crowd kept shouting, “Resell! Resell!”

Katie’s lamb was sold 36 times that day, and the last buyer gave it back for good. Katie ended up with more than $16,000 for a fund to pay her medical expenses - and she still got to keep her famous lamb.

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We Have A Chance

Job 6:11

As I ate breakfast one morning, I overheard two cancer doctors conversing. One complained bitterly, "You know, Bob, I just don't understand it. We used the same drugs, the same dosage, the same schedule and the same entry criteria. Yet I got a 22 percent response rate and you got a 74 percent. That's unheard of for metastatic cancer. How do you do it?"

His colleague replied, "We're both using Etoposide, Platinum, Oncovin and Hydroxyurea. You call yours EPOH. I tell my patients I'm giving them HOPE. As dismal as the statistics are, I emphasize that we have a chance."

________

Chicken Soup for the Surviving Soul

Aubery & Nancy Mitchell, R.N.

No Less A Starfish

Luke 10:19

About eight weeks after my first mastectomy, I agreed to accompany my husband on a business trip to Connecticut and Rhode Island during June, with the understanding that I could rest as much as necessary and not overdo it. In an attempt to make sure we balanced pleasure with business meetings, my husband asked if there was anything special I wanted to do while we were in that beautiful part of the country. Because I grew up in Arizona with desert and dryness I have always had a genuine love of and appreciation for the ocean. I suggested we try to get down to Newport beach if at all possible. For me, there is something therapeutic about the ocean. The waves, walking in the sand, watching the tide, just experiencing the presence of the ocean. Somehow I felt I would feel more connected to nature, myself and the healing process.

Armed with a map and directions from the lady who sold us our box lunches, we were on our way. The drive was beautiful and far shorter than we expected.

We gathered our things and headed for the shore. I couldn’t wait to take off my sandals and scrunch my toes in the wet sand. As we topped a hill, the beach looked like a patchwork quilt of beach blankets. I had never seen so many people on so little sand in all my life. We weaved our way through the crowd toward the water. As I took a step, I looked down, and to my utter surprise, saw a beautiful starfish. I thought to myself, How could this be? All those people, and no one stepped on it or even bent over to pick it up. I was as thrilled as a child. For me it was magic: my own personal gift from the sea.

Then I realized something unique about this particular starfish. It had a message - a very special message. One of its arms was bent and curved around. At that moment, from someplace deep within me, I had an overwhelming awareness, a sense of meaning. This was no less a starfish because it had a bent arm, and I was no less a woman because I lost my breasts. I called it my “grace moment.” I realized it was no accident that I found myself on that beach, that day, at that moment.

This experience was simply an answer to my prayer. I knew I would survive breast cancer from that moment on. Furthermore, I had a message I would willingly share with others.

No matter what our setbacks, difficulties or pain, we can get through them. Only through these moments of hell do we reach deep down within our being and discover who we are, what we believe and what is important and “real” in our lives. We experience a “knowing of our soul.”

Today, I have my little starfish on a special table in my home. Every time I pass it I think of its message. I’m grateful for the insight having cancer gave to me and for a relationship with a Higher Power that blesses me with little miracles on a daily basis. Most of all, I am grateful to know in my heart that I am no less a woman because I lost my breasts to cancer. I am more than my limitations.

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Surprised By Death

Romans 5:6

A YOUNG PASTOR DISCOVERS WHAT GRACE LOOKS LIKE WHILE BATTLING CANCER.

"WHILE WE WERE STILL WEAK, AT THE RIGHT TIME CHRIST DIED FOR THE UNGODLY... BUT GOD PROVES HIS LOVE FOR US IN THAT WHILE WE STILL WERE SINNERS CHRIST DIED FOR US." -- ROMANS 5:6,8, NRSV

In 1996 James Van Tholen, then 31, and his wife, Rachel, moved to Rochester, New York, where Jim became pastor of a Christian Reformed Church. Members of the church found themselves drawn to Jim’s ministry, especially to his preaching, which gleamed with biblical intelligence and humane understanding.

Then, the unthinkable occurred: in the late winter of 1998, physicians identified and surgically removed a liposarcoma from behind Jim’s right knee. Within weeks Jim had another tumor behind his chest wall, and then spots on both femurs and one kidney. Recent tests confirm cancer up and down Jim’s spine, with the result that he now thinks about how he moves, always conscious of the risk of spinal cord compression (and paralysis).

From March until October, Jim struggled to recover from surgery and to absorb forms of chemotherapy that offered no cure but could prolong his life somewhat. By October, the chemotherapy had suppressed Jim’s cancer enough that he was able to return to his pulpit.

What follows is the sermon Jim preached from Romans 5:1–11 on the morning of his return, October 18, 1998. As the members of the congregation listened to their young preacher’s sermon, they understood something about dying and rising with Christ that they hadn’t known just that way before.

-- Cornelius Plantinga, Jr.,

dean of the chapel at Calvin College

and a former teacher of Van Tholen’s at

Calvin Theological Seminary.

_____________________________________________________________

This is a strange day -- for all of us. Most of you know that today marks my return to this pulpit after seven months of dealing with an aggressive and deadly form of cancer. Now, with the cancer vacationing for a little while, I am back. And of course I’m glad to be back. But I can’t help feeling how strange this day is -- especially because I want to ignore my absence, and I want to pretend everybody has forgotten the reason for it.

But we can’t do that. We can’t ignore what has happened. We can rise above it; we can live through it; but we can’t ignore it. If we ignore the threat of death as too terrible to talk about, then the threat wins. Then we are overwhelmed by it, and our faith doesn’t apply to it. And if that happens, we lose hope.

We want to worship God in this church, and for our worship to be real, it doesn’t have to be fun, and it doesn’t have to be guilt-ridden. But it does have to be honest, and it does have to hope in God. We have to be honest about a world of violence and pain, a world that scorns faith and smashes hope and rebuts love. We have to be honest about the world, and honest about the difficulties of faith within it. And then we still have to hope in God.

So let me start with the honesty. The truth is that for seven months I have been scared. Not of the cancer, not really. Not even of death. Dying is another matter -- how long it will take and how it will go. Dying scares me. But when I say that I have been scared, I don’t mean that my thoughts have centered on dying. My real fear has centered somewhere else. Strange as it may sound, I have been scared of meeting God.

How could this be so? How could I have believed in the God of grace and still have dreaded to meet him? Why did I stand in this pulpit and preach grace to you over and over, and then, when I myself needed the grace so much, why did I discover fear where the grace should have been?

I think I know the answer now. As the wonderful preacher John Timmer has taught me over the years, the answer is that grace is a scandal. Grace is hard to believe. Grace goes against the grain. The gospel of grace says that there is nothing I can DO to get right with God, but that God has made himself right with me through Jesus’ bloody death. And that is a scandalous thing to believe.

God comes to us before we go to him. John Timmer used to say that this is God’s habit. God came to Abraham when there was nothing to come to, just an old man at a dead end. But that’s God for you. That’s the way God likes to work. He comes to old men and to infants, to sinners and to losers. That’s grace, and a sermon without it is no sermon at all.

So I’ve tried to preach grace, to fill my sermons up with grace, to persuade you to believe in grace. And it’s wonderful work to have -- that is, to stand here and preach grace to people. I got into this pulpit and talked about war and homosexuality and divorce. I talked about death before I knew what death really was. And I tried to bring the gospel of grace to these areas when I preached. I said that God goes to people in trouble, that God receives people in trouble, that God is a God who gets into trouble be cause of his grace. I said what our Heidelberg Catechism says: that our only comfort in life and in death is that we are not our own but belong to our faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.

I said all those things, and I meant them. But that was before I faced death myself. So now I have a silly thing to admit: I don’t think I ever realized the shocking and radical nature of God’s grace -- even as I preached it. And the reason I didn’t get it where grace is concerned, I think, is that I assumed I still had about forty years left. Forty years to unlearn my bad habits. Forty years to let my sins thin down and blow away. Forty years to be good to animals and pick up my neighbors’ mail for them when they went on vacation.

But that’s not how it’s going to go. Now I have months, not years. And now I have to meet my creator who is also my judge -- I have to meet God not later, but sooner. I haven’t enough time to undo my wrongs, not enough time to straighten out what’s crooked, not enough time to clean up my life.

And that’s what has scared me.

So now, for the first time, I have to preach grace and know what I’m talking about. I have to preach grace and not only believe it, but rest on it, depend on it, stake my life on it. And as I faced the need to do this I remembered one of the simplest, most powerful statements in the entire Bible.

You may have thought that the reason for my choice of Romans 5 lay in the wonderful words about how suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope. Those are beautiful words, true words, but I’m not so sure they apply to me. I’m not sure I’ve suffered so much or so faithfully to claim that my hope has arisen through the medium of good character. No, many of you know far more about good character than I do, and more about suffering, too.

It wasn’t that beautiful chain with character as the main link that drew my attention to Romans 5; instead, it was just one little word in verses 6 and 8. It’s the Greek word ETI, and it has brought comfort to my soul. The word means "yet" or "still," and it makes all the difference between sin and grace. Paul writes that "while we were STILL weak Christ died for the ungodly." He wants us to marvel at the Christ of the gospel, who comes to us in our weakness and in our need. Making sure we get the point, Paul uses the word twice in verse 6 in a repetitious and ungrammatical piling up of his meaning: "STILL while we were STILL weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly."

I’m physically weak, but that’s not my main weakness, my most debilitating weakness. What the last half year has proved to me is that my weakness is more of the soul than the body. This is what I’ve come to understand as I have dwelled on one question: How will I explain myself to my God? How can I ever claim to have been what he called me to be?

And, of course, the scary truth is that I can’t. That’s the kind of weakness Paul is talking about. And that’s where ETI comes in -- while we were STILL weak, while we were STILL sinners, while we were STILL enemies of God, we were reconciled with him through the death of his Son. I find it unfathomable that God’s love propelled him to reach into our world with such scandalous grace, such a way out, such hope. No doubt God has done it, because there’s no hope anywhere else. I know. I’ve been looking. And I have come to see that the hope of the world lies only inside the cradle of God’s grace.

This truth has come home to me as I’ve been thinking what it will mean to die. The same friends I enjoy now will get together a year, and three years, and twenty years from now, and I will not be there, not even in the conversation. Life will go on. In this church you will call a new minister with new gifts and a new future, and eventually I’ll fade from your mind and memory. I understand. The same thing has happened to my own memories of others. When I was saying something like this a few months ago to a friend of mine, he reminded me of those poignant words of Psalm 103:15–16: "As for mortals, their days are like grass; they flourish like a flower of the field; for the wind passes over it, and it is gone, and its place knows it no more." For the first time I felt those words in my gut; I understood that my place would know me no more.

In his poem "Adjusting to the Light," Miller Williams explores the sense of awkwardness among Lazarus’s friends and neighbors just after Jesus has resuscitated him. Four days after his death, Lazarus returns to the land of the living and finds that people have moved on from him. Now they have to scramble to fit him back in:

LAZARUS, LISTEN, WE HAVE THINGS TO TELL YOU. WE KILLED THE SHEEP YOU MEANT TO TAKE TO MARKET. WE COULDN’T KEEP THE OLD DOG, EITHER. HE MINDED YOU. THE REST OF US HE BARKED AT. REBECCA, WHO CRIED TWO DAYS, HAS GIVEN HER HAND TO THE SANDALMAKER’S SON. PLEASE UNDERSTAND -- WE DIDN’T KNOW THAT JESUS COULD DO THIS.

We’re glad you’re back. But give us time to think. Imagine our surprise...

We want to say we’re sorry for all of that. And one thing more. We threw

away the lyre. But listen, we’ll pay whatever the sheep was worth. The dog, too. And put your room the way it was before.

Miller Williams has it just right. After only a few days, Lazarus’s place knew him no more. Before cancer, I liked Williams’s poem, but now I’m living it. Believe me: hope doesn’t lie in our legacy; it doesn’t lie in our longevity; it doesn’t lie in our personality or our career or our politics or our children or, heaven knows, our goodness. Hope lies in ETI.

So please don’t be surprised when in the days ahead I don’t talk about my cancer very often. I’ve told a part of my story today, because it seemed right to do it on the first day back after seven months. But what we must talk about here is not me. I cannot be our focus, because the center of my story -- OUR story -- is that the grace of Jesus Christ carries us beyond every cancer, every divorce, every sin, every trouble that comes to us. The Christian gospel is the story of Jesus, and that’s the story I’m called to tell.

I’m dying. Maybe it will take longer instead of shorter; maybe I’ll preach for several months, and maybe for a bit more. But I am dying. I know it, and I hate it, and I’m still frightened by it. But there is hope, unwavering hope. I have hope not in something I’ve done, some purity I’ve maintained, or some sermon I’ve written. I hope in God -- the God who reaches out for an enemy, saves a sinner, dies for the weak.

That’s the gospel, and I can stake my life on it. I must. And so must you.

[In 2001, James R. Van Tholen lost his battle with cancer at the age of 36.]

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A Mom With Balance

Sandra Schmirler was that rarest of athletes whose celebrity actually transcended her sporting achievements. To be sure, there was no shortage of sporting glory in her short life. Three-time Canadian women's curling champion. Three-time world champion. Olympic gold medallist. All in the span of six seasons. "Schmirler the curler" they called her.

