1. A
Story of a Healing
My doctor called
me at work on a Friday [September, 1996]. When the doctor himself calls you and tells
you to come to his office the next day first thing in the morning, which was a
Saturday, and to bring your wife, you know this is serious. He told me I had cancer. When we were driving home afterwards, my wife
was surprised that I had no emotions about the whole thing. I felt like all my emotions had been sucked
out of me long before this.
God’s work in my
life didn’t just deal with the cancer, and it didn’t just start when the
diagnosis was made. The cancer was the
bottom of a long spiraling descent. My
life was falling apart. I was falling
apart. My life wasn’t supposed to turn out like
this. I know some people say that I
went through a midlife crisis. I
wouldn’t call it that. A midlife crisis,
at least as I understand it, is where a person wakes up to the realization that
his or her life is going in the wrong direction, that they need to find out who
they really are or what it is they need to do with their lives.
I knew all that
for years. I knew what I wanted to do
with my life for years, since I was a teenager.
And as I grew older, it was like I was watching that dream go further
and further away and I couldn’t stop it.
There was no sudden revelation. I
had been watching it happen for years.
I don’t know how much anybody
else was really aware of what was going on if anything. I was always a quiet person and usually quite
expressionless. Nobody would ever accuse
me of being a happy person, though I would never really say that I was
sad. That would be admitting that my
Christian life was not working out right.
But the fact is, for my whole life, I would have to say that my natural
disposition bordered on sadness or depression.
What my family
was seeing and what I did not want my kids to see was that I was very tired
when I came home from work, and I spent a lot of time watching videos. I have thousands of books at home and I was
too tired to look at them. I had little
interest or energy for things around the house either.
I think it is
important to understand just where I was at psychologically and emotionally at
this point. I am going to lay it on a
little thick, but it is all true and it will make what happened later much more
meaningful.
I knew where I
wanted to be. I knew it my whole adult
life. But I spent 25 years not doing
what I felt I should be doing, going further and further from what I had wanted
almost my whole life and watching it happen.
1. So I was miserable,
though I would never really admit that.
That would be admitting defeat or failure. I knew all about counting one’s blessings, but the fact
was my whole life seemed to be wrong.
2. I was getting older and I
hated the way my life was turning out.
How could it possibly be further from what I had wanted for my life,
from what I felt I was supposed to do with my life? I had a career I never wanted and felt was
robbing me of what I really wanted to do with my life. The work wasn’t
so bad, but I was giving my best time and energy to something I did not want
and had very little left over for the things I really wanted.
This never affected my work, because I always
worked hard and usually enjoyed my work.
I just wanted to be somewhere else.
So while I often enjoyed my work, I hated the fact that I was there and
not doing the things that I wanted to do with my life.
I felt I was
living a double life. I would give my
best time and energy to something I didn’t want to do, and then when I would
get home, I would try to do what I really thought I should be doing. I didn’t spend the time with my wife and kids
and other people like I should or would have liked to. I was always thinking about how little time
and energy I had for what really mattered to me.
3. I was angry. I
felt I had made a wrong turn 30 years ago and couldn’t get back on the right track. I felt like I had wasted the last 25 years of
my life. People my age had already spent
25 years or more doing the things they wanted and now were at the peak of their
careers.
4. I felt trapped. I made a wrong turn, though I didn’t really know how or when,
and now I had no way out. All my efforts
to change my life were thwarted. I had
gotten on the wrong boat and was getting further and further from where I
wanted to go every day it seemed.
5. I had a strong sense of disappointment. I was disappointed in God. I felt He could have and should have done
more for me in my life. I had always
heard about this great love that God has for His people, but what I saw and
felt did not move me greatly. Is love
only a feeling or a description of one’s thoughts of another? Or is it a disposition that moves one to
action on behalf of another? I long
thought and felt that God could have and should have done far more for me on
the basis of this love that He was supposed to have for me. So in my head, I would have to say that God
loved me and I knew it. But it is
another thing to feel loved by another, and I could not say that I felt loved
by God.
I believed in
what I considered a promise from God, and it always seemed to be later.
If a human makes a promise to you, generally you would expect the person
to act on it shortly. With God any time
before you die is okay, or even as in Abraham’s case, hundreds of years later.
