Aug 28
When you believe in God, it can be hard to come to terms with the fact that He has allowed adversity to come into your life or your loved one’s. Author David Biebel talks about this fact in his book If God Is So Good, Why Do I Hurt So Bad? 
Biebel says there are two truths suffering people have to reconcile:
1. Sometimes life is agony
2. Our loving God is in control
Think about it.
If God knows everything, this diagnosis did not surprise Him.
If God sees everything, He saw the bad news coming.
If God has power over everything, He could have stopped it.
But He didn’t.
He didn’t stop you or your loved one from getting cancer–or MS or Alzheimer’s or heart disease or whatever other affliction you’ve encountered. He didn’t stop it from happening to you or your loved one or tons of other people and their loved ones.
But the reality is that God’s Word never promises that He will stop all bad things from happening to us. On the contrary, it assures us that He is prepared for each crisis and will intervene on our behalf.
The Message Bible paraphrases 2 Corinthians 4:8-9 this way: “We’ve been surrounded and battered by troubles, but we’re not demoralized; we’re not sure what to do, but we know that God knows what to do; we’ve been spiritually terrorized. But God hasn’t left our side; we’ve been thrown down, but we haven’t broken.”
God is in control.
Errant cells aren’t.
Toxic medicine isn’t.
White-coated doctors aren’t.
Herbs and vitamins aren’t.
We aren’t.
The sooner we learn this truth, the easier our struggle against serious or chronic illness will be. It’s actually quite freeing once you get it right. You can relax knowing Someone else is in charge—Someone much more intelligent, powerful and vigilant than we are or could ever hope to be.
Be encouraged that this health crisis has not taken God by surprise. He is in control and will equip you with whatever you need. And best of all, He will never leave your side.
Romans 8:38-39 has a powerful promise: “And I am convinced that nothing can ever separate us from God’s love. Neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither our fears for today nor our worries about tomorrow–not even the powers of hell can separate us from God’s love. No power in the sky above or in the earth below–indeed, nothing in all creation will ever be able to separate us from the love of God that is revealed in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
As Kathy Broccoli reminds us in the song below “My life is in your hands. My heart is in your keeping. I’m never without hope–not when my future is with You.”
Aug 14
As I was reading in the book of Hosea about how God promised to “transform the Valley of Trouble into a gateway of hope,” I couldn’t help but think of my friend Lauren.
His cancer journey has been an incredible roller coaster with hopes dashed one minute and unexpected new hopes found the next.
I hope the valley of trouble that you or your loved one faces is a lot smoother ride than Lauren’s, but just in case you hit a bunch of bends in the road, I thought you’d like to hear his hope-filled story.
It all started in December of 2006 when Lauren, then 54, was diagnosed with a rare mantle cell non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. He began a course of chemo at nearby Hershey Medical Center, but never really got a good remission and restarted more treatment in July of 2008 after more tumors developed. 
In November of that year, he walked his only daughter down the aisle (and unlike his wife, didn’t have to worry about how his hair looked that day!) A couple weeks later he headed back to Hershey for a stem cell transplant, because he still had a lot of active disease.
The transplant involved Lauren receiving an intravenous lethal dose of chemo and then being “rescued” from death with a transfusion of an anonymous donor’s healthy stem cells.
Lauren survived the transplant, but some of the cancer also survived and started growing. The doctors tried a couple of new chemos, which didn’t work and then some radiation, which also failed to stop the tumors growing on his arm.
“Many times I was about to throw in the towel, but my wife kept telling me ‘Don’t give up’!” Lauren recalls. “ When my faith was weak, the faith of others helped hold me up.”
Finally in October 2009, the Hershey doctor said there was one more hope: a donor lymphocyte infusion. (Don’t feel bad if you’ve never heard of it—Lauren hadn’t either.) Basically, it involved putting some of the donor’s white blood cells (lymphocytes) into him to see if they could recognize and destroy the cancer cells.
Lauren was the first to know the procedure was working.
“Within a week I could see the shrinkage in the tumors on my arm,” he recalls.
A second dose was given and the tumors disappeared. Nearly a decade later, Lauren and Joan have welcomed several grandchildren into their family and he continues to get clean bills of health from Hershey.
A few years ago, Lauren and his wife traveled West and stopped in Death Valley.
“I kept thinking about the verse in Psalm 23:
‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me’,” recalls Lauren. “I knew I had come through that valley and He was with me.”
As Lauren and I talked on the phone about this day’s writing, he told me he was looking at his favorite picture in his home. It’s a poster of a craggy mountaintop with this inscription underneath: “It’s not the greatness of my faith that moves mountains, but my faith in the greatness of God.”