Schmirler was that quintessentially ordinary Canadian - a humble gal from Biggar, Saskatchewan, who never got rich off her game, and even at the height of her fame could be seen in the local Safeway pushing the shopping cart down the aisles with her two daughters. Her day job was supervisor at the local recreation centre. Her full-time job was wife and mom.

She and her team won the Canadian and world curling championships in 1993, 94 and 97. In 1998 they won the first Olympic gold medal in curling. But her glory was short-lived. One year after the gold medal victory, Sandra was diagnosed as having cancer of the esophagus. Five months after that, she died on March 2, 2000, at he age of 36. She left behind her husband and her two daughters, aged 2 and nine months.

Along with being a fierce competitor who brought women's curling to a new level, even outdrawing the men's Briar tournament in 1998, Schmirler was a devoted mother. She was pregnant with her first girl during her 1997 tournament and was a nursing mother during the '98 Olympics. While Schmirler wore many hats in life - curler, Olympian, television personality - those who knew her best say the one role she savoured the most was the one cancer shortchanged her of - that of mother.

While Schmirler was pregnant with her first child at the world championships in Switzerland in 1997, she was asked how pregnancy affected her. She said, "It gives me more balance." When asked in what way, she answered, "Both ways." That statement captured her perfectly - balanced on the ice and balanced in life.

Those special people that we call "mothers" succeed in all aspects of life - in the community, in the workplace, in the church, in social life, even on the world stage. But they also know that all those achievements rank a distant second to the high and holy calling of being a mother to the children that God has given them.

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Apple's Steve Jobs: Saved By A Death

Romans 6:23

The beaming face of Steve Jobs was the focal point of the stage in San Francisco recently. The 54-year-old founder and CEO of Apple Inc. was greeted by a 57-second standing ovation as he appeared at his company’s annual media event. It was more than obvious that he was glad, really glad to be there. He just about wasn’t there.

Billionaire Jobs had faced the possibility of death five years earlier. In 2005, giving the Commencement Address at Stanford University he told the graduates:

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas ... The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy ... when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept: No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. (http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html)

The computer guru has had his share of health problems. On January 14, 2009 he announced he was taking an extended medical leave because his health problems were “more complex” than he originally thought. In fact, he was a very sick man suffering from end-stage liver disease. He was the sickest patient on the list waiting for a liver transplant at the Methodist University Hospital Transplant Institute in Memphis, Tennessee. (http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-10271526-37.html)

A car crash claimed the life of a young person. In life, that young person had generously decided to donate their organs. When organ donor cards are signed, potential donors do not specify who the recipients can be. Whoever is most in need qualifies. Their only desire is that, by their death, some other person might be saved. This time, the life that was saved was Steve Jobs.

In June, 2009, wearing his trademark long-sleeved black shirt and jeans, Mr. Jobs walked out on to the Apple stage to a thunderous applause and said:

“I’m very happy to be here today with you all. As some of you may know, about five months ago I had a liver transplant. So I now have the liver of a mid-20s person who died in a car crash and was generous enough to donate their organs. And I wouldn’t be here without such generosity.

“So I hope all of us can be as generous and elect to become organ donors. I would like to take a moment to thank everybody in the Apple community for the heartfelt support I got too. It really meant a lot.” (http://www.appleiphoneschool.com/2009/09/09/steve-jobs-return-video/)

Steve Jobs’ life was saved by the death of another person. Is it any wonder his face was beaming with delight over his new lease on life? Is it any wonder he spoke with such gratitude as he reflected on the generosity of the person who had chosen donate their organs to save another’s life?

Have you ever thought about the generosity of the One who chose to give-up His life by dying on a cross in order for you to be saved? Your spiritual disease of sin is far worse than any form of cancer. Without the generous intervention of Another you are facing certain eternal death. Here’s what the Bible says about such a spiritual condition:

“The wages of sin is death.” Romans 6:23

“The soul who sins shall die.” Ezekiel 18:20

Sin is such a deadly spiritual disease it leaves us completely without strength to save ourselves. Left to our own efforts, we would face eternal death and separation from God. But consider this amazing piece of news:

When we were yet without strength (to save ourselves)

in due time,

Christ died for the ungodly.

Romans 5:6

Why would He lay down His life to save us? The only explanation is the generous and loving heart of God.

“God shows His love for us in that while we were still sinners,

Christ died for us.”

Romans 5:8

“Hereby perceive we the love of God

Because

He laid down His life for us...”

1 John 3:16

The gift of an organ to save the life of another is outstanding generosity. With the urgency of Steve Job’s physical health needs, what would you think if he had refused the gift or had shown anything less than heart-felt gratitude to the donor?

Spiritually, the donor was God. He gave His Son to die for your sin sickness. In another sense, the donor was Christ Himself because He willingly laid down His own life upon the Cross to save you.

Have you ever accepted the gift? Have you thanked God for generously giving His Son to die for your sins?

“The wages of sin is death;

But the gift of God is eternal life

Through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

Romans 6:23

To refuse the donor and the gift you will face eternal damnation.

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[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #3042]

Watch What Happens!

Colossians 4:2

Continue earnestly in prayer, being vigilant in it with thanksgiving. --Colossians 4:2

A missionary to Haiti was told by a doctor that she might have cancer. A biopsy was performed and sent away for analysis. As she waited for the results, she was filled with fear and could find no peace of mind.

Then one evening her anxiety suddenly lifted like a cloud. She had a deep and inexpressible awareness that the Lord would take care of her husband and children and their emotional needs, regardless of the outcome.

As she reflected on all of this, it occurred to her that it was Wednesday evening--prayer meeting night in her home church back in the United States. She also realized that it was the first Wednesday night after friends had been notified of the potential crisis. These facts convinced this faithful missionary that God had given her an opportunity to sense His answer to the prayers of others on her behalf. In addition, the medical report soon came back with the welcome news that there was no cancer.

This true incident carries a needed reminder to all of us who are Christians. The emphasis given to prayer in Colossians 4 highlights the kind of support we should be giving one another. Let's pray for the needs of others and then watch to see what the Lord does. --MRDII

When earthly help is of no avail,

There is one Friend who will never fail;

Just lift your eyes - the answer is there,

For nobody knows the power of prayer! --Kenny

To influence people for God, pray to God for people.

Good Friday Had A Deeper Meaning For Him

Job 2:10

Rev. James Montgomery Boice was the pastor of Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia for 32 years. He was a noted Bible teacher on the radio and a statesman for Reformed theology. In 2000 he died just two months after being diagnosed with liver cancer. He was only 61 years old. He received his diagnosis on Good Friday and two hours later delivered a sermon on the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

Several weeks later, Boice informed his congregation of his condition and asked them, “If God does something in your life, would you change it? If you’d change it, you’d make it worse. It wouldn’t be as good.” He had total confidence that God’s plan was the best plan for him.

________

Adapted from “Bible teacher and statesman Boice dies,” Gettysburg Times, June 17, 2000.

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[Original illustration at this number was added to HolwickID #18617]

Getting All the Cancer

Numbers 33:55

"Cancer" - it's probably one of the most dreaded words in the English language. It's the word we all hope we will never hear from a doctor. It's a word too many friends of mine have heard over the years. Thankfully, there are more forms of treatment and successful cancer surgeries than there have ever been before. But once the surgeon has operated to remove the cancer, there is a question that everyone wants the answer to - "Did they get it all?"

I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about "Getting All The Cancer."

A little cancer that is missed in the human body can end up destroying so much. That's why it's the surgeon's goal to do his best to remove all the cancer. That's every bit as important when it's spiritual cancer you're dealing with. It's important to do your best to get rid of all of it.

That's what God seems to be saying to His ancient people in our word for today from the Word of God in Numbers 33:55. God has commanded the Jews to drive out all of the pagan tribes in the Promised Land - the land God had promised to His people centuries before. Knowing that they would be tempted to obey that command only partially, God said, "If you do not drive out the inhabitants of the land, those you allow to remain will become barbs in your eyes and thorns in your sides. They will give you trouble in the land where you will live."

And that's exactly what happened. The Israelites removed some of the cancer of idolatrous and immoral cultures - but not all of it. And those they didn't remove kept coming back to attack them for generations to come. Worse than that, the ancient Jews began to be attracted to some of the culture they were supposed to get rid of - their women, their music, their customs, their gods. The compromises that came from not getting all the cancer ended up bringing down the judgment of God on them, and ultimately even cost them their land.

What God calls for in His children today - men and women purchased with the blood of the Son of God - is a radical "sin-ectomy." Zero tolerance for the actions and the attitudes that cost God's Son His life. The sins we hang onto, the sins we only partially deal with are going to be "barbs" and "thorns" that will give us trouble for the rest of our lives. Incomplete repentance is like partial cancer surgery - leaving behind just enough to kill you later.

Could it be that there is a corner in your life that is, if you're honest, a stubborn holdout to the Lordship of Jesus Christ? Maybe it's that bitterness, that problem with telling the truth, maybe an out-of-control tongue, your self-centeredness, your self-reliance, maybe just a negative or critical attitude.

It may be a sin that has plagued you for years - you've tolerated it, excused it, blamed others for it, justified it, and even repented of it - a little. But you've never burned all your bridges to that sin, you've never set up your life as if you'll never do it again, you've never made yourself accountable to someone. You've never let Jesus break your heart over what you've been doing to Him when you do that. You've left just enough of that sin - that cancer - to make you sick and suck the life out of you.

The cancer of our sin demands radical surgery - the kind that says, "Lord, I want to get it all this time! I'm holding nothing back. Do what You died to do, and set me free from this!" And claim God's powerful promise as your own promise - "For sin (that's the sin that has infected your life for so long) shall not be your master." (Romans 6:14)

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Make Today Count

Orville Kelly was informed two years ago that he had terminal cancer. He and his wife went home to cry -- to die. Should they keep it a secret? They prayed. The answer was that they should play about it. So they decided to give a big party. They invited all their friends.

During the festivities, Orville held up his hand to make an announcement: “You may have wondered why I called you all together. This is a cancer party. I have been told I have terminal cancer. Then my wife and I realized we are all terminal. We decided to start a new organization. It is called the M.T.C. -- Make Today Count. You are all charter members.”

Since that time the organization has grown across the country. Orville has been too busy to die, pointing out the way we Christians are to play into the jaws of death -- singing, loving, not losing a minute from “the joy the world cannot give nor take away.”

The Tale Of The Tardy Oxcart

Charles R. Swindoll, Word, p. 37.

Truth That Transforms: Richard John Neuhaus

Seven years ago, my friend Richard Neuhaus lay near death. Doctors told him a few months before that he had intestinal cancer. Surgery to remove the tumor had not gone well. As he puts it, it was "an unspeakable mess."

He started to hemorrhage right after coming out of surgery. So, the doctors had to open him up again and risk his dying on the table. Fortunately -- providentially -- Neuhaus survived. Then, the next night, while lying in his room, he was "jerked into an utterly lucid state of awareness." He sensed that there were two "presences" there with him. And he heard someone say, "Everything is ready now."

My friend has never doubted that he was visited by angels that night, who were prepared to take him home. But he was allowed to stay here, and I think God graciously did that because there is still so much we have to learn from Father Neuhaus.

For nearly four decades, Richard John Neuhaus has been setting an example of how Christian faith can transform not only individuals, but society as well. In the 1960s, the Canadian-born minister was the pastor of a mostly black and Hispanic church in Brooklyn. His commitment to biblical standards of freedom and equality led him to become an active participant in the Civil Rights movement, marching alongside Martin Luther King.

In the 1970s, Neuhaus, then a Lutheran pastor, was one of the first religious leaders to denounce both the Supreme Court's decision in Roe V. Wade, and the direction that America's embrace of abortion was heading.

In the 1980s, as people denounced the increasing role of Christians in public life, Neuhaus wrote what has now become a classic, The Naked Public Square. In it, he argued that the belief that America is a "secular society" is both "demonstrably false" and "exceedingly dangerous" to the health of American democracy.

In the nineties, Neuhaus worked with other Christians, including me, to point out the perilous state of American democracy. His magazine, First Things, featured a controversial symposium called "The End of Democracy?" that challenged the judiciary's usurpation of functions the Founders intended for "We the People" working through our elected representatives.

That symposium led to a joint declaration entitled "We Hold These Truths." Fourteen Christian leaders, both Protestant and Catholic, wrote that if American self-government was to survive, it would have to adhere to the moral truths of the Declaration of Independence.

We pointed to the "bitter consequences" of separating liberty from moral truths on abortion, crime, drug abuse, pornography, family disintegration, and neglect of the poor.

Neuhaus is one of those intellectual leaders whom I have been talking about in recent days -- the ones who are leading a Christian counter-attack against the entrenched secular mindset in academia and other centers of cultural influence. His powerful books and articles have earned him the title of "the modern-day C. S. Lewis," and his writings are being widely read across America.

Neuhaus will be a keynote speaker at our Wilberforce Forum conference in Chicago this coming June. God in his sovereignty is raising up some mighty warriors like Neuhaus -- armed with a biblical view of life and a keen intellect to contend for Christian truth. And this is one reason I think we'll experience a great Christian renewal in this century.

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For further reference:

Cox, Harvey. "Putting God Back in Politics."(Review of Richard John Neuhaus, The Naked Public Square.) The New York Times, 26 August 1984; Section 7, Page 11.

Neuhaus, Richard John. The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1985.

