Cancer and me. And God.

On having peace while not being in control.

Photo by Ksenia Yakovleva on Unsplash

I can’t say how grateful I am for the response to my first Substack post. Thanks so much. (Remember, it’s free to subscribe. Tell your friends!)

Second post: I know the world is on edge — there’s talk of a Middle East ceasefire as I write this, reports a former employer of mine, the AP — but I will let wiser heads pontificate about all that. (For now, anyway.) Right now, I’m going with the cancer. People ask how I’m doing. I think I should address this right away.

Besides, this is an opportunity, maybe, to supply some food for thought and encouragement to those with tough diagnoses or scary situations. I have grown through the experience. I mean, I’ll be honest: I’m a little nervous; there is no cure for my prostate cancer. Metastatic, Stage 4. That sort of news spanks you in the butt, no doubt about it. But…it can do more than that. It can provide a degree of clarity and personal growth that you might not have otherwise.

I mean it.

Let me go back a bit. I’ve told you about my Christian faith and interest in theology. (For those of you suddenly tuning out because faith talk isn’t your thing, please do me the honor of reading this not-too-long post.) I became a believer in college (a story for a future post), abandoning a weak, ill-thought-out agnosticism and embracing an electric new outlook on life. It made sense of the world to me. It gave me peace. It still does.

And – I say this carefully, because you might think it a weird comparison – it was kind of a heart-combusting thing… not unlike the kind of thrill a college freshman (as I was) might experience (as I did) when newly in love with a girl (as I very much was). Of course, God and the girl – Angela! I still have her, and she me – are different in important ways. Of course. I’m just saying that the feeling of the heart having wings (to shift my metaphor away from combustion) is similar in both relationships. At least it was for me. Despite my father’s prediction that both God and the girl were passing fads, both relationships turned out to be permanent.

All that to say: by the time of my cancer biopsy in January 2024, I remained firm and confident and happy in my faith. The blessings of life (wife, kids, grands, career) were too many to count. A great retirement lay ahead. So many plans.

But I was forgetting: I am not in charge.

Not even of my own life. I had it all figured out, planned out, thought out. Of course, I knew I was not entitled to a trouble-free existence, as no one is. But… I… assumed.

Wait. What’s the better word I want here? Presumption. Presumption: an unwarranted confidence in some future outcome. It’s a miscalculation, is what it is. And worse, it’s a kind of usurping. The future is not ours to plan. And so, over the past year, I have been vividly reminded that Someone Who’s actually qualified to design the future is in fact doing so.

I may not love the feeling that I’m not in control. But it’s a thrill, when I think about it, and a relief too, to be able to trust the One Who is.

***

A different sort of presumption was also exposed: that I, in my retirement writing, would astonish the world with keen insights, and that this scattering of electronic morsels would draw many people to faith in Jesus, heal political divides, establish a commonly understood reality and shared body of facts, and otherwise leave indelible happy marks on our tortured society – all to much acclaim, applause and future book blurbs.

Ha!

May the Lord God be pleased to use a morsel of two for someone else’s benefit, and I will be pleased and, hopefully, weaned from grandiosity.

+++

I’ve gone on too long. I’ll wrap this up by saying I am also a work-in-progress in the sense that for all my classroom work and rummaging in the original Greek of the New Testament, I am only a kindergartener in the classroom of heaven. I am slowly learning more of the peculiar love that animates the story of Jesus and why He died on a Roman cross outside Jerusalem. A favorite hymn captures it in one trenchant line: “He, to rescue me from danger, interposed his precious blood.” There’s a bunker-buster worth of theology in that line; no time to unpack that here and now, except to note that Christ is the great Interposer!

OK, enough preaching for today. (You’re welcome.) Just one more line that has become increasingly powerful for me, this one from Scripture: “Nothing in all creation [not cancer, nothing! – RV] will ever be able to separate us from the love of God that is revealed in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8:39, New Living Translation)

***

Oh, one more thing on the nitty-gritty of my diagnosis. Since my cancer is metastatic (spread to parts unknown after starting in the prostate), our approach is to keep it suppressed as much as possible with a hormone therapy that blocks your testosterone, which fuels the cancer. So far, so good. The testosterone is much suppressed. So, no news is good news; if the PSA reading (from blood testing) remains as negligible as it currently is, I’m in good shape. If and when the PSA goes up again, I’d probably need to add chemo. Lord willing (as I have emphasized above), this therapy will keep me around for a few years more. But we don’t know that, do we? Some things are not in our control. Which is okay.