Proverbs 13:12 says that “Hope deferred
(brings) sickness of heart, and a tree of life desire coming (has come).” I felt like the promises that I believed God
had given me in my life kept getting pushed back. I often described it as coming to the end of
my rope, and then, after hanging for a while, finding that the rope suddenly
got longer. But I was always having that
sense that the end of the rope was near.
I saw a God who
would let His people flounder around for years trying to find the right thing
to do with God just sitting there waiting until they got it right. There was a famous amusement park in Chicago , where I grew up,
called Riverview. It had an attraction
that I loved to go in: Aladdin's Castle.
There was a room which was a labyrinth, where every wall looked like a
door and you had to push on every one to find out which was really a door and
which was a wall. I felt that the
Christian life was a lot like that. At
least my life did. I would ask God for
direction and usually get nothing. Then
I would get something which seemed like a direction, and it would turn out to
be what seemed a dead end.
I was familiar
with examples in the Bible of people to whom God had made promises and who went
through experiences where it seemed like those promises would never, couldn’t, come to pass. I felt the same way, yet even knowing this
pattern, that God will often do that, it still did not take away the pain that
there would be no way out apart from a miracle.
While I believed in miracles, after years of waiting, it was hard to
really think you would get what you had been looking for.
6. I hurt inside,
from things people had done to me. I had
forgiven them, but like you can forgive the person who ran over you with their
car, you might still have a broken hip and be in pain. The mere sight of a church building often
caused me to hurt inside. It stood for a
whole way of life that I wanted more than anything but couldn’t have.
7. I felt frustrated, like
an athlete who used to start on another team but now was sitting on the
sidelines for no reason that he could think of.
I had to watch but couldn't participate.
Why? Who knows?
8. I had a deep sense of loss. I had skills that weren’t being used and which I
felt were deteriorating. Like a musician
who couldn’t practice
and whose chances of making the symphony were becoming more remote because he
couldn’t compete with
those who spent their lives in music.
9. I felt like I was a failure,
not in every particular thing, but overall.
Though I knew what my strengths were, I was all too aware of where I was
weak and where I had really blown it.
There were times, sometimes in the middle of the night, when I would go
through my whole life and see how I had failed in some major way in every area.
10. I felt like I was dying
inside, like the life was being sucked right out of me. Literally? We’ll see.
11. I had a number of problems which will go unnamed. But let me say that they were big ones, and
ones that I felt completely powerless to change. It would have to take a miracle, and after so
many years, that seemed quite unlikely.
Some time in 1995 or 1996, I was riding home
from work on my bike, and I felt God say to me, “I want you to get to know
Me.”
My first
reaction was, “What? What have I been doing for the last 35 years?”
1. When I was about 14, I was going to confirmation class
because my parents wanted me to. I had
to memorize the Apostle’s creed – I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker
of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ His only Son our Savior - and I
realized that I did believe in God and all these other things about Him and His
Son. Right then my whole life
changed. I knew immediately as a
consequence of believing in God that He was the most important thing in life,
and my highest priority was to get to know Him and to serve Him.
2. When I was a senior in high school, I dropped my advanced
math and science courses, because I was no longer interested in things like
that. I wanted to study the Bible.
3. After high school, instead of going to the university to
train for a high paying secular job, I went to a Bible school, because I wanted
to learn the Bible and go into full-time Christian work.
4. After
Bible school, I didn’t
go on to further schooling at that time, because I believed that what I really
needed, I couldn’t get
in school: I needed to get to know God and people. I would get a secular job to learn what life
was like on the other side of the pulpit
5. I studied Greek and Hebrew on my breaks at work, so I could
study the Bible in the original languages.
I would spend all my extra money on books to learn all I could about
anything pertaining to God and church.
6. I later quit a good paying job so I could work in a new
church that I started, where I would have no sure income.
7. When I later got my master’s
degree, I didn’t get
it in computer science or business, so I could make a good living. I got it in Biblical Studies, because I
wanted to know more about God and to be able to teach it to others.
Now He tells me I needed to get to know
Him. I long had believed that God had
promised me some things about my life and that they were due, even long
overdue. I thought I was near to the
light at the end of the tunnel. I then
saw that light and it turned out to be the light at the beginning of the next
tunnel.