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The Cancer Breakthrough

Romans 6:23

It's the word you hope you'll never hear when you're in your doctor's office - cancer. But recently there's been a beautiful four-letter word that may go with that ugly word. It's the word "cure." The possible breakthroughs have to do with one of the greatest killers of women - breast cancer. But the discoveries may turn out to open up ways to cure other cancers, too. This entirely new approach to fighting cancer - one that has shown promising results in lengthening the lives of terminally ill cancer patients - has been described as "attacking cancer at its genetic roots." The gene is called HER-2, and it produces this protein on the surface of cells that ultimately helps accelerate that abnormal growth that becomes cancer. Scientists have now developed a treatment that attacks this genetic malfunction that causes some cancers. One researcher offers hope to millions who have cancer or who may develop cancer when he says, "If we understand what is broken in the malignant cell, we may be able to fix it." They're calling this one of the hottest areas of cancer research. And it makes sense - stop the cancer by stopping its genetic root.

Well, I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A WORD WITH YOU today about "The Cancer Breakthrough."

Now you may be one of the blessed people like me who when you hear about cancer, you can say, "Not me." I wish I could say that about the cancer that infects all of us - the deadliest cancer there is. I guess we might call it "heart cancer." It's that spiritual cancer in the human heart that causes so much hurt and guilt and shame, and brokenness. The Bible calls it sin - middle letter: "I." When Pat Riley took over as coach of the New York Knicks some years ago, he said their problem was a disease they all had - "the disease of me." Actually, it's a disease we all have.

We were created by God to live life His way. According to the Bible, we've all said, "No, no. Not God's way. My way." That's the root of our deadly spiritual cancer. And it's terminal. No matter how religious or how nice we are, God makes it clear that "the wages of our sin is death" (Romans 6:23) - that's death as in being eternally cut off from God, His life, His love.

This is the cancer that devastates our self-respect, our family, the people we love the most - and often hurt the most - our inner peace, our eternity. And like mankind's battle against physical cancer, the battle against this "disease of me" has been going on for a long time.

Romans 7:15, our word for today from the Word of God: "What I want to do, I do not do. But what I hate I do." Sound familiar? That's our losing battle against this dark disease in our heart. The writer of these words is desperate for a cure, and he asks, "Who will rescue me from this body of death?" (Romans 7:24) Just like us, he's found no cure that can get at the root cause of all the dark things that come out of us.

Then comes the announcement of the cancer breakthrough. As this fellow sinner asks, "who will rescue me?" He answers, "Thanks be to God, through Jesus Christ our Lord!" Jesus has pioneered the cure for this spiritual cancer that has seemed so unstoppable, so incurable. He shed His blood on the cross, absorbed all the sin, all the punishment, and attacked the root causes of the actions and the attitudes we hate - and broke the power of sin by taking all its punishment.

So many people - maybe even people you know - have opened their lives to Jesus and found forgiveness and moral victory that is changing their lives. It can be yours today if you'll tell Jesus you're trusting Him to do that for you. If you want to begin this relationship with Him, I want to send you the booklet I wrote about it called "Yours For Life" if you'll let me know you're ready.

The "disease of me" is ravaging spiritual cancer. It's terminal, but the cure is within your reach. The only reason you'd go one more day still dying is if you refuse to reach out to Jesus for the cure.

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Unanswered Prayer

Job 30:20

How can a person’s faith be maintained when it seems like God hasn’t answered important prayers?

The day will forever be imprinted on my mind. It was the Monday after Thanksgiving in 1990. My husband, Don Stamps, had been having stomach problems. The gastroenterologist had given him several tests to try to determine the problem. We were to call the doctor on Monday afternoon to find out the results.

However, when the doctor called us on Monday morning, we knew it meant the news was not good. Cancer. The dreaded diagnosis of the 20th century. We clung to each other and cried. How could this be? We had one year left to finish the study notes for the Full Life Study Bible. We had been obedient to God in starting the project while we were missionaries in Brazil eight years before.

Surely, the diagnosis was wrong. If it was right, God would heal Don to bring honor and glory to His name.

The weeks and months that followed were a haze of surgeries and radiation and chemotherapy treatments. Don continued to write the study notes when he could. He worked at his desk with a machine pumping liquid food through a feeding tube into his body. On the other side of his desk was a large plastic wastebasket where he could vomit the bile that continued to rise from his cancerous digestive system. I continued to type the study notes and meet the deadlines for Zondervan Publishing House.

People all around the world were praying for my husband.

One Sunday morning I was sitting by myself on the last pew in my home church. Don was too sick to be there. The doctor had told us a few days before that they had done all they could. If God did not heal him, it was just a matter of time. My future looked bleak. Suddenly in that service, I felt an unbelievable peace flow through my spirit. Whatever happened, I could trust God for Don’s future, my future and the future of our three children.

In the month that followed, Don finished the study notes, and we watched him die. He did not waver. He said with Job, "Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him" (Job 13:15). Watching him trust God, my teen-agers and I were able to trust God for our future.

At times I was concerned that my children would turn away from God because our prayers for their dad’s healing went unanswered. I have watched as each has answered the call of God to serve overseas, proclaiming the good news that God can be trusted with our lives. My oldest unmarried son, Toby, is a cartographer. He recently left to spend at least two years in a sensitive country that needs the gospel. My youngest son, Todd, and his wife, Leslie, and son, Andrew, are in school preparing for missions. Tiffany, my 23-year-old daughter, is in Israel teaching in a Christian school.

We have had questions about prayer, but God’s grace has been sufficient (2 Corinthians 12:9). We have learned that God is faithful even when our prayers seem to be unanswered. As I have gone to the Word of God for answers, some of Don’s study notes have led me to the Scriptures that I needed. In the article on divine healing, he wrote, "Know that God’s delays in answering prayers or not answering are not necessarily denials of those requests. Sometimes God has a larger purpose in mind which, when realized, results in greater glory of God and in good for us. Realize that if you are a committed Christian, God will never forsake you or forget you. He loves you so much that He has engraved you on the palms of His hands."

Isaiah 55:8,9 says, "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts."

Only eternity will tell how God answered those prayers for my husband’s healing.

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Linda Stamps-Dissmore is Women’s Ministries director of the Oklahoma District

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Mirror, Mirror On the Wall

When I look into the mirror I see a survivor. I don’t think about anything but living. Well, that’s not true because the farther I get from cancer, the more hopes and dreams I let creep in. When I looked into the mirror during my illness, I wasn’t that bald person staring back at me. I didn’t recognize myself. My body had let me down, but I didn’t want my soul to escape. People responded to the way I looked. I hated the pity I saw in their eyes as much as the fear. The body is back to its original state, but the soul has taken on the wonderful layers of a survivor. Now I celebrate Bad-hair days Bushy eyebrows Stubbled legs with razor burn. I celebrate Blended flavors of peanut butter and chocolate Sweet lemonade through a straw Greasy hamburgers with bacon. I celebrate Whining children Shouting and arguing Pulsating music and barking dogs. I celebrate Making plans Dreaming The hoping that goes with having a future. I celebrate life.

To Change It Would Make It Worse

Mark 9:24

My mother would have been 59 back on the first of March, and would have made 59 look like 45. She was a godly, sweet woman, yet she never saw 57 due to her death from colon cancer.

We watched as a family as God gathered her home to Himself. There were countless tears shed as the cancer progressed slowly for six years. There were numerous questions -- questions that never got answered -- questions that, in many ways, should not and cannot be answered until the coming day of the Lord Christ. Such answers would inevitably extinguish faith, and so we continue to live by faith (Habakkuk 2:4).

In the past two-plus years since her death, there has been much soul-searching that has included occasions of near breakage of personal faith. I am a professor of theology, but theology professors are not impenetrable fortresses of unshakable faith, and no amount of academic training can prepare someone for the pain that is felt when a treasured family member wilts under the weight of such a disease. What textbook can prepare a son to watch his mother essentially starve to death, withering to a mere 82 pounds?

Those who have wrestled through the suffering of a loved one know full well that platitudes are of little comfort in the face of death. The Lord summons His people to study His character and nature as revealed to us in His living word in such circumstances. What is longed for is not the word of man, but the Words of the Lord God. Like Job, we long for Him to speak (Job 38-42).

Yet at the same time it can be difficult for me to flee to Him, given that this was, after all, His plan for her days before there was one of them (Psalm 139). I may delight in His sovereignty, but do I believe in His goodness? Is He truly good? How can goodness delight in suffering? God is good, and all things work together for good to those who love and are called by Him (Romans 8:28). But when what we know doesn’t square with what we see and experience, there is a battle in the dark night of the soul. It brings to mind the honest cry of Mark 9:24, “I believe, help my unbelief.”

In a seminary chapel service a few months ago, Southern Seminary President R. Albert Mohler Jr. made a statement that was tremendously helpful to me as I have been thinking and praying through the issues of God’s goodness vis-à-vis His wisdom. He asserted, “To change it would make it worse.” To change it would make it worse. In other words, to elicit a change or to remove the painful experience, were we able to, would injure God’s purposes in and for suffering. This is “Plan A,” and to alter it in any way would be to make it less “good” and therefore, in the end, less glorious. This is such a sensible statement, and an almost blinding flash of the obvious for those who take delight in the sovereignty of the Lord God.

Such an acknowledgment of God’s sovereignty, in my mind, is essential for an understanding of His goodness. But it is much easier, I would suggest, to acknowledge the Lord’s sovereignty than His goodness and wisdom when faced with suffering. Saying “God is in control” is indeed a great comfort and truth worthy of thoughtful reflection. Yet it is much more difficult to say, “It is good and wise for my mother to die of cancer.” What I mean by this is that for one to assert the Lord’s goodness and wisdom in the midst of such a circumstance is to say, “God is in control, and since His actions are good and wise, her death is good and wise in His sight.” In the end, my own mother’s cancer will be seen to have been a good and wise thing. As God’s child, I must believe that. The Scriptures teach me this. Yet grief and suffering can sometimes make it seem that God is not good, though He is fully good. I cannot merely acknowledge His sovereignty at the cost of His goodness or wisdom; I must also acknowledge His goodness and wisdom in this circumstance, since He is all of these things.

Yet, such is extremely difficult. While I do believe in God’s wisdom, there is gnawing disbelief, particularly on special days such as her birthday. “How can this work for good?” I ask. I do not yet know. Still, in faith I do assert that to change it would indeed make it worse. We exist somewhere between the making and the embracing of that assertion. Theologian John Frame pointedly crystallizes a central point that I personally must reckon with. He writes, “[God] declares His goodness, and He demonstrates it richly. [But] we don’t merely know the bare fact that God is good; we know Him.” Thus, I must seek Him, and at the same time am being upheld and guarded by the very One whose goodness and wisdom I may doubt, yet at the same time, believe.

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Barry Joslin is assistant professor of Christian theology at Boyce College of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.

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[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #5271]

Health Watch: Skin Cancer - An Undeclared Epidemic

Skin cancer is the most prevalent of all cancers. Estimates vary on its occurrence, but it is estimated that approximately 700,000 Americans develop skin cancer every year.

The principal cause of skin cancer is almost universally accepted by medical experts to be overexposure to sunlight, especially when it results in sunburn and blistering. Other less important factors would include: repeated medical and industrial x-ray exposure; scarring from diseases or burns; occupational exposure to such compounds as coal and arsenic; and family history.

Prevention is a matter of guarding the skin AGAINST known causes. Since the sun and its ultraviolet rays would seem to be the main culprit, the most effective preventive method is sun avoidance. Limit the exposure of the skin to harmful rays by covering up and using sun-screens with at least a 15 SPF rating. Men should be in the habit of applying sun-screen immediately after shaving to maximize daily protection — winter or summer.

It is a simple routine to inspect your body for any skin changes. If any growth, mole, sore or discoloration appears suddenly or begins to change, see your dermatologist. In fact, just as you get your annual physical with your internist, a periodic physical body scan by your dermatologist is prudent. I have it done every two years and in fact just found a small cancer the size of a pencil eraser that was easily removed in an office procedure.

If a laboratory test reveals that an area of the skin is cancerous, the dermatologist has an array of treatments to choose from to suit the needs of the individual patient. In the treatment of any skin cancers, early detection and removal is the best defense. Fortunately, skin cancers are relatively easy to detect and most can be quickly cured. Even malignant melanoma, if caught in its early stages, can be treated successfully.

The American Academy of Dermatology recommends that one helpful way to guard against melanoma/skin cancer is to do a periodic skin self-examination. Get familiar with your skin and your own pattern of moles, freckles and beauty marks. Be alert to changes in number, size, shape and color of pigmented areas. If any changes occur, call your dermatologist.

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Paul Sullivan is a consultant for Zigler Training Systems. Look for future Health Watch articles from Paul.

Professional Golfer Commits Life To Christ While Battling Cancer

Mark Lye seemed to have the perfect life. He played 18 years on the PGA Tour, winning tournaments on three different continents, before launching a successful television career. But at age 50, a battle with cancer helped him realize that all the success was meaningless apart from a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

Lye's path to salvation began in the 1980s when God brought several Christians across his path, including fellow golfer Steve Jones. Though Lye was largely focused on material concerns at the time, he remembers feeling a certain curiosity about Christians.