Don’t worry, my friend, today if your faith is not that big. Just be sure to put it all in a very big God.
I will…transform the Valley of Trouble into a gateway of hope. Hosea 2:15
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Excerpted from 50 Days of Hope, copyright 2012 by LYNN EIB
Jul 31
In those nerve-wracking few days between my diagnosis and my surgery, I announced to my husband, “We need a pastor—and I don’t mean you!”
I think he could tell by the distraught look on my face that I was serious, so he called our good friend David Dunn, pastor of a sister church in a nearby town.
In my mind’s eye I can still see the moment David and his wife Carolyn walked into our family room. David headed straight for Ralph and Carolyn moved toward me. Her extended arms enveloped me in a warm embrace as I lay my head on her shoulder and released my soul-aching sobs.
I can’t tell you how long the four of us stood there huddled with only wordless weeping. David and Carolyn did not try to cheer us up in their delightful Maine accents. They did not quote any of the hundreds of Bible verses they knew so well. Neither shared any wisdom garnered from living longer on this earth than either my husband or I had.
Instead…they felt our pain. Their embraces spoke volumes to us: we love you and we are here holding you up as long as you need us.
I count that as my first lesson in learning how to be a patient advocate and walk with a friend in the dark.
My friend Ken says the presence of a friend usually meant much more to him than the words of a friend when
he was facing a diagnosis of tongue cancer many years ago.
His advice to friends and family of patients facing serious illness is to “just BE!”
“Be a friend,” he says, “Be a shoulder. Be a hugger. Be an asset. Please just BE there and God will BE there. If you do this, you will BE the giver of the greatest gift a suffering friend needs—presence without fixing; love without agenda,” he adds.
Helen Keller walked in the dark from the age of 19 months when an illness struck her blind, deaf and dumb.
She later did learn to speak, but lived the rest of her nearly 88 years without benefit of sight or hearing. Still Helen prized friendship so much that she thought it preferable to be blind and have true friends, than be sighted and have none.
Won’t you pray today for God to send true friends into your life? Whether you are the patient or the caregiver, resist the urge to go it alone. You need a loyal friend who will love you regardless of your situation. Swallow your pride and allow people the privilege of walking with you in the dark.
And if you are the caregiver for someone facing a life trial, won’t you please pray to be the kind of friend who offers your presence as the most important gift? Don’t be concerned that you might not know what to say to your hurting friend or family member. Your actions will say much more than your words as Proverbs 17:7 makes clear:
A true friend loves regardless of the situation,
and a real brother exists to share the tough times. (The Voice Bible)
Friends love through all kinds of weather,
and families stick together in all kinds of trouble. (The Message Bible paraphrase)
And never forget that God longs to walk with you in the dark and empower you for your journey.
You light a lamp for me.
The Lord, my God, lights up my darkness.
In your strength I can crush an army;
with my God I can scale any wall.
Psalm 18:28-29 New Living Translation
Excerpted from Peace in the Face of Cancer, copyright 2017 by Lynn Eib
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View in your browser to be able to hear the music video below “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” by Matt Maher
Jul 17
Don’t let this adorable, seemingly innocent smile fool you… she’s a negotiator. Consider our recent conversation.
ABBY: You have any stuffed animals dat were mommy’s when she was a widdle girl?
ME: I don’t think so. I think I gave them all to her already.
ABBY: Can you just check?
ME: Sure, I can do that.
ABBY: An’ if you find any, can you give ’em to me?
ME: OK, I’ll do that.
ABBY: Good, ’cause Mommy said we no can buy any more stuffed animals.
Uh-oh. Scammed by a preschooler.
I don’t think Abby’s negotiating skills are all that unusual as I believe most children are negotiators–wrangling to get what they want, how and when they want it. By the teenage years the art seems to be perfected. (I recall our middle daughter insisting that because she was old enough to have donated blood, she was old enough to do whatever else she wanted!)
But for many of us, negotiating is something we carry into adulthood and even into our relationship with God. I know I’ve been guilty over the years of trying to bargain with the Almighty. I remember in the spring of 1991 just after finishing my chemo, I knew God was calling me to start a cancer support ministry. Honestly, I just wanted to put cancer behind me and get back to my normal life. Hanging out with cancer patients sounded depressing.
However, a few weeks later I came up with an idea that I figured would suit both God and me: I would start a cancer support group, and God would have to let me live because everyone in that group would need me!
