I Have Cancer…

Let me get this out of the way: I am no theologian. I don’t have a Bible verse ready for every situation. I think I know (maybe) ten verses by heart, and that’s only the result of having gone to a Christian school for fourteen years of my life. It wasn’t by choice, but I’m still glad I can recite John 3:16 and John 1:1 by heart, because that’s more than most. I’m not a Bible scholar, although I got an award called “Bible Scholar” my sophomore year of high school because I had all A’s on my Bible verse recitations. This all suffice to say: I don’t know everything there is to know about the Bible or God.

I know that all things are possible through Christ. I’ve known that since I was a child. I think that’s one of the first things they teach in Sunday school. Thanks to my elementary school, Sunday school was every day of the week for me. Jesus loves me, this I knew.

I knew He loved me. I knew John 3:16 said he died for my sins. I knew, I knew, I knew. I had faith in him—that through Him, all things were possible. That was until I was twelve-years-old, sitting on a hospital bed, and hearing a doctor tell me I had cancer.

Wait. Doctor, can you repeat that? Cancer.

Can you use it in a sentence?

“You have cancer,” he told me, glancing awkwardly back and forth between my mother and me, trying to guess which one of us was going to need the most help with the breaking of this news. “It’s a rare form. We’re going to need to get you into surgery tomorrow. Now, Mrs. Gordon…”

He went over the details with my shaking mother, while I zoned out and thought about this boy at my school that I had a crush on. He was a year older than I was, in the eighth grade; skinnier than a rod, awkward and goofy, I thought he was the one forever. I wondered if he’d love me when I was bald.

I continued to think of other things, mundane things, but now, I thought of them all in the context of my newly found cancerous cells. What about the basketball team this year? What kind of grades would I be getting, being sick? Would my friends all up and leave me because I was the cancer freak?

The surgery came and went–a quick fix—and we hoped for the best, but the best had yet to come. One year later, almost to the day, they found more tumors, and this time, another difficult word entered my day-to-day vocabulary.

Chemotherapy.

I didn’t need the doctor to use it in a sentence this time.

I began to liken myself to Job. God put him through so much, but he had a plan all along. Job never let go of his faith. He believed in God enough to suffer. He knew, in the end, it’d all be okay. Having faith like Job is easier said than done. I’m sad to say, I wasn’t as faithful. My relationship with God began to falter. Sure, I knew that God would never leave me nor forsake me. That was one of the Bible verses I did have memorized, despite my prior statement of me being no theologian. Yet, as much as I tried to convince myself that was the case, I couldn’t help but wonder: where’d God go?

The four years I went through chemotherapy were four years where no prayers were uttered. God wasn’t answering them anyways. I stopped going to church, I ignored the hymns we sang in school, and I let my mind wander during pre-dinner prayers. I didn’t care. God left me, so I left him.

In the end, it wasn’t a Bible verse that led me back to him. I didn’t have a epiphany or a serendipitous moment where I realized God actually was there all along. This isn’t a Lifetime movie. This was my life.

After four years, I went through more scans. CT scans, MRIs, Pet scans—you name it, I was scanned by it. I had two metal plates in my head and three different types of chemotherapy under my belt. I was a cancer pro. As I waited in the doctor’s office, nervously, to hear whether or not the previous round of chemo had worked, I said my first serious prayer in years. It wasn’t anything dramatic. It wasn’t an empowering speech. It was this: Please.

I’m sure you can guess the ending.

It’s easy to blame God during hard times—that’s why we so often do. We view it as a punishment or a lack of love. We view it as Him leaving us. So we leave Him, not knowing that he’s always right there, providing for us in ways that we know not. I thought God had abandoned me, so I blamed Him for allowing me to get sick. I was just a kid, and I did not deserve to be on the brink of death for five years. I didn’t deserve to be scared that each new day was going to be my last.

I shouldn’t know, at the young age of twenty, what it feels like to make peace with your death. I shouldn’t know what it’s like to see my parents cry because they’re afraid of watching their child die before their eyes. I shouldn’t know what it’s like to see the fear in my baby sister’s eyes that she may lose the sibling that is supposed to protect her. I shouldn’t know these things, but I do.

And despite blaming God for a long time, I know it wasn’t the result of his lack of love for me. Because he loves me more than imaginable. That’s why the death I made peace with never came.

I’m not going to pretend like I know everything. I really don’t have an answer for why babies die or children are starving or bad guys go unpunished. I don’t have an answer for everything unfair in this world.

All I have is the few Bible verses I have memorized.

“
Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged, for the LORD your God will be with you wherever you go.” – Joshua 1:9

[This is a guest post from Hannah Gordon – If you like what you read here, you’ll love her new book, “Almost-Love Stories,” check it out!]