“I remember Steve Jones in the early '80s,” Lye recounted. “He was a Christian. I said, 'Man, what's going on?’ He said, 'Christ is my Savior.’ I said, 'Well, I can't believe that's the way you feel.’ He said, 'Yeah, maybe you'll understand someday.'“

Through two decades of golf, Lye remained unconcerned about spiritual matters. At one point, he and his wife, Lisa, began attending church. But, for him, it was merely an activity unaccompanied by any real commitment to Christ.

“I'd been only scratching the surface for a long time,” he said. “We had been going to different churches for a few years, and we decided to go to the First Baptist Church of Naples [in Florida] and commit there, but it was only a surface type of commitment to me. Even though I had thought in a religious way a lot of times, I'd never really committed or anything.”

Life seemed to be under control for Lye. He began a golf broadcasting career in the early 1990s and enjoyed a comfortable lifestyle for the next decade.

Then tragedy struck in 2002. Lye was diagnosed with cancer, and doctors informed him that the prognosis was uncertain. Broken and frightened about his future, Lye journeyed to the empty sanctuary of First Baptist Naples the next day and committed his life to Jesus Christ.

“The day after I got my analysis from the doctor ... I just went to the sanctuary at First Baptist and I just said, 'I know You've been watching me, God. And today's the day.’ I'd always thought about it for a long time, but I said, 'This is the kick in the pants that I need, and I'm just going to commit full boar right now from this day on.'

“I finally admitted to Him and myself that I had made so many mistakes. You never think you're a sinner. You think that you've done everything right, but you're just kidding yourself. ... You start looking and you start reading things, and you say, 'My gosh, I've been a bad sinner for all this time.'

“I told God ... 'You can do what you want with me, but I'm there for you.’ I just made a personal commitment that day, July 3 [2002], and that was it,” Lye said.

In the months immediately following his commitment to Christ, Lye underwent major surgery and several rounds of chemotherapy. During that time, he found comfort in his newfound faith and looked to fellow believers for encouragement.

“Going through the daily rigors of the chemo and all that stuff, my sanctuary was ... in church,” Lye said. “I would just go there, just hang out and look forward to Sundays. Even though I wasn't physically able to go into the sanctuary and worship with the masses, I would lay out on the couch and watch pastor [Hayes] Wicker through the TV monitors” in the hallways.

In addition to his physical struggles, Lye also struggled with how to tell others about his commitment to Christ. But some advice from friend and 12-time PGA Tour winner Paul Azinger convinced Lye to make his Christianity public.

“A few days after I made that commitment I called [Azinger] up and told him and he encouraged me along and gave me some guidance and told me what to do as far as announcing it. With my Golf Channel job, it was kind of like, 'Do I want anyone to know this? That I have cancer, that I'm a Christian?’ He said, 'No, you come out with it,'“ Lye said of Azinger's counsel.

Lye's physical condition has improved greatly during the past year. Cancer treatments have proved so successful that Lye has resumed both his broadcasting with the Golf Channel and his golfing career on the Champions Tour (formerly the Senior PGA Tour). Much to Lye's delight, there is a network of more than 50 Christians on the Champions Tour who meet weekly for Bible study and fellowship.

“All kinds of guys and their wives are passing the Word,” he said. “Not that many on the regular PGA Tour, but there are a lot of [Christians] on this tour, the Champions Tour.”

Eighteen months have passed since Lye's initial commitment to Christ, and now his life is completely transformed. Becoming a Christian, he reflected, helped brought a new perspective on all of life.

“I'm getting on the right track,” he said. “It's a daily journey ... but I'm trying to figure things out a little bit step by step.”

Lye noted, “My jobs don't seem as life or death as they once did. My health is not such life or death as it once was. I can now deal with life ... and know that there's a big picture out there past what we're experiencing here.”

To Lye, “The golf, the job ... they're things. The important things in our lives right now [for] my wife and myself are living like Christians and doing the right things and professing to others and being involved and doing what we can. It's just a whole different way of thinking. It's a whole different way of existing.”

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Optimism Provides No Help Against Cancer

A positive attitude does not improve the chances of surviving cancer and doctors who encourage patients to keep up hope may be burdening them, according to the results of research released Monday.

Optimism made no difference in the fate of most of the 179 cancer patients that Australian researchers followed over five years. Only eight people were still living by the time the study ended in 2001.

All the patients studied were suffering from a common form of lung cancer.

Although the study was small and dealt with a kind of cancer that offers little chance for survival (about 12 percent of patients live beyond five years), health experts say it is the first scientifically valid look at optimism and cancer. The results surprised researchers, who expected optimistic patients to live longer than their hopeless counterparts.

Patients are burdened by trying to maintain a positive outlook during their difficult situations, said researchers from the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre in Melbourne, Australia, and five other health centers in an article published Monday in the journal Cancer. The study found that optimism dimmed when patients experienced the toxic effects of cancer treatment and when they learned more about the realities of the disease.

“We should question whether it is valuable to encourage optimism if it results in the patient concealing his or her distress in the misguided belief that this will afford survival benefits,” the study's lead author Penelope Schofield wrote. “If a patients feels generally pessimistic ... it is important to acknowledge these feelings as valid and acceptable.”

Although optimism may not help cancer patients live longer, it can help patients in other ways, according to the American Cancer Society, which publishes the journal Cancer.

A positive attitude can help lead to healthier eating habits, stopping smoking, drinking less, exercising more and learning more information about one's disease and treatment options. Cancer patients have learned to live with therapy, avoid fatigue and even have returned to work, said Dr. LaMar McGinnis, senior medical consultant for the Atlanta-based society.

“It is disappointing they don't reflect on quality of life,” McGinnis said. “We did not have any illusions that optimism influences therapy but we do believe that optimism and hope does influence the quality of life a patient has.”

Do You Think I'll Ever Find God?

John 3:16

This story was written by Father John Powell, a retired professor at Loyola University in Chicago. Father Powell is advanced in years, but the story is still fresh in his mind and he confirmed that it is true, according to TruthOrFiction.com

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A TRUE STORY about an Atheist Theology Student Who Was Found by God

Some twelve years ago, I stood watching my university students file into the classroom for our first session in the Theology of Faith. That was the first day I first saw Tommy. My eyes and my mind both blinked. He was combing his long flaxen hair, which hung six inches below his shoulders.

It was the first time I had ever seen a boy with hair that long. I guess it was just coming into fashion then. I know in my mind that it isn’t what’s on your head but what’s in it that counts; but on that day I was unprepared and my emotions flipped.

I immediately filed Tommy under “S” for strange... very strange. Tommy turned out to be the “atheist in residence” in my Theology of Faith course. He constantly objected to, smirked at, or whined about the possibility of an unconditionally loving Father-God. We lived with each other in relative peace for one semester, although I admit he was for me at times a serious pain in the back pew.

When he came up at the end of the course to turn in his final exam, he asked in a slightly cynical tone: “Do you think I’ll ever find God?”

I decided instantly on a little shock therapy. “No!” I said very emphatically.

“Oh,” he responded, “I thought that was the product you were pushing.”

I let him get five steps from the classroom door and then called out: “Tommy! I don’t think you’ll ever find him, but I am absolutely certain that He will find you!” He shrugged a little and left my class and my life.

I felt slightly disappointed at the thought that he had missed my clever line: “He will find you!” At least I thought it was clever. Later I heard that Tommy had graduated and I was duly grateful.

Then a sad report, I heard that Tommy had terminal cancer. Before I could search him out, he came to see me. When he walked into my office, his body was very badly wasted, and the long hair had all fallen out as a result of chemotherapy. But his eyes were bright and his voice was firm, for the first time, I believe. “Tommy, I’ve thought about you so often. I hear you are sick!” I blurted out.

“Oh, yes, very sick. I have cancer in both lungs. It’s a matter of weeks.”

“Can you talk about it, Tom?”

“Sure, what would you like to know?”

“What’s it like to be only twenty-four and dying?”

“Well, it could be worse.”

“Like what?”

“Well, like being fifty and having no values or ideals, like being fifty and thinking that booze, seducing women, and making money are the real ‘biggies’ in life.”

I began to look through my mental file cabinet under “S” where I had filed Tommy as strange. (It seems as though everybody I try to reject by classification God sends back into my life to educate me.)

"But what I really came to see you about,” Tom said, “is something you said to me on the last day of class.” (He remembered!) He continued, “I asked you if you thought I would ever find God and you said, ‘No!’ which surprised me. Then you said, ‘But he will find you.’ I thought about that a lot, even though my search for God was hardly intense at that time. (My “clever” line. He thought about that a lot!) But when the doctors removed a lump from my groin and told me that it was malignant, then I got serious about locating God. And when the malignancy spread into my vital organs, I really began banging bloody fists against the bronze doors of heaven.

"But God did not come out. In fact, nothing happened. Did you ever try anything for a long time with great effort and with no success? You get psychologically glutted, fed up with trying. And then you quit.

"Well, one day I woke up, and instead of throwing a few more futile appeals over that high brick wall to a God who may be or may not be there, I just quit. I decided that I didn’t really care... about God, about an afterlife, or anything like that. I decided to spend what time I had left doing something more profitable. I thought about you and your class and I remembered something else you had said: ‘The essential sadness is to go through life without loving. But it would be almost equally sad to go through life and leave this world without ever telling those you loved that you had loved them.’ So I began with the hardest one: my Dad. He was reading the newspaper when I approached him.”

“Dad”...

“Yes, what?” he asked without lowering the newspaper.

“Dad, I would like to talk with you.”

“Well, talk.”

“I mean... It’s really important.”

The newspaper came down three slow inches. “What is it?”

“Dad, I love you. I just wanted you to know that.” Tom smiled at me and said with obvious satisfaction, as though he felt a warm and secret joy flowing inside of him: “The newspaper fluttered to the floor. Then my father did two things I could never remember him ever doing before. He cried and he hugged me.

And we talked all night, even though he had to go to work the next morning. It felt so good to be close to my father, to see his tears, to feel his hug, to hear him say that he loved me. “It was easier with my mother and little brother. They cried with me, too, and we hugged each other, and started saying real nice things to each other. We shared the things we had been keeping secret for so many years. I was only sorry about one thing: that I had waited so long. Here I was just beginning to open up to all the people I had actually been close to.

“Then, one day I turned around and God was there. He didn’t come to me when I pleaded with him. I guess I was like an animal trainer holding out a hoop, ‘C’mon, jump through.’ ‘C’mon, I’ll give you three days... three weeks.’ Apparently God does things in his own way and at his own hour. “But the important thing is that he was there. He found me. You were right. He found me even after I stopped looking for him.”

“Tommy,” I practically gasped, “I think you are saying something very important and much more universal than you realize. To me, at least, you are saying that the surest way to find God is not to make him a private possession, a problem solver, or an instant consolation in time of need, but rather by opening to love. You know, the Apostle John said that. He said God is love, and anyone who lives in love is living with God and God is living in him.’ Tom, could I ask you a favor? You know, when I had you in class you were a real pain. But (laughingly) you can make it all up to me now. Would you come into my present Theology of Faith course and tell them what you have just told me? If I told them the same thing it wouldn’t be half as effective as if you were to tell them.”

“Oooh... I was ready for you, but I don’t know if I’m ready for your class.”

“Tom, think about it. If and when you are ready, give me a call.” In a few days Tommy called, said he was ready for the class, that he wanted to do that for God and for me. So we scheduled a date. However, he never made it.

He had another appointment, far more important than the one with me and my class. Of course, his life was not really ended by his death, only changed.

He made the great step from faith into vision. He found a life far more beautiful than the eye of man has ever seen or the ear of man has ever heard or the mind of man has ever imagined.

Before he died, we talked one last time. “I’m not going to make it to your class,” he said.

“I know, Tom.”

“Will you tell them for me? Will you... tell the whole world for me?”

“I will, Tom. I’ll tell them. I’ll do my best.”

So, to all of you who have been kind enough to hear this simple statement about love, thank you for listening. And to you, Tommy, somewhere in the sunlit, verdant hills of heaven: “I told them, Tommy...as best I could.”

Draw Me Near

John 11:25

There is a place in my Bible that is prone to be frequently revisited. In fact it is quite often the place I find in front of me when I open the book. And every time it happens, like a scent that uproots a potent memory, I recall the story behind the pages.

Some time ago, between classes in college, I was reading in a park when the skies shifted without warning and the pounding rain left a permanent bookmark on a chapter in John. The pages have long since dried, leaving the paper wavy and wrinkled, and easy to turn to. But something about the lasting impressions of the rain has also impressed that day into my mind. (No doubt, a fitting metaphor of life.) The hardest rains always leave indelible imprints.

In THE PROBLEM WITH PAIN, C.S. Lewis refers to pain as God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world. Convincingly, he explains what we know to be true of God and evil, suffering and Christ. Years later, in the pages of A GRIEF OBSERVED, he describes watching his wife lose her battle with cancer and wrestling with God through the pain. He writes as a man who bitterly, tortuously, and intimately knows what he knows to be true of God and evil, suffering and Christ. Writes Lewis, “Your bid for God or no God, for a good God or the Cosmic Sadist, for eternal life or nonentity, will not be serious if nothing much is staked on it. And you will never discover how serious it was until the stakes are raised horribly high.” He continues, “Nothing will shake a man — or at any rate a man like me — out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself.”

