Voices: How cancer changed the way we look at life

When the nurse rolled me out to the car after my breast cancer surgery, she said, “Welcome to your new normal.”

She was right. Nothing was ever the same, and after dealing with the pressing issues of chemo and radiation, I realized cancer had changed the way I think. The best way I can describe this is I began to think backward, a reverse of the way I used to think.

For example, life used to lie ahead like a great sea of time and place, with hope and promise, whereas now time was frighteningly finite. Instead of planning our next trip or purchase, instead of thinking creatively about life, I needed my will and, I feared, a funeral home.

God became as real and personal as the doctor—if not more so.

Wrapped in a weird weakness with chemo, my thoughts were not about great restaurant food, but if I could eat any food, then stand and walk. What a turn-around.

In health, we humans live for the big achievements we can accomplish. Yet, in sickness we strive to survive.

Footprints in the sand

Life changes in an instant, yet God is in us. He holds and carries us.

Years ago, many of us loved the poem “Footprints” by Mary Stevenson in which an infirm person sees footprints in the sand when God walked beside him. Then, he notices the footprints decrease to only a single set.

“What happened? Did you leave me, Lord?” the protagonist wonders.

God said, “It was then that I carried you.”

Are we ready for God to carry us? We can pray now for the grace to yield to him in whatever situation might arise—cancer or something else.

“Even when your hair is white, I will carry you,” says the Lord (Isaiah 46:4)—even when you are bald, with not one hair on your body, I could add.

We can live in God’s strength and find more than survival. We can find beauty in trusting him.

We are God’s treasure formed under pressure

Think of the creamy white pearl. It forms because of an irritant within an oyster’s shell. Trouble or irritation becomes value and elegance in a humble, distressed environment.

I like the idea of wearing pearls as a symbol of God’s work in my life. The Bible teaches we are gems and jewels to God as his own people. We are his treasure, formed under the pressure of humanity and sin, purified in his crucible.

And like a pot formed under a different kind of pressure, we are his vessel, pulled up by God’s hands on his potter’s wheel, with just the right amount of water making thin, strong, useful form.

Who could be a more personal Father? Who could love us more than our Maker?

In the cancer fight, we see him fight for us. He fights, I think, so his will for our lives shall not be diminished by sin and disease.

Thinking backward

As a cancer survivor, I think backwards, because life did not happen as I planned, nor as I prayed. Yet, a lot of the gospel seems ironic and backwards. When I am weak, I am strong. In dying to self, I live. In giving, I receive. In serving, I lead. Cancer survival is interesting.

If you are a cancer survivor, you have such valuable knowledge and experience with God. He can use you now, powerfully.

Disease did not kill us, but we may live now in the new normal. We live with a changed worldview and new realization of God’s presence and the ways he works within his children.

We have learned to experience peace in uncertainty—not that I have attained this fully.

Many people in the world need God to carry them a while, and you can show them how that works. We know the hospital, the operating room, the scan machines, the radiation monster machine and the odds. We know the bad news and the good.

We humble ourselves before God, and he lifts us up and gives us feet to walk in the high, dangerous places where others cannot go (Habakkuk 3:19). We can scale heights when we know in our deepest, hidden cells the Lord is our strength. Cancer cannot touch the soul God made and redeemed for himself.

Ruth Cook is an educator assistant for an English-as-a-Second-Language class and is a longtime Texas Baptist. The views expressed are those of the author.