But I saw that
all the things I was doing for God
had nothing or little to do with knowing
God. It is one thing to know in my head
that God loved me but quite another to believe it in m heart. It is one thing to know that I should trust God for everything, but
another thing to actually do it. One
thing to say that I love God and another to really enjoy Him. One thing to be able to teach a lesson on
joy, and another to actually have joy.
Especially when there were so many things in life that I really wanted,
things that I felt I needed, things that I had been praying for and was not
seeing.
Now He was
asking me if I could be happy if I never got those things, if I only had
Him. Could I love God even if He didn’t answer my prayers? Could I love Him for himself apart from His
gifts? Could I believe that He was doing
the right thing even when I didn’t
like it? I knew from the story of Job
that I would never know all that was going on and why things may not be going
on to my liking. God wanted me to love
Him for Himself, like two people in love where all that mattered was just being
together. But that was not to come soon
or easy. I told God, I would try.
One morning in
early June 1996, I woke up and heard the words: “Rejoice always.” Not audibly but very real. Four things came to my mind immediately:
1. I knew that that was in the Bible, and I had known that for
at least 30 years.
2. I knew that in the original Greek that verse said, “Always
rejoice.”
3. I knew that two verses later it said: “In everything give
thanks, for this is the will of God for you.”
4. I
knew that God had spoken.
I was looking
for the direction of God in my life, and I knew He had just given me some very
clear instruction. Now these verses have
always been in the Bible, and I should have been practicing them from the
beginning, but I wasn’t. So here I was looking for something to do
with my life, and I get this?
Now this was not
easy, but I knew I had to do it. So I
started thanking God for my life and how I hated it. When I got angry about something, I would
thank God I was angry. I thanked God for
the job I hated. I thanked God for the
people who hurt me. Did I feel like it? Did I enjoy
this? Did I mean it? I did it because I knew God wanted me
to. No other reason.
Several days
later, I was playing ball with my sons and, while picking up a ball and holding
the bat in the other hand, the end of the bat pressed into my chest. It felt really strange. Usually I just brush pain off. But this was different. I stopped playing ball after a few minutes
and went to bed early. In the middle of
the night, I woke up and couldn’t
move. Oh, I could move, but I didn’t want to. It hurt too much. I slowly got dressed and my wife drove me to
the hospital. They took CT scans and
said I had a deep bruise. They advised
me to see a certain doctor for follow-up on Monday. What,
take off work to see a doctor for a deep bruise? So no, I didn’t go. I was still at the hospital when I had to
call my boss about work that day. It
still hurt me a lot to try to get upright, so I took the day off. In a few hours, the pain subsided enough to
get around, so my wife drove me home. The
next day I was almost 100%, and I never gave it another thought.
About a month
later, I woke up while dreaming of teaching a Bible class on James 1:2-4. “Count it all joy when you fall into various
trials,” it says. My whole life felt
like a various trial. But again, I knew
God had spoken and I knew that I had to regard the very things that I hated as
reasons to be happy. It wasn’t easy, but knowing it was
the right thing to do, it gradually became easier. Gradually means about three months, six
months, a year.
Near the end of August
1996, I got a letter from the doctor I was supposed to see asking me why I hadn’t come in to see him. The letter said that I had enlarged lymph
glands. Well, nobody had told me that.
So what does that mean? He
wanted me to meet him at the hospital the next day before work for some blood
tests. The blood tests would rule out
things like HIV and the next step would be to take a biopsy. When all the blood tests came out negative, I
switched to our family internist who then recommended an oncologist. When the oncologist wanted to do more blood
tests, my doctor said, “No. Just get
into the hospital tomorrow and get a biopsy.
It’s been three
months already.”
The diagnosis
was mixed-cell non-Hodgkins lymphoma. I
don’t know the
difference between Hodgkins and non-Hodgkins, but I did learn that mixed cell
means large and small cell cancer, the large cell being aggressive, the small
cell not. It was in stage 3, which is 3
out of 4, meaning it was pretty well spread throughout my body. The next step was to get a bone marrow
biopsy.
I had a problem
here, and I don’t mean the cancer. I already believed in healing. I had studied it for years and have seen it
work many times, though on smaller things.
But I had learned very early that it was important that I had to want to
be well. And now I wasn’t sure. I didn’t
really care whether I lived or not. Now that scared me. Now this was several months after I had
started to rejoice always, but the pain and the hopelessness were only
gradually going away. We’re talking slow progress
here.