I believe the first time I really and fearfully looked my faith in the eyes was while I was pounding my fists against the chest of God, half demanding, half pleading, to know why my father was dying. Those indelible days gave new meaning to Paul's admonition, “Work out your salvation in fear and trembling.” In our prayers we cry, and in our hymns we sing, “Draw me nearer, nearer, nearer blessed Lord, To the cross where Thou hast died. Draw me nearer, nearer, nearer blessed Lord, To Thy precious, bleeding side.” But when the stakes are at their highest, do we mean it? Have we counted that cost?

Just before Paul admonishes the Philippian church to work out their salvation in fear and trembling, he describes the cost of Christ. “Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death — even death on a cross!” (2:6-8). In his life, his body, his very attitude, Christ carried the cost of our sin, our dire need and our inability to draw near to God.

There was a point in my dad's pain when he said to me, “I had no idea how Christ suffered.” There is something about our pain that can lead us to the foot of the cross, to the utmost expression of love wrought with stripes and sorrow. As the hymn continues, “There are depths of love that I cannot know, Till I cross the narrow sea; There are heights of joy that I may not reach, Till I rest in peace with Thee.”

It is fitting that the pages marked by rain in my Bible tell the story of the death and resurrection of Lazarus. As Mary and Martha and Jesus wept, the rain seemed appropriate. But I remember clearly being struck with another thought: Surely, it was Lazarus who got the lesser end of the deal. To a crowd of people mourning death and loss, Jesus proclaimed radically, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies” (John 11:25). While Jesus spoke to the mourning crowd about true life, Lazarus was truly living. I wondered that day how Lazarus felt about coming back. He had seen the heights and depths of joy we long for on earth; he had been drawn near to the almighty God. For Lazarus, humanity's greatest prayer had been answered. And then it began to rain, ever etching that thought into my Bible and my consciousness.

__________

*

Don't Waste Your Cancer

Job 2:7

Editor's note: John Piper wrote this column in February before he had prostrate surgery. The surgery went well, and doctors reported finding no cancer as spreading to surrounding tissue. That is the “best news possible” in terms of life expectancy, according to a statement on his ministry's website.

MINNEAPOLIS (BP) -- I write this on the eve of prostate surgery. I believe in God’s power to heal -- by miracle and by medicine. I believe it is right and good to pray for both kinds of healing. Cancer is not wasted when it is healed by God. He gets the glory and that is why cancer exists. So not to pray for healing may waste your cancer. But healing is not God’s plan for everyone. And there are many other ways to waste your cancer. I am praying for myself and for you that we will not waste this pain.

• You will waste your cancer if you do not believe it is designed for you by God.

It will not do to say that God only uses our cancer but does not design it. What God permits, He permits for a reason. And that reason is His design. If God foresees molecular developments becoming cancer, He can stop it or not. If He does not, He has a purpose. Since He is infinitely wise, it is right to call this purpose a design. Satan is real and causes many pleasures and pains. But he is not ultimate. So when he strikes Job with boils (Job 2:7), Job attributes it ultimately to God (2:10) and the inspired writer agrees: “They ... comforted him for all the evil that the Lord had brought upon him” (Job 42:11). If you don’t believe your cancer is designed for you by God, you will waste it.

• You will waste your cancer if you believe it is a curse and not a gift.

“There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1). “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us” (Galatians 3:13). “There is no enchantment against Jacob, no divination against Israel” (Numbers 23:23). “The Lord God is a sun and shield; the Lord bestows favor and honor. No good thing does he withhold from those who walk uprightly” (Psalm 84:11).

• You will waste your cancer if you seek comfort from your odds rather than from God.

The design of God in your cancer is not to train you in the rationalistic, human calculation of odds. The world gets comfort from their odds. Not Christians. Some count their chariots (percentages of survival) and some count their horses (side effects of treatment), but we trust in the name of the Lord our God (Psalm 20:7). God’s design is clear from 2 Corinthians 1:9, “We felt that we had received the sentence of death. But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead.” The aim of God in your cancer (among a thousand other good things) is to knock props out from under our hearts so that we rely utterly on Him.

• You will waste your cancer if you refuse to think about death.

We will all die, if Jesus postpones his return. Not to think about what it will be like to leave this life and meet God is folly. Ecclesiastes 7:2 says, “It is better to go to the house of mourning [a funeral] than to go to the house of feasting, for this is the end of all mankind, and the living will lay it to heart.” How can you lay it to heart if you won’t think about it? Psalm 90:12 says, “Teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.” Numbering your days means thinking about how few there are and that they will end. How will you get a heart of wisdom if you refuse to think about this? What a waste, if we do not think about death.

• You will waste your cancer if you think that “beating” cancer means staying alive rather than cherishing Christ.

Satan’s and God’s designs in your cancer are not the same. Satan designs to destroy your love for Christ. God designs to deepen your love for Christ. Cancer does not win if you die. It wins if you fail to cherish Christ. God’s design is to wean you off the breast of the world and feast you on the sufficiency of Christ. It is meant to help you say and feel, “I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.” And to know that therefore, “To live is Christ, and to die is gain” (Philippians 3:8; 1:21).

• You will waste your cancer if you spend too much time reading about cancer and not enough time reading about God.

It is not wrong to know about cancer. Ignorance is not a virtue. But the lure to know more and more and the lack of zeal to know God more and more is symptomatic of unbelief. Cancer is meant to waken us to the reality of God. It is meant to put feeling and force behind the command, “Let us know; let us press on to know the Lord” (Hosea 6:3). It is meant to waken us to the truth of Daniel 11:32, “The people who know their God shall stand firm and take action.” It is meant to make unshakable, indestructible oak trees out of us: “His delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers” (Psalm 1:2). What a waste of cancer if we read day and night about cancer and not about God.

• You will waste your cancer if you let it drive you into solitude instead of deepen your relationships with manifest affection.

When Epaphroditus brought the gifts to Paul sent by the Philippian church he became ill and almost died. Paul tells the Philippians, “He has been longing for you all and has been distressed because you heard that he was ill” (Philippians 2:26-27). What an amazing response! It does not say they were distressed that he was ill, but that he was distressed because they heard he was ill. That is the kind of heart God is aiming to create with cancer: a deeply affectionate, caring heart for people. Don’t waste your cancer by retreating into yourself.

• You will waste your cancer if you grieve as those who have no hope.

Paul used this phrase in relation to those whose loved ones had died: “We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope” (1 Thessalonians 4:13). There is a grief at death. Even for the believer who dies, there is temporary loss -- loss of body, and loss of loved ones here, and loss of earthly ministry. But the grief is different -- it is permeated with hope. “We would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord” (2 Corinthians 5:8). Don’t waste your cancer grieving as those who don’t have this hope.

• You will waste your cancer if you treat sin as casually as before.

Are your besetting sins as attractive as they were before you had cancer? If so you are wasting your cancer. Cancer is designed to destroy the appetite for sin. Pride, greed, lust, hatred, unforgiveness, impatience, laziness, procrastination -- all these are the adversaries that cancer is meant to attack. Don’t just think of battling against cancer. Also think of battling with cancer. All these things are worse enemies than cancer. Don’t waste the power of cancer to crush these foes. Let the presence of eternity make the sins of time look as futile as they really are. “What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses or forfeits himself?” (Luke 9:25).

• You will waste your cancer if you fail to use it as a means of witness to the truth and glory of Christ.

Christians are never anywhere by divine accident. There are reasons for why we wind up where we do. Consider what Jesus said about painful, unplanned circumstances: “They will lay their hands on you and persecute you, delivering you up to the synagogues and prisons, and you will be brought before kings and governors for my name’s sake. This will be your opportunity to bear witness” (Luke 21:12 -13). So it is with cancer. This will be an opportunity to bear witness. Christ is infinitely worthy. Here is a golden opportunity to show that He is worth more than life. Don’t waste it.

Remember you are not left alone. You will have the help you need. “My God will supply every need of yours according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:19).

[see also HolwickID #1316]

Through Battle With Cancer, He Experiences God's Sovereign Care

Romans 8:26

Just 11 days before Christmas, Don Whitney received three words from his doctor that no one wants to hear: “You have cancer.”

Whitney, associate professor of biblical spirituality and author of numerous books on prayer and other Christian disciplines, was stunned. There were no signs that anything was amiss in his body -- no pain, no bleeding, no mysterious lumps. He felt perfectly healthy.

The news came from a routine medical checkup that included a colonoscopy.

“I think I was kind of numb at first. I tried to ask some questions and I tried to write down [the doctor’s] answers because I knew I wouldn’t remember. My hand was quivering as I tried to write down what he said,” Whitney recounted.

“My mind was tumbling [with] a thousand things running through my head. I was trying to stay with the subject at hand and ask him questions [such as] ‘What’s next?’ and ‘How bad is this?’ At the same time I was a thousand miles away and was thinking, ‘What about my family?’ I had just finished my first semester [on the faculty] at the seminary and I was thinking, ‘Am I going to die? Am I soon to stand before the Lord?’

“I thought about my little girl and my wife Caffy and my mother who is a widow and I am an only child. It was sobering.... I wondered if there would be chemotherapy and even if after the surgery they would just sew me up and say there was nothing they could do.”

After two surgeries for colon cancer and a painful recovery period, Whitney is cancer-free five months after the initial diagnosis, and doctors have given him a healthy long-term prognosis. Early on, however, the type of cancer he had and complications rendered his future uncertain. Colon cancer can be a “silent killer” because it typically does not manifest any symptoms until it has reached an incurable stage.

“I had no problems, no pain, no symptoms,” he said. “I was absolutely shocked.... The doctor said if I had put the colonoscopy off until May, he wouldn’t have been able to save my life.”

It seemed that Whitney would face a grim waiting game; it was near the end of the year and Whitney’s surgeon warned him that most, if not all, operating rooms in Louisville would be booked until January. As the doctor called around local hospitals to find an open operating room, Whitney paced the floor in the doctor’s office and prayed. God’s hand of providence clearly trumped what seemed to be a negative set of logistical circumstances, he said.

“We got the last operating room in the city of Louisville for 2005 and surgery was set for six days later,” Whitney said.

Whitney had surgery on Dec. 20 and spent 10 days in the hospital. He went home in late December but soon developed complications and underwent a second surgery, weathering another week in the hospital and a difficult recovery period.

Despite complications from the second surgery, Whitney began to heal and was able to participate in the annual collegiate conference at Southern. He continues to regain strength and has resumed his full course load of teaching at Southern and speaking engagements for his ministry, The Center for Biblical Spirituality.

Colon cancer is the No. 2 killer among the various types of cancer, and Whitney says he is grateful he had a routine colonoscopy which led to the discovery of his cancer. He urges all men over 50 to have the procedure.

“Ninety percent of the people who die from colon cancer would not die from it if they had a colonoscopy,” he said. “Everybody should have one when they are 50. If they have a relative who had colon cancer, they should get it at 40.”

Whitney said his cancer caused him to reflect more deeply on biblical truths regarding life and eternity. He credits a strong belief in the sovereignty of God and the prayers of fellow believers for strengthening him through the ordeal. Whitney and friend John Piper, pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, exchanged e-mails to encourage each other after doctors discovered that Piper had cancer on the day of Whitney’s surgery.

“It makes you realize your life is a vapor,” Whitney said. “You always realize you are going to die, but when you realize that you may be at the borders of heaven, it makes you think. It has made me appreciate time with my family more, especially with my little girl.

“I have never sensed the prayers of God’s people more. There were times I was so medicated or in so much pain that all I could pray was ‘Lord, hear the prayers of Your people.’ I knew people were praying for me. I couldn’t put two thoughts together. It was a reminder of Romans 8:26-27, ‘You do not know how to pray as you ought but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us in groans too deep for words’ and prays according to God’s will for us. I was just relying on the Holy Spirit’s prayers for this.

His belief in the sovereignty of God “is one of the things that got me through,” Whitney added. “When I learned that I had cancer, it really comforted me to know that God was not surprised and that He was in control.”

Can God Beat Cancer?

Psalms 139:16

Can God beat cancer? I sat with a man at the cancer treatment center recently who asked me that question. His wife died less than a year ago from ovarian cancer. Shortly after her death he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. His prognosis is not good.

Eighteen months ago, after some unexplained weight loss, I went to see my doctor. A CT-scan revealed that I had stage IV colon cancer that had spread to my liver. The oncologist told us that it was as bad as it gets. He would later say that without treatment, I had only a few weeks to live.

I immediately started chemotherapy treatments. The cancer began to respond and, after 11 months of chemo, I had surgery to remove the affected part of the colon and a process called radio frequency ablation to kill the 25-plus tumors on my liver. While recovering from the procedure in the hospital, we were elated to get the news that they could find no trace of cancer. But two months later another CT-scan revealed the cancer has returned. I am taking chemotherapy as I write this.

So how did I answer my friend from the treatment center? Can God beat cancer? Most definitely! Is that his plan for my life? I really don’t know.

Here is what I do know. Cancer will not take one day from my life that God intends me to have, and treatment will not add one extra day to my life. Psalm 139:16 says that all my days were ordained before I was born. That gives me great perspective. God has a plan for me, and when my days are at an end I will go to my heavenly home, cancer or no cancer.

I also know that I can trust God. His knowledge and His thoughts are far greater than mine. So I chose to trust that.

