“In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths.”
Proverbs 3:6
I am in remission. I am grateful to be able to say this. I know that there are those that have not had the privilege. I do not write these words lightly. Once I was in remission from cancer this past year, I watched other loved ones fight it. I saw two precious loved ones suffer and ultimately die from it. I never imagined that I would be a person that would have this cancer narrative, but I am.
One of the questions that I have avoided throughout this journey of battling and recovering from cancer has been “How can I grow from this?” or “What can this experience teach me?” Asking myself those questions was an affront to the very real injustice I felt at the hands of having cancer at all. How dare this life give me cancer? It was truly insulting. for a while, I had no intentions of growing from it. My only intentions were to survive it and get back to life.
However, I found that “getting back to life” was much harder than I had first supposed. How does a person get back to life when their body is poisoned, weakened, and broken from treatments, their spirit is disheartened, disillusioned, and their mind is traumatized, grieving, and working to process the treatments and physical consequences that come with battling cancer? I thought that once I was officially in remission, life would go back to normal, but it didn’t. People had expectations for me to be who I was before treatments. they wanted me to fall back into old priorities and responsibilities. They wanted me to put up with old ways of communicating and interacting with others. But everything was irrevocably changed. I was not the same person.
I found myself in a form of an identity crisis. I didn’t know who I was by the time my body had been riddled with cancer to the other side where my body was wrecked from the same poison that had healed it. I was broken in every way. Yet, I knew that a part of a Christian’s journey is placing your trust in Jesus. I told myself that I trusted God and I consistently prayed it, but when the bills started piling up or “loved ones” would insensitively wound me in my grief I grew anxious and confused. That isn’t trusting. I beat my head against a proverbial rock, trying to understand why my anger towards God was so intense if I had sworn to trust him. I couldn’t deny feeling cheated by life. I felt cheated by God.
“In God I will praise his word, In God I have put my trust; I will not fear what flesh can do unto me.”
Psalm 56:4
I learned as I transitioned from active treatments and into recovery that trust has other components that go beyond simply saying, “I trust you, Lord.” Trust involves laying aside your own desires, your own wants, and your own dreams for the desires and thoughts that He has for you. This can be confusing to understand when we are actively going through treatments and every cell in our body is hurting because we can confuse the pain of our suffering with the will of God. God did not desire for us to hurt. His desire is to perfect us. His desire is to draw us closer to Him. His desire is to create a more perfected shape of our being in His image. I am not the same woman that I was before cancer because God used the very horrible reality of cancer to perfect me just a little bit more than I would have been able to do on my own. This is where trust comes in. If I trust the word of God, and the journey that God takes me on then I will not fear if it even brings me up to the gates of death. I can say this with confidence now because I have faced death and still hold on to my faith in God.
Trust takes courage. It sometimes requires that we put aside the very real feelings of primal fear and confusion, and decide to live above them. It challenges a believer to spiritually place their hope in a dream that may never come to fruition all for the sake of committing to the goodness of God. While we suffer, some scriptures may feel like bitter gall in the soul, but afterward are sweet as honey on the tongue.
“Delight thyself also in the LORD; and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart.”
Psalm 37:4
This scripture is still hard for me to cling to right now. It “feels” like a wicked trick to believe when cancer has stolen so much from my future. All I can see are the consequences of chemo and how it has stolen my primitive rights as a woman. However, I know that God is my fortress, and my faith in him calls me to trust even as my heart grieves. I will not feign religiosity that says that I trust blindly and without a qualm. I have spit, cussed, and had a holy hissy fit, but I still believe that God is the center of my life. It’s my choice to continue to behave and live in the manner that befits a godly woman. I choose to live for him, no matter the cost.