I knew I needed
help.
I couldn’t
get a will to live on my own. On the way
to work a couple days later, God reminded me of the story of Aaron and
Hur. The Israelites had been attacked by
the Amalekites. Moses went up on a hill
with his staff, called the rod of God.
When he held it over his head, Israel prevailed. When he let it down, Amalek prevailed. When he got too tired, he sat on a large
stone and Aaron and Hur held up his arms until the battle was won.
I knew I needed two people to pray for me, but
I couldn’t just ask
someone to pray for me. I knew if I had
asked someone, they would have agreed, but their heart may not have been really
into it. I needed someone who really
wanted to. In the next two days, two
friends called me unexpectedly, and I knew they were the right ones. Within a week or so, that empty sense of not
caring had left.
Then in my Bible
study, I came across the verse that says: A
broken spirit dries the bones. (Proverbs
17:22: A joyful heart is good medicine, but a broken spirit dries the
bones.) I said, “That’s me.” Remembering how that bat hurt me that first
day and that now I was scheduled for a bone marrow biopsy made me think that my
bones were already affected. But how do you fix a broken spirit? I remembered immediately Ephesians
5:18: “Be filled in spirit, speaking to
yourselves with psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, singing and making melody
in your heart to the Lord, giving thanks always for all things unto God and the
Father, being subject to one another in the fear of Christ.”
I know most
translations read, “Be filled with the Spirit.”
But I also knew enough Greek to know that this phrase in Greek was
different from any other expression in the New Testament for being filled with
the Holy Spirit. I also knew that there
were five participles following that sentence describing this filling. Most teachers I have heard say that these
five participles showed the results of being filled. On the contrary, they were the means to this
filling. I was convinced that the Bible
was telling me how to fill my Spirit
in contrast to filling it with wine, like in the previous verse.
These
participles were: “speaking to yourselves in psalms, hymns, and spiritual
songs, singing and making melody with your heart to the Lord, giving thanks
always for all things in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ to God the Father,
being subject to one another in the fear of Christ.” Those who saw these participles as results of
being filled with the Spirit would not see them as something that we are to
initiate on our own, but they would wait and hope for God to do this for
them. But I saw that these are things I
needed to do to fill my spirit and consequently heal it. So I began memorizing Bible passages again,
Psalms and other scriptures that God brought to mind, and I would sing and make
melody to God. The passage also spoke of
giving thanks, so I made sure to continue that as well.
My bone marrow
test was postponed for a week or so.
When I finally had the test, it turned out to be negative. I can’t
prove that that extra week made a difference, but I believe it did.
The doctor again
confirmed the original diagnosis and told me that the treatment would be
chemotherapy, and that I should start right away. I told her I did not want chemo. This was the first time I had actually said
this, so my wife was surprised as well as the doctor. I don’t really know what to say, so she then
said we would get another opinion. We
went to Northwestern
Memorial Hospital
I believed in
healing. For the 10 or 12 years prior to
this I had believed God for healing for dozens of smaller things. If I were to get medical treatment for this
because it was bigger, I would have felt like a hypocrite. I would have denied everything I had come to
believe about God. At this point I had a
diagnosis for a problem I didn’t
even know I had. To jump in and get
treatment without even giving God a chance to heal, without even checking to
see if any difference in my condition had or would occur by the power of God I
believed would have been irresponsible for me as a Christian.
Also, ever since
my kids were small, I had encouraged them to pray for healing or whatever else
they needed. If I now sought medical
treatment, I would be telling them that God doesn’t
or can’t do the bigger
things. If I were to start treatment,
how could I say that God had answered our prayers? Any heathen can get chemo. If I got better, who is to say if I got
better from the chemo or from God? Or
both? Or who is to say that prayer even
made a difference at all?
If I got better
having taken the chemotherapy, it would in my mind only confirm the belief that
people should look first to science for the answers to life’s biggest problems. If God only chooses to work through medicine,
then what can we pray for? What if we
didn’t have medical insurance? Would God
expect us to spend all we had on treatment before He would help us? There was a woman in the Bible who spent all
she had on doctors but only got worse (Mark 5:25 -34). So I
couldn’t accept that the medical route was the one I had to take.
Now there were
two issues that were on my mind at this time.