When I was young, my aunt always kept a puzzle going in her family room. It was one of those with a ton of pieces, and they were always hard. The key to getting the puzzle finished was seeing the picture on the box. God sees the picture on the box in my life. I see the pieces. I trust what He sees. His plan may be to receive glory from a miraculous healing in my life, or His plan may be to mold and shape my family, my staff and others through my death. I am not smart enough to know which is best. He is. When Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego faced the fiery furnace, they told the king that if he threw them into the furnace their God would deliver them -- and even if He didn’t, they would not bow down (Daniel 3:17-18). They trusted God no matter what. Me too.

Finally, I know that God wants me to live my life with the perspective that every day counts. The psalmist prayed that God would remind him that our time here is brief and life is fleeing away (Psalm 39:4). The truth is that we all are dying and every day is precious. I want to make mine count. I want to spend my days making a difference in the lives of those God has placed around me. “Law & Order” and “CSI” just don’t seem so important anymore.

These days it is always crowded at the cancer center. It seems that cancer affects the lives of nearly everyone in one way or another. However, it is not bigger than God. God can and does beat cancer. More importantly, He uses something as ugly and awful as cancer to accomplish His will in the lives of people everywhere. He is in charge. He has a plan. I am good with that.

________

Mike Blaylock is the vice president for campus affairs at the University of Mobile in Mobile, Alabama

When Hope Is No Longer Needed

Romans 8:18

How many times have you heard, “There’s always hope.” Some would promptly reply, “You’re wrong,” when, in fact, they’re the ones who are wrong. When the Lord is part of the equation -- and He is for every truly born-again child of God -- there’s hope every single moment of every single day ... until, that is, the arrival of that day that Paul spoke of in Romans 8:18-25, when we no longer will need hope.

In those verses, the apostle wrote about “hope” of that day when “the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God” (verse 21). That is the day for which we “groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies” (verse 23b). But then Paul said that it is hope because it is something we do not yet have. “But hope that is seen is no hope at all,” he said. Then he asked, “Who hopes for what he already has?” (verse 24). Paul concluded by describing the incredible value of hope in verse 25: “But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.” What we can wait for patiently is that day when hope is no longer needed, because of the blessed reality we are experiencing.

So you see, there will be, indeed, for every believer a day when there will be no hope, and it doesn’t have to be one of those days when things finally get so bad that any optimism on your part is unrealistic. Paul linked that day, when all you hope for is fully realized, to the most amazing event of human history, which Christians around the world will be celebrating this weekend (and, actually, what the first Christians celebrated every Sunday, which they named the “Lord’s Day,” to commemorate Jesus’ resurrection.)

Paul wrote the church in Corinth, “And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men” (1 Corinthians 15:17-19). He then immediately affirmed the reality, “But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep” (verse 20). The historical fact of His resurrection guarantees our own. That makes hope a whole lot more than simply wishful thinking; that for which we hope is an absolute certainty.

I am certain that many of you find yourselves in situations that have been so difficult for so long, and you’ve hoped that they would get more bearable for so long, that you’re determined to do everything you can to refuse to even consider the possibility of things getting better because, frankly, you’re worn out from having your hopes dashed day after day after week after month after year.

Millions of families, including my own, were transported in time a couple of weeks ago back to that time when they -- like Elizabeth Edwards and her presidential candidate husband, John -- heard those ominous words “not curable but treatable.” That means that barring some medical breakthrough, the family member battling breast cancer will more than likely sooner rather than later breathe her last and slip into eternity, and all the finest physicians in the world can do is to try to prolong her life a matter of days or weeks or months and, hopefully, enhance the quality of her remaining days. Hope of survival beyond just a few years is virtually non-existent (though in my wife’s case, our doctors never dismissed the possibility, albeit extremely remote, of a miracle).

Thankfully, when we traveled that road a few years ago, we still had the hope of heaven for my beautiful wife and the hope that a full and meaningful life would still be possible for a 48-year-old man who was single for the first time in his adult life and two lovely young adult women who could no longer spend time with their mother. I am happy to report that all those hopes have been realized in our lives and, I know, in the lives of countless others who know the Risen Christ personally.

As long as we have breath, we have hope in Jesus; it is only when we breathe our last that things are hopeless -- but it is then that we need no hope, because all we could ever hope for will be fully realized in our Risen Savior.

Hallelujah! He is risen!

________

John Loudat is editor of the Baptist New Mexican, the newsjournal of the Baptist Convention of New Mexico.

Physical Deterioration

Job 23:11

Because of the nature of today’s discussion, I’ll dispense with the usual light-hearted opening.

We have some friends who at this moment are going through the trauma of dealing with cancer, chemo and all that goes with it. You may also have friends who are in the same dilemma. What do you say at a time like this? Probably this is not a time for the usual small-talk platitudes, but rather a time to listen, show you care and pray with and for them.

At times like this you wish you could sit down and talk to Job. We do have the next best thing — his book. If you are going through a difficult time of physical deterioration, you can easily become very distressed and feel like Job when he said (Job 23:3-4) “If only I knew where to find Him: if only I could go to His dwelling, I would state my case before Him… “ You may feel like that at times.

In times like this, the child of God has a resource which is beyond the reach of those who do not know Him. Job knew it! In spite of all he went through (including some wordy friends), he still could say, “God’s voice thunders in marvelous ways; he does great things beyond our understanding” (Job 37:5). Always keep hope and again say with Job, “My feet have closely followed His steps; I have kept to His way without turning aside.” (Job 23:11) Stay true to Him.

Giving Thanks, With Cancer

1 Thessalonians 5:18

Cancer is an ugly visitor. It enters your home without asking. It rearranges your life. It takes over with or without your consent.

I remember a conversation about cancer with my friend Ricky several years ago. He told me his story of his father battling cancer, and I was quick to say I didn’t ever want to go through that with a family member. But Ricky said he viewed the issue differently.

Ricky told me how his father’s cancer was the greatest blessing of his life. For the first time, he and his father had man-to-man conversations, instead of father-to-son talks. The two spent hours during the chemotherapy, telling each other the things they had always wanted to tell. Their love for each other grew deeper. Instead of sadness, there was great joy.

I thought about Ricky’s story this past 20 months as I watched my mother-in-law, Claudia, and my wife, Wendy, walk side-by-side as Claudia became a breast cancer survivor. The two who were already close became even closer. I gave both Claudia and Wendy a double-banded ring to wear to remind them to pray for one another.

Then I saw something else. I saw Claudia’s cancer become a tool to share the love of Christ. Claudia began to minister to other women in her church who had a loved one struggling with breast cancer. She began to pray for and to share with others in the therapy room. Even the nurses became subjects for her prayers. The doctors quickly found out they were not her source for healing. They were instruments of healing in God’s hands.

Cancer and disease in the life of a believer can become a source of thanksgiving, albeit an unwanted source.

My first lesson in giving thanks in all things came from Helen Lamas. She was my Training Union teacher in pre-teen years. In spite of my spitballs and horseplay in class, she loved me. Faithfully, she taught me about Jesus.

When I was in junior college, coastal counties in Mississippi were engaged in a battle over legalized gambling. Helen joined the fight to keep it out of Jackson County. I drove her all over our county to distribute information to churches and others who would listen to her plea to keep it out. Jackson County became the only one of the three coastal counties to vote gambling down. Helen was ecstatic for the victory and delighted to serve the Lord in the fight.

I was away at college when I received the call from my mother telling me that Helen was terminally ill. I was mad and upset all at the same time. I think I was even mad at God for letting such a faithful woman suffer.

As I entered her hospital room, I was wearing my pain all over my face. It wasn’t long before my faithful teacher was teaching me from her deathbed. After she coaxed me into admitting my struggle with her sickness, she made a statement I’ll never forget. “Why Keith, if I wasn’t sick, I would never get to share my faith with all of these doctors and nurses.”

"Give thanks in everything, for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus" (1 Thessalonians 5:18).

________

Keith Manuel is an evangelism associate on the Louisiana Baptist Convention’s evangelism & church growth team.

Select Comfort: Religion and the Dying

According to a new study, terminally ill cancer patients who “drew comfort from religion” don’t want to die if they don’t have to. Well, no surprise. But, says the Times, they’re less eager to die than people who don’t draw “comfort from religion.”

Well that’s interesting, perhaps, but there is a more important as well as more troubling aspect to the story that’s going unnoticed.

The study appears in the most recent issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. Researchers from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston used questionnaires and interviews “to assess the level of reliance on religious faith for comfort” of 345 terminally ill patients.

The “vast majority” of the patients — some 90 percent of those who were religious and 97 percent of those who were not — did not want “heroic measures,” such as mechanical ventilators or CPR, to be used in their cases.

Based on that seven percentage-point difference the New York Times proclaimed “Religious Belief Linked to Desire for Aggressive Treatment in Terminal Patients.” Please.

Do a little more math and you will realize that sweeping generalizations like “far more likely to seek aggressive, life-prolonging care” are based on the responses of approximately 25 people.

The researchers acknowledged that the study didn’t explore why this small handful of religious patients sought “extensive end-of-life care.” That didn’t stop them from speculating anyway. One of the study’s authors disabused Times’ readers of the idea that “spiritual patients are more likely to say their lives are in God’s hands.”

Instead, she told the Times, “to religious people, life is sacred and sanctified ... they feel it’s their duty and obligation to stay alive as long as possible.”

That has it backwards. If 90 percent of the religious people in the study refused heroic measures, then it’s more accurate to say that they don’t feel such an obligation — possibly because they believe that their lives are in God’s hands.

If all that was going on here was yet another mis-characterization of the faithful, it wouldn’t matter. But the Times let its readers know why they should care: cost.

The Times noted that Medicare “spends about one-third of its budget on people who are in the last year of life, and much of that on patients at the very end of life.” The study noted that the religious patients “were less likely to have completed advance medical directives, such as a living will or do-not-resuscitate order.”

Anything, including religious belief, that might motivate people to seek “aggressive treatment” toward the end of life, costs money. Ominously, Wesley J. Smith has documented the “growing utilitarian emphasis in medicine,” in which saving money increasingly takes precedence over “doing right by suffering patients.”

Little wonder, then, that what amounts to a statistical blip becomes the stuff of headlines. Religion can be a problem if it makes people want to stay alive longer. As we nationalize healthcare, as Smith warns, the sick and infirm will soon be told they should do the patriotic thing: go quietly.

________

Killing Without Consequences: the Last Goodnights

Job 3:20

In his book, The Last Goodnights: Assisting My Parents with Their Suicides, lawyer and author John West publicly tells a story that most people would have kept silent. He does it so that one day others may be able to kill openly and without fear. That’s not how West puts it, of course, but I’m afraid that’s what it boils down to.

West’s parents were prestigious psychiatrists. As West wrote, “Neither was at all religious, but both had deep insight into the human condition.... And they knew what they wanted.”

What they wanted was to die “on [their] own terms.” When West’s father was diagnosed with cancer, he asked his son for help in taking his own life. In West’s mother’s case, “advancing cognitive decline” led her to fear that she would “turn into a bowl of Jell-O in her head.” A couple of weeks after West assisted his father’s suicide, his mother made the same request.

It’s hard to listen to West talk about his parents’ deaths, as he recently did on NPR’s Diane Rehm Show. As he describes it, when talking about their impending deaths, his parents kept resorting to euphemisms like “do the trick” and “achieve the goal.”

No euphemism, however, can do away with the stark reality of death and what West had to do to kill them. For instance, he had to wake his father, who was groggy from pain pills given to him by a hospice worker, in order to take the extra pills that would kill him. West admitted that his father might not have finished taking the pills had he, the son, not fed them to him.

In California, these acts were against the law, but as West proclaimed on Rehm’s show, “Everyone in the medical world knows that it happens all the time.” (As it happens, both a doctor and a hospice worker contacted Rehm to disagree.) At any rate, West considered this a case where “it was more important to do the right thing than to follow the letter of the law.”

So, according to West, murder of an innocent is the right thing?

West is publicizing how he helped kill his parents to promote assisted suicide, which he wants to see legalized.

But as West’s story itself shows, our culture and our legal system have already begun to acquiesce to murder, to the point where more and more of these assisted suicide cases are allowed to slip by. Diane Rehm asked West whether he might face any legal repercussions for his actions. His response was that he had heard nothing from the authorities so far.

No good can come of allowing people to kill others — even if they claim they were acting out of the most purely humanitarian motives. The authorities need to uphold the law.

Make no mistake: Legalizing assisted suicide is a big step on a dangerous and slippery slope, especially in a world where human life is growing cheaper by the minute. We’ve already seen that legalizing assisted suicide has led to non-voluntary euthanasia in the Netherlands. And we’ve talked recently on BreakPoint about how increasing health-care costs have spurred Britain to deny certain citizens life-prolonging treatment.

I will say it over and over, until I am blue in the face: Every human life, from conception through natural death, is sacred. And to take that life unjustly is simply murder — the kind of thing the state has a sworn duty to stop.

________

The Greatest Treasure

Mary and her husband Jim had a dog, Lucky. Lucky was a real character. Whenever Mary and Jim had company come for a weekend visit they would warn their friends to not leave their luggage open because Lucky would help himself to whatever struck his fancy. Inevitably someone would forget and something would come up missing. Mary or Jim would go to Lucky’s toy box in the basement and there the treasure would be, amid all of Lucky’s favorite toys. Lucky always stashed his finds in his toy box and he was very particular that his toys stay in the box.