But God reminded me that He doesn’t play “Let’s Make a Deal.” (I was surprised, too, that He knew that TV show!) Instead, He wanted me to get involved—no guarantees and definitely no negotiating.
As most of you know, I reluctantly started a Cancer Prayer Support Group in October 1991 and it became one of the greatest joys of my life. In fact, many of you reading this are people I met in that group. Eventually, that group led to me being hired by my oncologist, Dr. Marc Hirsh, where I met many, many more of you. And then my role as his patient advocate led to my writing my first book, When God & Cancer Meet, which has sold more than 100,000 copies and allowed me to meet many, many, many more of you.
What a great lesson in non-negotiating. I didn’t need to wring blessings from God’s hands. He was not interested in my bargaining chips or attempted cajoling. I just needed to follow where He was leading and leave the rest up to Him. When I did, He proved to me one again that He is able to “accomplish more than we might ask or think.” (Ephesians 3:20)
“So I stop all negotiations with the God of all Creation.
You’re bigger than I thought You were.
You’re bigger than I thought You were.
I will rest in the Father’s hands.
Leave the rest in the Father’s hands.”
–Passion “Bigger than I Thought You Were”
(P.S. Don’t miss the music video below–I honestly planned this whole blog around the words because they are so powerful.)
Jul 03
Twenty-nine years ago if I had heeded this quote from the creator of Peanuts, I could have saved myself many sleepless nights.
I was pretty consumed back then with trying to figure out how a healthy-eating-and-exercising-mom in her thirties could get cancer. Especially colon cancer for crying out loud! Colonoscopies aren’t even recommended for the average person until age 50.
I never smoked. I wasn’t overweight and worked out regularly at the local Y. I ate a high-fiber, low-fat diet including all our homegrown pesticide-free vegetables. In my mind someone who leaves the skin on their mashed potatoes and who shakes wheat germ on everything should not get colon cancer! Besides my little girls needed their mommy and my husband already watched one wife die a slow, debilitating death.
How? Why? What if?
Any unanswered questions keeping you awake at night?
If you’re trying to figure out exactly why you or your loved one is facing a trial right now, I’m afraid you won’t get any explanations from me. I don’t believe we can make sense of another person’s suffering—only our own. People often want to try anyway and they’ll preach and tell you why it all happened, but they’re not God and they don’t really know. It might make them feel better to think they have it all figured out, but I doubt it will do much for you.
And if you are the loved one of someone facing really difficult circumstances, please don’t tell them “everything happens for a reason.” Such a comment minimizes the sufferer’s feelings and implies that there’s a good, rational justification for what has occurred. I won’t be uttering that phrase to my daughter’s friends who have a 5-year-old with spina bifida and a 7-year-old with an aggressive brain tumor. Instead I will pray that these dear parents, who love their sons and their Lord will run with their sleep-interrupting questions to the One who knows them best and loves them most.
I waited a long time for the Eternal;
He finally knelt down to hear me.
He listened to my weak and whispered cry. Psalm 40:1 The Voice Bible
Hear me, O God, when I cry;
listen to my prayer.
You are the One I will call when pushed to the edge,
when my heart is faint.
Shoulder me to the rock above me. Psalm 60:1-2 The Voice Bible
I’ll never know the answers to your questions or all of mine, but something I read in a book by C.S. Lewis has helped me to be more at peace with not knowing.
It’s found in a scene from The Horse and His Boy, part of Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia series. These classic children’s books (loved by adults, too) are set in the magical land of Narnia, which is ruled by a powerful lion named Aslan (who represents Jesus). At one point Aslan explains to a rich runaway girl named Aravis why some of the awful things that happened to her had to occur. She then asks Aslan what will happen to her stepmother’s slave, who was punished for falling asleep after Aravis had drugged her.
“Will any more harm come to her by what I did?”
“Child,” said the Lion, “I am telling you your story, not hers. No-one is told any story but their own.”[1]
Are you trying to understand your story? Take your questions to your Heavenly Father, who will either give you the answers you need…or the peace to live with the questions.
[1]C. S. Lewis, Horse and His Boy (New York: Harper Collins, 2005), 202.
Excerpted from Peace in the Face of Cancer. Copyright 2017 by Lynn Eib.
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Be sure to open this blog in your browser to hear the music video below “Hold Me Jesus” by Rich Mullins.
I’m a newspaper reporter-turned-author. And I’m a passionate encourager, but always a truth-teller. I worked for nearly two decades in a unique position as a patient advocate in my oncologist’s office and the Cancer Prayer Support Group I founded in 1991 is the country’s oldest such faith-based group.