The first was the pressure we were facing from our friends and
family. I knew what I believed, but
people were telling my wife that I was crazy not to get chemo. I had to think of my kids. My wife was afraid that she couldn’t support the kids by
herself. So I wanted some input from God
to confirm my decision. This was a big
decision, and I wanted to be able to show her that God was in this.
Over the course
of about a month and a half, I read my Bible trying a little harder to hear if
God was going to speak to me through something I read. I didn’t change my pattern of reading. I just read what I would have read anyway,
though I might have spent more time actually reading than if I wasn’t in a
crisis. I wrote down almost 30 passages
of Scripture which to me spoke directly to my situation and which seemed to
confirm my decision. Though I was
looking for guidance, I was not looking for passages that I thought would
support my views.
These are the
passages that I believe God brought to my mind in this regard:
Exodus 17:8-13 when Moses held up his hands, Israel
prevailed
Exodus 23:25 “I
will remove sickness from your midst.”
Exodus 34:10,11 “Before all your people I will perform
miracles which have not been produced in all the
earth . . . and all the people among whom you live will see the working of the
Lord.”
I Samuel 17 David kills Goliath. Who is this uncircumcised Philistine, that he
should taunt the armies of the
living God?
Psalm 34 He delivered me from all my fears. He saved him out of all his troubles. He delivers him out of
all his afflictions.
Psalm 103:1-5 He heals all your diseases.
Proverbs 3:5-8 “Fear the Lord and turn away from
evil, and it will be healing to your body and refreshment
to your bones.”
Proverbs 3:11-18 “Long life is in her right hand.”
Proverbs 4:20-23 His words are life to those who find
them and health to all their whole body.
Proverbs 9:7-12 “By the fear of the Lord your days
will be multiplied and years of life will be added to
you.”
Proverbs 10:2 “Righteousness delivers from
death.”
Proverbs 10:17 “He
is on the path of life who heeds instruction.”
Proverbs 10:27,28 The fear of the Lord prolongs life. The hope of the righteous is gladness.
Proverbs 11:4,6,8 Righteousness delivers from death. The
righteousness of the upright will deliver him. The righteous is delivered from trouble.
Proverbs 17:22 “A joyful heart is good medicine,
but a broken spirit dries the bones.”
Ephesians 5:18 “Be
filled in spirit, speaking to yourselves
in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs among yourselves, singing and making melody in your hearts to
the Lord, giving thanks always for all
things to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, being subject to
one another in the fear of Christ.”
Proverbs 18:21 “Death
and life are in the power of the tongue.”
Mark 5:25-34 “Your
faith has saved you.” This woman had
spent all that she had on doctors over the previous 12 years, and the Bible
says that they didn’t
help her at all, but she only got worse.
Mark 5:35-36 Your daughter has died. “Fear not, only believe.”
Mark 9:19-23 “All things are possible to the
one who believes.”
Mark 11:22 -24 Have
faith in God. If you do not doubt in
your heart but believe that what you say is coming to
pass, it shall be unto you. Therefore,
whatever you pray for and ask, believe that you
have received it and it shall be unto you.
John 11:40 “Did
I not tell you that if you believe, you shall see the glory of God?”
Acts 3:6 “What I have I give to you. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth rise
and walk.”
Acts 10:38 “Jesus
went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil.”
Acts 28:1-9 Paul
had been bitten by a poisonous scorpion and he just shook it off into the
fire. All the sick people in the whole
island then came to him and he healed them.
Luke the physician was with him at the time.
I had made an
appointment to see the doctor just to tell her why I did not want to have
treatment. I remember driving downtown
and asking God if He had anything more to tell me about this. Very clearly in my mind, I believe He said,
“I have told you everything you need to know.
It’s time for
you to stand on what I have told you.”
So I asked the doctor to monitor me.
If I came back in several months and things were worse or the same, then
we’ll see. She and the other doctors agreed to wait.
The second issue
that I was concerned about was dealing with the causes of the disease in the
first place. If you come down with some
physical condition, what makes you think you can’t
come down with it again? Why did you get
it in the first place?
I knew it did
not make sense to get healed of something and then not deal with the causes
that made you sick. Now, I can’t prove that my
psychological state caused the lymphoma, but I know how I felt, the depth of
the pain, the loss of energy, the feeling of having the life sucked out of me,
the emptiness, the frustration.
So I asked God:
How do I get out of this state?