It happened that Mary found out she had breast cancer. Something toldher she was going to die of this disease… she was just sure it was fatal. She scheduled the double mastectomy, fear riding her shoulders. The night before she was to go to the hospital she cuddled with Lucky. A thought struck her… what would happen to Lucky? Although the three year old dog liked Jim he was Mary’s dog through and through. If I die Lucky will be abandoned, Mary thought. He won’t understand that I didn’t want to leave him. The thought made her sadder than thinking of her own death.

The double mastectomy was harder on Mary than her doctors had anticipated and Mary was hospitalized for over two weeks. Jim took Lucky for his evening walk faithfully but the dog just drooped, whining and miserable. But finally the day came for Mary to leave the hospital. When she arrived home Mary was so exhausted she couldn’t even make it up the steps to her bedroom. Jim made his wife comfortable on the couch and left her to nap. Lucky stood watching Mary but he didn’t come to her when she called. It made Mary sad but sleep soon overcame her and she dozed.

When Mary woke for a second she couldn’t understand what was wrong. She couldn’t move her head and her body felt heavy and hot. Panic soon gaveway to laughter though when Mary realized the problem… she was covered, literally blanketed in every treasure Lucky owned! While she had slept the sorrowing dog had made trip after trip to the basement and back bringing his beloved mistress his favorite things in life. He had covered her with his love.

Mary forgot about dying. Instead she and Lucky began living again, walking further and further together every night. It’s been 12 years now and Mary is still cancer-free. Lucky? He still steals treasures and stashes them in his toy box but Mary remains his greatest treasure.

Giving Up

Luke 12:22

I was diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma earlier this year. It was shocking; cancer diagnoses usually are. The treatments were unpleasant; cancer treatments usually are. I thank God that my final chemo treatment was two months ago and my scans showed no sign of the disease remaining.

As I begin my new phase of life as a cancer survivor, a new enemy has crept in: anxiety.

I find myself worrying that it will come back. I worry about possible long-term effects from chemo. I worry that I’ll be afflicted by another type of cancer or a completely different disease in the future.

While I was in the hospital waiting for my initial biopsy results, I had a strange peace. After months of uncertainty, we had a name for the symptoms I was experiencing. There was a standard treatment with an excellent response rate, and I was under the care of experienced doctors. During treatments I had some difficult moments, but I looked forward to the end and couldn’t wait to get back to normal.

Now that I have moved on to the next phase, I’m finding that anxiety can be crippling if not addressed and confessed daily.

As we suffer trauma, sometimes in the moment we don’t fully process what’s happening. We’re just in fight mode and do what we have to do to get through. When the dust clears and we start to make sense of everything, the deeper feelings come out.

Anxiety feels different when you have actually experienced something life-changing. The event serves as justification for future worry: That awful thing happened that one time, so who’s to say that this new thing I’m worried about is not a legitimate concern?

Jesus gives us plenty of instruction about anxiety in Matthew 6:25–34. He tells us plainly: Don’t worry about your life. Don’t worry about tomorrow. But why are these commands from our Lord so hard to follow?

I’m convinced that to move on, we have to give up. We have to give up a lot of things that we love, that we cling to, that we rely on. If we don’t, we’ll never make it.

We certainly have to give up the illusion of control. You can live a healthy lifestyle, but you can never guarantee that you won’t get cancer or another debilitating disease. You can drive safely, but you can’t prevent someone else from crashing into you. You can cling to your loved ones, but you can’t guarantee their safety. There’s literally no other option but to trust God.

I have repeated Matthew 6:27 to myself often during this period of my life: “Can any of you add one moment to his life-span by worrying?” This is a very practical statement from our Lord -- worrying doesn’t change circumstances. I wasn’t able to prevent getting cancer by worrying about it, and God saw fit to heal me without any assistance from me.

To worry about our lives is to demonstrate a lack of trust in God and His good plan. He tells us repeatedly in His Word that He loves us and cares about us. He showed us His love in a very definitive way at the cross. Jesus’ sacrifice involved more physical, emotional and spiritual pain than most of us will ever have to experience, but it was part of the good plan of our good God.

We also have to give up our idols -- the things and people that we value more than the will of God.

For me, my biggest idol has been my marriage. At the time of my diagnosis, I was engaged to a wonderful man. We worked with my doctors to plan my treatment schedule around the wedding date, and we had a wonderful ceremony right at the mid-point in my treatments. I had longed for marriage for so long, and I wasn’t ready to let go for anything. Even the thought that I might not be able to live a long and happy life with my husband was too much to bear.

God’s priorities for us might be different than our priorities. He promises to provide for our needs as we seek first His Kingdom (v. 33), but He knows what we need better than we do. We need to be prepared that He might allow us to lose the things we love the most, including our families or our own lives.

I encourage anyone who has experienced trauma or debilitating anxiety to seek assistance from a counselor or doctor. But it’s also worth it to reflect on what you’re holding on to. If we hold on tightly to our lives, we will worry that things won’t work out the way we want them to. Jesus has already guaranteed that we will have troubles (v. 34), so there’s no question that we will all experience seasons of pain, loss and disappointment. We need to give up so that we can trust God and free ourselves from the anxiety that will keep us from seeking and desiring His will.

The Sickness We Should Be Afraid of

Mark 5:25

Rebecca McLaughlin is a Christian writer who is being treated for cancer. She wrote:

My guess is most of us are more afraid of physical sickness than some nebulous spiritual kind. Right now, as I await my diagnosis, it’s tempting to feel like the most important question is, “Do I have cancer?” But if Jesus is the Son of God, it’s not. Our most important sickness is spiritual. We’re all terminally ill. Without a doctor sent by God himself, there is no hope.

11th-Hour Salvation

Acts 2:36

It’s a salvation story of epic 11th-hour proportions. Its cast includes a respected judge, a wife desperate to see her husband come to faith in Jesus Christ and a Southern Baptist pastor who spoke the right words at just right time.

Bob Wattles of Orlando, Florida, was a longtime Orange County circuit judge who won both praise and criticism for his rulings but was always respected for acting according to his deeply held principles. At age 62, Wattles made his greatest decision of all, giving his life to Christ just eight weeks before losing his battle with cancer on Sunday, Jan. 24, 2010.

So, how did his end-of-life miracle come about? First, some background into the judge’s spiritual condition.

“Bob grew up in a Christian family, but I don’t know if he ever established a personal relationship with Christ,” said Patricia Strowbridge, Wattles’ wife of nearly 15 years. “As he grew older and because of the requirements of his job, I think whatever bit of relationship he had really got squashed down to the point that he drifted so far away that he was unable to surrender any part of his life to Christ.”

Her husband’s choice not to accept Christ weighed heavily on Strowbridge.

“This was a heartache to me for many, many years,” she said. “At the very end of his life, I didn’t know where his relationship was with the Lord, and this was very troubling to me because I felt that, with cancer winning the battle, my children would look at me and ask, ‘Is Dad in heaven?’ I would never be able to lie to my children; if they saw doubt in my eyes, it would break their heart. I prayed so hard that he would find a way of surrender to Jesus Christ.”

As Wattles’ cancer continued to spread, Strowbridge knew she needed outside help. She called on Randall James, a pastor at First Baptist Church in Orlando. James had known Judge Wattles for about 16 years.

“Patricia called me because she knew I had been treated for cancer for the past 23 years,” James said. “She asked me if I would speak to her husband and I told her I would be honored to.”

While James wanted to encourage Wattles not to give up his fight against cancer or succumb to self-pity, he knew that the judge had a far bigger need.

“During our very first conversation, I posed the question, ‘Do you know for sure that if you died tonight you would be in heaven?’” James recalled. “The answer was something to the effect of, ‘I hope so.’”

James knew what he had to do next.

“I told him, ‘You can have the same assurance that your wife and I have that we will one day be in heaven. It requires a relationship with Jesus Christ.”

James then shared with Wattles what he calls the “ABCs of evangelism.”

“I said to the judge, ‘A, admit you are a sinner; B, believe that Jesus died on the cross and that His blood paid your sin debt; and C, confess Jesus Christ as Lord.’ I told the judge we don’t have to do anything to earn our salvation, but that Jesus made it as simple as possible. We don’t have to write a check, join the church or even be baptized; we only have to accept Jesus into our hearts.”

With that, James extended an invitation.

“I said to the judge, ‘Because accepting Christ is so simple, what do you have to lose, brother?’ I then prayed the prayer of salvation and asked him if he had accepted Jesus into his heart and he said, ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘Welcome to the Kingdom of Christ.’”

That conversation took place at a prayer and healing service at First Baptist Orlando last November and the timing could not have been better.

“When Randall said to my husband, ‘...what do you have to lose, brother?’ a complete change came over him and he said, ‘You’re right, and accepted Jesus into his heart,’” Strowbridge said. “Right after that, his condition began to grow even worse.”

Just six days before Wattles went home to be with the Lord, Strowbridge invited James to the house to speak with the judge once more.

“When Pastor Randall left that evening, he gave me a hug and said, ‘Your husband is well with the Lord,’” Strowbridge recounted. “That gave me a lot of encouragement because Pastor James was the last person my husband had a coherent, lucid conversation with. When he woke up the next day, he could no longer speak intelligibly [because the cancer had entered his brain]. By the weekend, he had lost all coherence.”

For James, that final visit with Wattles was a sweet time of fellowship between two children of God.

“We reconfirmed his salvation and talked about heaven,” James said. “We chatted about a few other things, then I got down on my knees at his bedside. He ... reached out his hands and I took hold of them.”

It was a familiar sight to James.

“His fingers were completely swollen, and I knew why. They were swollen from the chemotherapy and the steroid that helps build strength following chemo treatments. So I took his two swollen hands, prayed with him and gave him a kiss on the cheek and walked out.”

Six days later, Wattles lost his battle with cancer.

“I am so glad that his pain and suffering is over,” James said. “He is at peace with Jesus.”

On Thursday, Jan. 28, James had the opportunity of giving the message at Judge Wattles’ funeral at First Baptist, which was attended by nearly 1,000 people, including about 60 Orange County judges. James was bold in sharing the plan of salvation.

“We are all just visitors and aliens on this earth,” James said. “If we want to have eternal life with God the Father, we must turn from our sins and confess our faith in Jesus Christ. This is how we can be sure that we will spend eternity in heaven. I know that this is where Bob is right now and that he wants everyone in this room to be where he is now.

“In fact, Bob is more alive now than ever.”

Why Elizabeth Edwards Left God Out of Her Last Goodbye

Mark 15:34

A dying person’s last words are often, and perhaps too easily, held out as the key to understanding all that went before, and so it has been with Elizabeth Edwards.

Her final public message, posted on Facebook, was characteristically eloquent, to the point, and full of grace -- that last word being one that Edwards herself often invoked, and one that was often applied to her, especially as she bore up under so many trials, the last of them the cancer that claimed her life on Tuesday.

But the opening line of her public farewell was especially notable for its careful phrasing (Edwards, who did post-graduate work in literature, was, after all, a student of the novelist Henry James) about matters of the soul:

“You all know that I have been sustained throughout my life by three saving graces -- my family, my friends, and a faith in the power of resilience and hope,” Edwards wrote.

That she seemed to carefully evade a mention of God or Jesus or things eternal and Christian was striking, and it struck some as “odd,” in the words of “American Power” blogger and neocon Donald Douglas.

“I can’t say what it is -- spiritual or otherwise -- that animates her sense of grace, but it’s not God,” Douglas wrote before proceeding to add some even less graceful conjecture.

“Being anti-religion is cool, so Edwards’ non-theological theology gets props from the neo-communists,” he said. “Still, at her death bed and giving what most folks are calling a final goodbye, Elizabeth Edwards couldn’t find it somewhere down deep to ask for His blessings as she prepares for the hereafter? I guess that nihilism I’ve been discussing reaches up higher into the hard-left precincts than I thought.”

Douglas drew some sharp critiques in the comments on his post but also strong support, and even in the report on the faith angle at Christianity Today -- the leading mainstream evangelical publication -- some commenters rued Edwards’ apparent lack of orthodox Christian faith.

But a closer look at the faith of Elizabeth Edwards offers a more nuanced view, and one that might elicit more charity from those who would judge her at her death.

What seems clear above all is that Edwards’ late-in-life spirituality was forged by the flames of unspeakable heartache, from the death of her 16-year-old son, Wade, in a car accident in 1996 to the faithlessness of her husband, John Edwards, who ran for president in 2008 and thrust his wife into the public spotlight while he betrayed her with a private affair. And of course, there was the cancer that since 2004 ravaged her body and also shaped her theology.

As Adele M. Stan recounted in a July 2007 profile of Edwards for the liberal journal the American Prospect, Edwards told audiences that she “grew up in the Christian tradition” and attended a Methodist church with her husband, but that during her early years as a child in Japan -- her father was a Navy pilot, so the family moved around -- “I grew up with Shintos and Buddhists.”

That Eastern influence seemed to emerge as Edwards faced her illness:

“I have, I think, somewhat of an odd version of God,” Edwards explained to an audience of women bloggers when asked how her beliefs inform her politics. “I do not have an intervening God. I don’t think I can pray to him -- or her -- to cure me of cancer.”

Edwards, according to Stan, laughed after describing God as “her” -- hardly a heresy and certainly understandable given her audience -- and continued on:

“I appreciate other people’s prayers for that [a cure for her cancer], but I believe that we are given a set of guidelines, and that we are obligated to live our lives with a view to those guidelines. And I don’t believe that we should live our lives that way for some promise of eternal life, but because that’s what’s right. We should do those things because that’s what’s right.”

