Since the day they found the cancerous mass, August 26, 2011, I have prayed for God to heal my body.
After days of bedridden sickness due to chemotherapy, I was driving to the lake to meet my mother and step father for a boat ride on Lake Cumberland in the glorious October. Hazy and still a little foggy from the chemo, something profound occurred to me (don’t stop reading).
Reeling from the deep depression and anxiety of being as sick as I was, I prayed that daily prayer…. For God to remove all cancer from my body. As a gust of wind blew a bundle of yellow leaves just in front of my vehicle, I wondered briefly, when and how would I know I was healed. When I would know that God had healed me? After more than two years of praying this same prayer, I have come to realize, in order to improve the quality of life, I need to know if God intends to heal me or not.
A solution came to me in a push of great relief woven perfectly with a sense of duty and mission. That great question was entirely up to me.
My whole life, I have expected to be normal. I have expected I would live to be 75 to 85 years old, and that was fine with me. Just like every cancer patient, I have lived the last two years knowing that my lifespan could be and most likely would be greatly diminished. So you and I have been praying for divine intervention – for God to remove the cancer from my body and restore me to my previous sense of mission. Driving, I thought about how I would know I was healed. Would it come with a clean PET Scan? After having several clean scans, I realize a clean PET scan would not be evidence of God’s healing. If there is no diagnostic instrument that can answer the healing question, I guess I would have to wait till I was 75 to 85 years old in order to see if God healed me. But if He did heal me, but I waited the remainder of my natural, cancer free life to know it, or to witness the “proof” of it, what good would the healing be anyway? I would have lived a complete life believing I was still sick and diminished – forty, fifty years of NOT living, but wondering.
It then occurred to me in that emotional push of great relief and a long, firm reach for strength, God would heal me the moment I accepted it. I have already lived longer than the doctors expected. I have no reason to believe this will not continue. In the absence of any medical tool that can proclaim me healed, the only other device would be in taking the journey to the end of my life to know whether healing had occurred. If I continue in the mindset I have been in for the past twenty-six months (wondering if I had been healed or searching for the answer), forty years hence, I would have destroyed any and all healing God had actually done for me, no matter if I lived one more year…. Five more….. ten more…. 50 more years.
The entire question and Idea of healing collapsed right in front of me and I realized that true healing of this cancer means living each and every day that I possibly can, for the soul purpose of living that day. And if I had the strength to do this, then I am healed by God through my faith. The need for “proof” would fasten me to a diminished life of illness of any given length.
So I suppose I will borrow a device from my friends in addiction recovery. I am healed from this cancer if I can live each day as it comes and as long as I keep looking for healing to come, it never will. Rather, if I accept that I am already healed, only then am I truly healed. And I will go forward stitching together the days of my life just like everybody else; with no idea when it will all end.
I suppose it could be argued, the only illness I have is an emotional one wherein, I cease to completely live for fear of dying.
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