The core issue
behind all my misery was that I felt my whole life was off track, that I had
gotten off the right path somehow and couldn’t
get back on. Where was I going and what
should I do with my life? I was constantly examining my life to
figure out what to do. So how do I get
out of this state? I had to have an
answer to this, so when I read the Bible, I kept an eye and ear out for
something I needed. I ran into a number
of verses that together spelled out my next step.
Proverbs 16:3 “Roll unto the Lord your works,
and your plans (thoughts) will be established (made
firm).”
Proverbs 16:9 “The heart of man plans his way,
and the Lord establishes his step.”
Jeremiah 10:23 “I
know, O Lord, that not to man is his way and it is not to man who walks to
establish his way.”
Psalm 37:5 “Roll on the Lord your way; trust on Him and He
will act.”
Psalm 37:4 “Delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you
the desires of your heart.”
I was seeing
that my life is not in my hands. You are
always told that you have to do something.
These verses were saying, “It’s
not what you think you have to do.”
Daniel 4 The
Most High rules over the realm of mankind and bestows it on whom He wishes.
The verse about
rolling on the Lord my way reminded me of Psalm 55:22
Psalm 55:22 Cast on the Lord your burden
(Lit. what was given you, Greek: care), and He shall sustain
you.
which in the early Greek
translation is almost exactly like I Peter 5:7.
I Peter 5:7 Be humbled under the mighty
hand of God that He may exalt you in due time, all your care
having cast on Him, for He cares for you.
The Greek word
for care μέριμvα (me´-rim-na) means: care, thought, solicitude [solicitude and
solicitous imply profound concern, full of concern or fears; meticulously careful;
attentive care and protectiveness].
The word care I had always understood as worry,
which has to do with fear, fear of what can go wrong. So I never thought that applied to me. But then I saw that cares and concerns are
more than that. My consuming concerns
were occupying my mind and continual self-examination and looking for clues and
new paths were preoccupying me.
Philippians 4:6 says:
“Be anxious for nothing, but
in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, let your requests be
made known unto God. The Greek text
says: “for nothing be anxious (mhde\n
merimna=te).”
My back was
against the wall. I had no choice. I had always known about these verses, but I
had not really lived by them. Now I knew
I had to. I knew I could no longer
afford the luxury of worry. I knew I
just had to trust God completely or die.
So now when something came up that needed my concern, I would make my
request and then leave it. I refused to
be caught in the trap of careful watching.
I refused to give it any more thought.
And what this
does now is free up a lot of brain space.
Being an introvert, our minds are very active. Now I had all this free time in my head.
I read two books
at this time by John Piper: Desiring God and Let the Nations be Glad. They
reinforced the idea that God was more concerned about my being able to enjoy
Him than about anything that I might do for Him. Like what He tried to tell at the beginning
of all this when I was on the bicycle riding home from work.
There
were two passages in the Bible that showed me God’s concern for things in the
bigger picture.
Isaiah 48:9-11 “For the sake of My name I delay My wrath. And for My praise I restrain it for you, in order not to cut you
off. Behold, I have refined you, but not
as silver; I have tested you in the furnace of affliction; For My own sake, for
My own sake, I will act; f or how can My
name be profaned? And My glory I
will not give to another.”
Ezekiel 36:22-23,32 “Therefore say to the house of Israel , Thus says the Lord GOD: It is not for
your sake that I act, O house of Israel , but for My holy name, which
you have profaned among the nations to which you came. And I will sanctify my great name, which has
been profaned among the nations, which
you have profaned among them; and the
nations shall know that I am the LORD, says the Lord GOD, when through you I display my holiness
before their eyes.
It is not for your sake that I am
acting, says the Lord GOD; let it be known to you. Be ashamed and dismayed for your ways, O
house of Israel .”
I could no longer justify the time I was spending thinking about my life, my problems, my
future. If God is to be the center of
life, I was paying too much attention on the perimeter. When God first created people, He put them in
a garden. They didn’t really have a whole lot
to do. It was the love and companionship
of humans that He wanted. He didn’t need our work.
These are the passages of the
Bible that God brought to my mind next:
Genesis 3 God created us to enjoy His presence.
Psalm 50:23 “The one who offers a sacrifice
of thanksgiving honors Me.”
I Samuel 2:30 “Those
who honor Me I will honor.”
