Wait and Hope
Sometimes things look fine, but they’re not.
When Ty and I were dating in college, there was a very large tree in the courtyard of his small apartment complex. College students would study under the shade. Small children would ride their bikes around the base. Young families would picnic beside it.
Then one day, it toppled. The entire tree split down the middle and crashed to the ground, revealing a rotten core. The center was entirely hollow—some kind of insect had killed it.
Nobody was hurt, thankfully. The tree hadn’t looked dead. It still had green leaves. There was just nothing holding it together. It had an invisible disease, eating it from the inside out.
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People often seem startled to see me at work or out and about doing my normal things. When I hear a familiar voice in the studio and pop down to say hi, the response is almost always one of gleeful surprise: Oh! I didn’t expect you to be in! Almost like: What are you doing here?
A friend recently remarked that my skin color looked great. People comment that I look well or good. These compliments always take me a bit by surprise. It’s funny: sometimes I forget that I have cancer. I’m still walking around on my two legs, wearing my normal clothes, working, picking kids up from school, cooking dinner, going on date nights with friends.
I forget that I have cancer until I take my shirt off and I see the giant horizontal seams from underarm to underarm. I see a large red rash with bumps under my skin. Ty runs his hands over my rashy, flat chest every day. He feels each individual bump. He’s drawn on my skin with Sharpie to measure the rash and mark the bumps. We want to know: is it growing or shrinking?
How can I feel so normal but be eaten up with cancer?
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One familiar thread I keep hearing from nurses and doctors is what a positive attitude I seem to have. Just yesterday, a nurse doing an ultrasound on me stopped and told me that she thinks that the cancer battle is fought in the mind, and I seem to have the right attitude.
Well, I don’t know about that. My body sure has taken a beating, and there are plenty of strong-minded people who die from cancer.
But I do think of Proverbs 17:22
A joyful heart is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones.
We can all agree that there is truth in this. Medical studies have shown it. Heart attitude helps.
Positivity isn’t something that you can manufacture, really. I think I’m just a naturally cheerful person. I take no credit for it—I was born that way.
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Recently I was talking to a friend of mine and she confessed some things that were going on in her marriage. Actions that had been swept under the rug years ago have created patterns of mistrust and lack of communication. I’ve had this conversation with other women before, and it always takes me by surprise. She’s certainly not the only one.
Cancer comes in many forms. Mine is right under the skin: bumpy and visible, but only when I’m naked. When my clothes are on, you’d never know it. Hers is mistrust, fear, and anger. But you’d never know it unless she told you.
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The natural question, then, is: how do we have a joyful heart (rather than a crushed spirit) in the middle of the suffering, whatever that looks like? Especially when we don’t feel like it? How do we gain contentment and peace—even joy—right smack dab in the middle of the dark place?
In her book Suffering is Never for Nothing, Elisabeth Elliott writes:
And when I stood by my shortwave radio in the jungle of Ecuador in 1956 and heard that my husband was missing, and God brought to mind the words of the Prophet Isaiah, ‘When you pass through the waters, I will be with you.’ You can imagine that my response was not terribly spiritual. I was saying, but Lord, You’re with me all the time. What I want is Jim. I want my husband.
Five days later I knew that Jim was dead. And God’s presence with me was not Jim’s presence. That was a terrible fact. God’s presence did not change the terrible fact that I was a widow. …
God’s presence did not change my widowhood. Jim’s absence thrust me, forced me, hurried me to God, my hope and my only refuge.
And we, too, must allow our pain to hurry us to God. There is no other place that will provide the rest that we need, no matter the burden. I love Elisabeth’s honesty in the above passage. “God’s presence with me was not Jim’s presence. That was a terrible fact.”
I think being honest with God is a great start. He already knows it anyway. In the next chapter, Elisabeth writes one of my favorite lines from the entire book:
God is big enough to take anything that we can dish out to him.
I’ve got to be honest. This past year, I’ve done plenty of dishing out.
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When I was first diagnosed with cancer, a friend sent me an article by John Piper called, “Don’t Waste Your Cancer.” She wrote: You might not be ready for this yet, but it’s here for you when you are. She had just finished her breast cancer treatment a few months prior.
It’s an excellent little article, and includes bold headlines:
-You’ll waste your cancer if you believe it’s a curse and not a gift.
-You’ll waste your cancer if you spend too much time reading about cancer and not enough time reading about God.
-You’ll waste your cancer if you refuse to think about death.
There are ten total ways that John Piper is warning me not to waste my cancer. Sheesh. That man does not beat around the bush.
There was one that stood out to me the most. I kept circling back around to it. It wriggled its way into my mind. It kept popping back up into my thoughts:
You’ll waste your cancer if you seek comfort from your odds rather than from God.
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The ironic thing is at the time, I thought I had run-of-the-mill breast cancer. My odds were good. I had quite a bit of cancer—don’t get me wrong—but after the initial shock of a cancer diagnosis, I’ve got to tell you, I rested a lot of hope in those odds. I actually told a friend: As cancer goes, I’ve got one of the good ones.
Ten months later, freshly diagnosed with an invasion of Inflammatory Breast Cancer (IBC), I can tell you point-blank: it’s not one of the good ones.
The odds? Let’s not go there.
My God? Ever the same.
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How do you find joy amid the toxic thing?
Even if the fig tree does not bloom and the vines have no grapes, even if the olive tree fails to produce and the fields yield no food, even if the sheep pen is empty and the stalls have no cattle—even then, I will be happy with the Lord. I will truly find joy in God, who saves me.
-Habakkuk 3:17-18
I sit with God. I trust him. He doesn’t promise me tomorrow, but he does promise me joy. He promises me that I have a purpose—that this has a purpose. He promises me peace. And on the days that I am restless and worried, I remember Psalm 61:2:
When my heart is overwhelmed, lead me to the rock that is higher than I.
And back I go again: to dish it out, to sit, to cry, to receive the peace, to ask for the joy.
And again. And again. And again.