Stan thought Edwards sounded a bit like John Lennon singing “Imagine,” essentially arguing that there is nothing beyond ourselves and this moment, so make the best of it.

Yet Edwards clearly seemed far more engaged with the dilemmas of God and evil -- and grace -- than such a narrow reading allows.

In a moving interview with Larry King in May 2009, for example, she spoke frankly about the death of her son and the religious questions it raised and the recalibrations it forced her to make.

In the weeks and months after Wade’s death, she told King, “I had this idea that God was going to find some way to turn back time and he was going to be alive.” She continued to ask herself, as many do, whether she had done something wrong -- did she not teach him well enough, not get him a safe enough car? And then when cancer struck, and her husband’s affair was revealed, she agonized about the possibility of her own cosmic cooperation in it all.

“And I have to recognize with each of these things, they just happen,” she told King. “You didn’t have to do something wrong to justify them.”

But she added, “You still sort of wonder: Is there some grand plan where you’ve done something someplace else?”

Edwards said she had to move on from such magical and negative thinking, and she quoted a line from the Bill Moyers PBS special on the Book of Genesis, to the effect that “You get the God you have, not the God you want.”

“The God I wanted was going to intervene. He was going to turn time back. The God I wanted was -- I was going to pray for good health and he was going to give it to me,” she said. “Why in this complicated world, with so much grief and pain around us throughout the world, I could still believe that, I don’t know. But I did. And then I realized that the God that I have was going to promise me salvation if I lived in the right way and he was going to promise me understanding. That’s what I’m sort of asking for ... let me understand why I was tested.”

Such openness to doubt and, in particular, to the persistence of suffering runs counter to powerful currents of American Christianity that stress the blessings (mostly material) that will flow to those who believe (and donate), as well as to the premium so many Christians place on voicing a confident and undiluted conviction, no matter what the reality.

For instance, compare the testimony of Elizabeth Edwards to that of her husband, who frequently touted his faith -- as it seems every candidate for office must -- which he said came “roaring back” after the death of Wade. Edwards alternately cited Jesus to reprove Americans for not caring for the poor and for his (albeit reluctant) opposition to gay marriage.

John Edwards, who was raised a devout Southern Baptist and is now a Methodist, told Beliefnet in 2007 that his Christian faith also helped him deal with Elizabeth’s cancer.

“It’s important in my case to have a personal relationship with the Lord, so that I pray daily and I feel that relationship all the time,” he said. “And when I’m faced with difficult decisions, which I regularly am, I very often go to Him in prayer.”

This was at the time Edwards was having an affair with a campaign videographer, Rielle Hunter, who would soon bear their child.

The testimony of Elizabeth Edwards, by contrast, seems much more human, but is also orthodox in channeling the Stoic philosophy that influenced early Christians along with the biblical tradition of lamentation, from the Psalmist whose words are echoed in the cry of Jesus dying on the Cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

And Elizabeth Edwards’ view that Christians should take care of others not out of a self-interested salvation but out of selflessness and love of God is also about as mainstream as you can get, since it was the command of Jesus himself.

Moreover, Edwards seemed increasingly embedded in what might be described as the “communion of saints,” relying on those around her to provide the spiritual support she so badly needed and desired.

“Connections have enriched and sustained me; they have strengthened me by holding me up when I needed it, and they have strengthened me by letting me hold up my end when it was needed,” she wrote in her 2006 memoir, “Saving Graces.”

That communal sense of the faith is also characteristic of American believers, as demonstrated by an extensive study released Tuesday, the same day Edwards passed away. The surveys showed that across all creeds, religious people were more satisfied than non-religious people and that the satisfaction was tied to the number of close friends people said they had in their religious congregation rather than factors like individual prayer, strength of belief, or subjective feelings of God’s love or presence.

Whatever Elizabeth Edwards believed at the hour of her death is known only to God, and is beyond the scope of our ability to judge or to affect. But her honesty in posing hard questions that most leave unasked -- or simply gloss over with biblical bromides -- seems like a legacy equal to the joys and griefs of her life.

Live Each Day, Says Terminally Ill Woman

Job 3:20

Melinda Pinkerton was on the cross-country track team when her coach noticed the 14–year-old’s ankles turned inward when she ran. She recalls the date, Nov. 18, 2002, when her parents received the results of her MRI.

“They told me about the results; the big NF2 [Neurofibromatosis Type 2] word scared me. My first thought was that I was going to die,” Pinkerton wrote. “A month later, Dec. 18th, I had surgery to remove a grape-sized tumor that was squeezing my spinal cord flat.”

Neurofibromatosis Type 2 is not a form of cancer, but is an incurable, genetic nervous system disorder. Today, the 26-year-old Pinkerton has about eight major tumors on her brain, three major tumors on her spinal cord and 40 or 50 smaller tumors on the spine.

Despite the crippling disease, she savors life and is disturbed when others facing medical adversities choose to end their own lives, even under the guise of legal physician-assisted suicide.

Among notable cases, terminally ill cancer patient and right-to-die advocate Brittany Maynard ended her own life Nov. 1, 2014, at her Portland, Oregon, home. She took a lethal prescription administered under Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act.

Pinkerton’s father Mark Pinkerton gave up his medical practice to spend more time with his daughter. He now works as a professor of pharmacy at Cedarville University in Cedarville, Ohio. He said Melinda was shaken by Maynard’s choice.

“We were watching the news one night ... and it was top news about how Brittany took her life, and after that went off, she just broke [into] probably the hardest tears I have seen her have at all with this disease,” Mark Pinkerton said. “She was just devastated. She was broken.”

Melinda marveled at everything Maynard could still do when she took her life, such as travelling to the Grand Canyon and Machu Picchu.

“And she’s like, ‘Wow, I’ve done a lot of things myself that Brittany’s robbing herself of even. But at the same time, [Melinda] was trying to comprehend how can you do these things and come home and swallow a pill. And I said, ‘Well, if you look at that level of activity, and when is the last you had activity of that level? You’re 26 now, I would say probably your freshman year of college, if not junior [or] senior year of high school.”

Neurofibromatosis Type 2 sufferer Melinda Pinkerton worked with limited use of her hands and arms to paint this abstract acrylic that hangs in her father’s office at Cedarville University in Cedarville, Ohio.

Today, Melinda is deaf, cannot walk without a walker, and is losing her sight, balance and the use of her hands. But she maintains the blog, MyLifeWithNF2.com, where she recorded the memory of learning her fatal diagnosis. She writes frequent, encouraging blogposts and emails with the use of two fingers; maintains friendships and worldwide connections; prays for many and less frequently, paints acrylic abstracts.

“I have a peace,” she blogged Jan. 13. “It did not come without tears and questions and frustrations. Even last night I had more, but as I got in bed and reflected on the past few days -- grand days of living to the full -- I was happy. And in decisions I have made, I am happy and in this peace, I am happy.”

Neurofibromatosis Type 2 attacks one in 40,000 people, either passed genetically or spontaneously mutated. Melinda Pinkerton’s biological father, whom she calls “Daddy Cory,” died of the disease at age 24, weeks before Melinda’s mother Bonnie learned she was pregnant. Pinkerton married Bonnie before Melinda’s second birthday.

“The doctor told my Mom that I would have a 50% chance of genetically inheriting the NF2 disease. She had the option to abort me, but chose to keep me, as she trusted God that He had special plans for my life,” Melinda wrote on her blog. “I know it was not only special plans for me, but also for my Mom and sisters. Daddy Cory and Mom had both graduated from the same college, one year before a special man named Mark –- or ‘Mr. Mark’ as my sisters called him. That special man is now my Dad.”

Melinda has lived longer than expected. Her numbness is so severe she could burn herself without feeling it, her father said. She deals with headaches, neck and back pain, preferring to forego pain medications that cause drowsiness.

“She said I would just rather deal with pain than trying to stay awake all the time,” her father told Baptist Press. “And with where these tumors are it has caused her bowels to not work. And so there’s a lot of health conditions there she has to fight with each day.”

She went through menopause at 23, her pituitary gland doesn’t work, and her eight-to-10 daily prescriptions cause side effects. Her skin is thin and fragile from corticosteroids; she bruises easily because of blood thinners.

But she professes joy and strength in the Lord.

“I think what’s amazing with Melinda is she has an incredible ability to just laugh at life and laugh with life,” her father said. “I told her you can giggle in my house any time you want to, and she will. She just can find joy in little things.

“She’s terminal. How long, they won’t even try to guess. She’s lived longer than we thought. You kind of wonder how she’s living day to day. A couple of times we thought we’d lost her already.”

“Every month, in fact lately every week, we can see her condition declining.”

She encourages others to face life’s challenges and make the most of the blessing of life.

“She just said the other day that really if you had no hope, you didn’t know who God was, things like suicide, you can’t really blame anybody,” Pinkerton said. “But [we need to] realize that there is a better way than to live in such despair, to realize that it’s God that gives you that hope and joy and significance to live each day.

“She just said you know, you have to face the challenges. Keep doing what you love to do, even though it is hard and you have to find another way of doing it. Face the challenges as they are for what they are.”

Christians especially should encourage the terminally ill to appreciate all of the time God gives them on earth, said Pinkerton, who worked 20 years as a primary care physician.

“I’ve had many times I’ve seen what could have been a worst-case scenario death process, and it ended up being a beautiful thing. They were able to spend last minutes with family. The family has gone through the grieving process, the gift that this person gave their family through this prolonged illness, is the gift of that letting go, that grieving process that you work through, so when they do die, the grieving process has already been worked through for the most part.”

Doctors should be committed to helping people live, instead of speeding their death, Pinkerton said.

“It bothers me when our health situation seems so bad, we just want to brush it off and let it go,” Pinkerton said. “And the doctors even say, ‘Well, what do you want to do, take a pill?’ Well no, it’s time to go find a new doctor.”

The Power of Preaching the Word

Mark 5:25

The writer of Hebrews said, “For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (Hebrews 4:12).

Not long ago, I was reminded of this power.

Preachers are called to communicate God’s Word and when they do so, they have a promise of His power to work in it and through it. When a preacher stands behind the pulpit, let the goal be to say what God has said. This truth should prod preachers to preach with passion and sobriety.

Part of the power of His Word is that it continues working years after it has been preached. God’s Word does not return void, though the results are sometimes delayed.

For me, the reminder came in an unlikely context and from an unlikely person -- an agnostic dying of cancer -- reminding me to never falter in the pulpit.

I was uncertain what I would find behind the front door of the house as I stood knocking. As a hospice chaplain, I had been summoned to visit a 78-year-old woman who had little hope of survival from pancreatic cancer. Her husband directed me to the room where she was reclining, in agonizing pain.

She was a Unitarian and had only married the year before. She had been single her entire life and had been looking forward to several years with her new husband. She was highly educated, having retired from an Ivy League university as a tenured professor of psychology. Though she had considered being a nun in her teens, she turned from her faith and never looked back -- until now. She was angry, bitter and questioning why after being single her entire life she was now dying after a year of marriage. Although she had refused to see hospice counselors, she requested to speak with a chaplain.

She instructed me to close the door and sit in front of her. I immediately had the impression she wanted privacy, perhaps from a sense of embarrassment about the conversation we would exchange.

I began making small talk, asking questions about her life and background to complete the required hospice evaluation from details of our conversation. Demonstrating her domineering spirit, she turned the tables on me and began peppering me with questions. She probed my beliefs and doctrine. She recoiled at the thought of belief in heaven, hell and the divinity of Christ, having drunk deeply from the wells of rationalism and pluralism.

We had been talking at length when she suddenly paused. She lurched forward in her chair and said, “I want to ask you something.” I knew immediately this was the reason I was sitting in her room. She was about to get to the point, her point. In a low and somber voice, she intoned, “I had a dream the other night. In the dream I heard a voice saying to me, ‘Touch the hem of his garment.’ What do you think it means?”

She was unaware of the origin or meaning of the phrase. The Holy Spirit used a fragment of biblical truth that had lain dormant within her for decades. Only God knows the preacher or Bible study leader who planted this seed in her young mind -- long before she abandoned her faith.

I momentarily froze in stunned silence. God was displaying His grace by reminding her of His Word she had learned as a child. She didn’t even remember where the phrase came from, but a merciful heavenly Father was using His Word to awaken her conscience to the truth, giving her one last opportunity to experience grace through Jesus Christ. I seized the moment and explained to her where the phrase came from in the New Testament and I pressed upon her that God was calling her to reach out for His mercy and grace. She listened politely to my words and abruptly concluded the visit. I prayed with her and left. She never requested another visit.

She died a few weeks later. I have never forgotten her or the lesson she taught me about preaching. I don’t know if she put her faith in Christ before death came. However, I do know that He was working in her heart and reminded her of His Word.

As a preacher, I desire immediate results. I want to see lives changed when I preach. However, the Word I preach will bear fruit in the lives of the hearers even if it is 50, 60 or 70 years from the time it is delivered.

In a world of massive moral shifts and devastating human turmoil, a preacher cannot do more than trust in the power of God’s Word. The prophet Jeremiah declared, “‘Is not My word like fire’ -- this is the Lord’s declaration -- ‘and like a hammer that pulverizes rock?’” (Jeremiah 23:29). Let every preacher take heart. When poor souls stand on the verge of chilly Jordan, they may very well be meditating on the Word of God which you preached in their hearing decades before.