Acts 16:19 -26 At
midnight in a dungeon Paul
and Silas prayed and sang praises to God before all the
prisoners, and God then delivered them.
I Peter 2:5 You are like living stones
being built up into a holy temple to offer spiritual sacrifices
acceptable to God
About two months
after I last spoke with that doctor, I called her up and asked for that follow-
up exam. I figured that by now, if anything was going
to change, something would have changed by now.
I believed in healing, but I did know that sometimes changes happen
slower than we think they should. I
remember driving downtown for these tests and I asked God for some more
input. I sensed Him saying that there
comes a time when you just have to stand on what you know already. You don’t need any more information. Stand firm in what you have.
The doctor
called me at work a few days later and said that all my tests were within the
normal range, so they would not recommend chemotherapy at this time. They would not say that I was healed. That is not an expression they like to use. With lymphoma there was no way they could say
with certitude that there were no cancer cells anywhere in my body. But if I had had these same results when I
first went to the hospital that night with the deep bruise, they would not have
called me in for tests. There would have
been no reason to think that there was anything wrong.
Lymphoma, they
say, can come and go. My wife asked her
if she ever heard of it going away without chemotherapy. The doctor replied, No, she had not. My wife asked her how she could explain this,
and she said she couldn’t.
Do I go back for
checkups? No, I do not. Some would say this is foolish. I know if I did, I still would do what I did
the first time. If the course of the
disease was reversed without the treatment, why would it not if it appeared
again?
In the time when
this was all going on, there was a time when I could see the lymph glands of my
neck swollen. For a time it hurt when I
walked from the glands in my groin. But
those are all distant memories. Whenever
I went to see the doctor during all this, they would always ask if I had night
sweats or was losing weight. I wish I
could lose a little weight. I barely
give it a thought any more, except when I meet someone who has cancer.
I know that few
battles in life never need to be fought again.
I still work in a field not of my own choosing. In fact, few of the outward circumstances
have changed at all. But I have. I know too that if I let myself, I can fall
into the same downward spiral of self-pity and anger. There is a story in the Bible where Jesus
walked on water. Peter asked if he could
too, and Jesus invited him to. As long
as Peter was able to keep his eyes on Jesus, he actually stayed on top. But as he became more conscious of the storm
that was going on around them, he immediately sank. The choice is mine.
I asked God why
all this happened. Not the cancer so
much. That was incidental compared to
the other things I felt. I had a day
recently where I felt again the loss of the last 25 years, how I wished they
would have been different.
Then I saw
it. If I had had everything the way I
thought it should have been, everything that I had wanted in life, I would have
been happy from a lot of little things that sort of centered on myself. I was amazed by how much my whole thought
life centered around myself. One of the
things that died in this whole thing was a certain sense of self-consciousness,
where now I hardly even give myself a thought anymore frankly.
I would have
evaluated my life by the number of people in the church that I pastored, the
number of degrees after my name, how many languages I used in my studies, how
many books I had written or read. I
would have equated my knowledge of God by how well I knew Hebrew and Greek, and
how much time I spent in study. I would
have thought I was a success in life. I
would have had all the outward trappings of being a good Christian leader, but
my knowledge of God would have been superficial.
I would have
substituted my successes in life and my satisfaction in my things for my
satisfaction in knowing God, my knowledge about God for actually knowing God,
and I would have substituted the approval of people for the approval of
God. I would have been proud of all my
knowledge, but my joy would not have been in God. I would have been happy because of things I
could lose, things that were not permanent, things that were not God.
Now these are
all non-issues. I am only one
person. I no longer pray for what I can
do for God, but for the glory of God to be made known, no matter how or through
whom it is manifested. I was made aware of how much more concerned
I was about what people thought about me than what they thought about God. I was the center of my universe and not only
was I unaware of it, but I didn’t
even see what was wrong with it.
The words of
Paul are fitting here: The things that
were gain to me, these things I have regarded for the sake of Christ to be
loss, rather indeed I regard all things to be loss because of the surpassing
greatness of knowing personally Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have suffered
the loss of all things, and I regard them as refuse or dung, that I may gain
Christ . . . that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection and the
fellowship of His sufferings. . . .
This one thing I do, forgetting the things that are behind, reaching out
to the things in front, I press on toward the prize of the upward call of God
in Christ Jesus.
Philippians 3:7-14
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