I HATE CANCER

I hate cancer.  Maybe I shouldn’t have such an emotion for a disease, but I do.  I Hate cancer.  I know God can and does work through situations and people going through cancer diagnoses, treatments, remissions, and deaths.  But I HATE cancer.  I’ve seen some of the most Christ-like attitudes from individuals with cancer, or their families, as they face down the disease.  But I HATE CANCER!

Today, I learned that cancer has finally taken the life of my PSC team member, one of my engineering mentors, my friend and brother in Christ, Gary Dawson.  So while I’ve known this was coming for some time, it hit me hard tonight, as I prepared to tell my kids about it.  They’ve lost two great-grandparents and one grandmother in the last 9 months.  But that’s not why it was difficult...those were sudden, this was not.  Sometimes death is too large of a topic for kids.  But that’s not why this was difficult…they understand death to some extent, and heaven to probably a greater depth than I do.  I guess it can be hard when you know someone well.  But that’s not why this was difficult…they had never even met Gary.

To explain why this hit me hard, I’ll have to go back a couple of years.  Every morning when I took the kids to school, we would hit a certain turn, and pray the rest of the way to school.  Not long after we started this habit, we learned of a couple of people battling cancer.  We made it a point to mention them by name every morning.  At the time, Gary was in remission, but when he let me know that the disease was back, he became the third name on the list.  Over the course of last year, we added two more names.  As I sit here tonight, the other four are in complete remission or are doing very well through their treatments.  As we got more names on the list, Andrew had trouble remembering all of them, so he would often say “Thank you for healing the people on the list,” or something similar.  But when it was my turn, I would say their names, and be as specific as I could about what we hoped God would do for them.

The conversation tonight was honest, real, and difficult.  Most of the prayers my children have uttered have either come true or were too general to have any intensity behind them.  (“please help all the sick in the entire world”)  I wanted the kids to understand that sometimes, the people that we’re asking God to heal, still die.  We talked about how I met Gary, and why he was important in my life.  We talked about why God seems to heal some people, but not others.  We shed a few tears for a man they never met.  We asked God to bless his family and help his grandkids to learn what a great guy he was through stories and memories. 

And I hope my kids’ faith was increased a little.  Not faith in a Santa Claus-type figure, that just gives you stuff.  But a faith in the maker of this world, whose will is sovereign and sometimes difficult to understand.  I want them to have faith in a God that loves them, and to know that just because disease can take a person’s life, it doesn’t diminish what God can and has already done to Death.

And maybe, I needed to hear all of the same things.  Because I hate cancer, and I hate the way it overtakes the life that it invades.  But it doesn’t get the last word, love does.

Just Passing Through, (Thank GOD!)

Eric