This week I received requests for three Sonshine Friends who have been diagnosed with cancer.
We all have crosses to carry in this life, from disease, injury, and heartbreak to challenging the violence in the world around us. None of them are crosses anyone desires or requests. They are given to us not by God but by the reality of limited human bodies and broken human societies.
The question becomes how do we carry those crosses that are a part of every human life? Do we carry them with anger, resentment, fear, self-loathing, or regret that ripples out into the world through unhealthy actions towards others? Or do we carry our all-too-human crosses with patience, self-worth, gratitude for the goodness that remains, and a trust that even in this unwanted cross God is at work?
In that moment of imagining Jesus calling my friends to carry cancer, I suspect they tearfully said yes, with tears of consolation that even this cross could somehow be used for good. They just had no idea how.
There’s a story about a cancer patient who walked into the cancer center for their last scheduled chemo treatment with no idea if the chemo was winning and a very long transplant road still lying ahead. Just after she checked in and took a seat waiting to be called for the requisite pre-chemo labs, a middle-aged woman with glassy eyes walked over and gently asked, “Do you mind if I ask you about your experience? My mom just got her diagnosis a few days ago, and we don’t know if the chemo and radiation will be worth what it will do to her quality of life. This is our first visit, and we don’t know what to do.”
She shared with the woman all about her experience, what questions to ask, and what had been hard for her, but noted that everyone’s experience is different—different cancers, different treatment plans, different prognoses.
But she could share one thing they might have in common. She told her one of the good parts of her experience was that her diagnosis had given her time to prepare for the end of life on her terms.
She have been able to say everything that needed to be said to those she loved, she planned her final arrangements and knew that she will die with a sense of peace of being loved, whenever it happens. It was only in articulating it that even she realized how much she had been transformed over the last few months.
The woman’s eyes welled up with tears, and in less than ten minutes they had become companions on the road. She had no idea what she and her mom decided about treatment, but when she returned, the lady left her a note scribbled on a piece of paper torn out of her notebook full of questions. It read, “Thank you so very much! You have a great light inside of you, and your smile lights up a room! Thank you for allowing me to speak with you.”
Instantly she remembered that image of being called to carry her cancer with God.
Lord, I pray for all my Sonshine Friends that whatever crosses we carry in this life, others will follow behind us, carrying similar crosses. Facing any experience of suffering or human challenge with a sense of calling to use it for the greater glory of God doesn’t mean God gave us the cross. Rather, God invites us to find him in it and be transformed by it in ways that only experience can teach. With the grace of God, we carry on.
