Mar 22
My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive;
and to do it with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style.
MAYA ANGELOU
I remember going in for my five-year cancer checkup and gleefully announcing to my oncologist, Dr. Marc Hirsh, that I wouldn’t be seeing him professionally anymore.
“Where did you get that idea?” he responded.
“It’s five years; I’m cured!” I told him, surprised he was unaware of such a momentous occasion.
“Well, the chance the cancer will return has diminished greatly, but you still need to be checked for the rest of your life,” Marc replied.
I felt as if my winning lottery ticket had been declared a forgery. After five whole years of waiting to be proclaimed cured, there was going to be no such official announcement.
Of course, back then I thought there were only two alternatives regarding cancer: sick or cured.
Thankfully, I learned there’s a crucial third distinction: survivor. The National Cancer Institute says that’s what we become “from the time of diagnosis until the end of life.” So survivors include folks who have just found out they have cancer, people who used to have cancer, and those who can expect always to have it. I’m pretty sure that includes everybody who has ever heard those three dreaded words: “You have cancer.”
As I write, there are an estimated 14.5 million people in the United States with a history of cancer, and about the same number of new diagnoses is expected worldwide this year.
That’s an incredible total of survivors, but I wonder how many fit only the first dictionary definition of survive: “to remain alive or in existence”? And how many also portray the second meaning: “to continue to function or prosper”?
Functioning and prospering sound a great deal better to me than simply being alive and existing. If you agree and want to see how you or your survivor loved one also can be a “thriver,” keep reading!
I think bestselling author and poet Maya Angelou’s mission statement is a perfect one to apply to our post-diagnosis lives. I’ve been living as a survivor since 1990, when I was diagnosed with colon cancer at the age of thirty-six. My girls were eight, ten, and twelve at the time, and now I’m a grandmother to six. In the ensuing years, my mission, like Ms. Angelou’s, has been not only to survive, but to thrive, and I’ve dedicated my life to helping cancer patients and their caregivers do the same.
Some of the people you will meet in this book are in treatment or have finished treatment with the hope that their cancer will be cured and never come back. Many (like me) were told there was a high chance the cancer would reappear, but guess what? No one on this earth really knows. (I’m still here, cancer- free, defying the 40-percent survival rate given me.) Still others you will encounter here have been told the cancer is “treatable, not curable” or will never go away. Despite that grim prognosis, some of those folks are in remission, and a few even have no signs of cancer!
And all of these survivors and their caregivers are peace seekers.
They are people like you who want to experience tranquility and contentment no matter what the diagnosis or prognosis. I’ll share their peace-seeking, peacekeeping stories so this book can become a volume of “portable peace” for you. Take it with you to read during treatment or while waiting at doctors’ offices or before you put your head on the pillow each night.
You see, I truly believe finding peace requires a two-pronged approach. It will take effort on our part. There are specific things we can do or not do to help create calm in our homes, our minds, and our hearts.
And it will take trust on our part because there are amazing things that only God can do for us and in us.
Here’s what I think is going to happen as you read this book:
Because of God’s tender mercy,
the morning light from heaven is about to break upon us,
to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,
and to guide us to the path of peace. Luke 1:78-79
(If the music video doesn’t automatically load below, please copy and paste this link to enjoy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FPBEyfQVts )
Mar 15
How much do you think about Heaven? A lot? A little? Not at all?
Whether your earthly life is close to it’s end or you have many decades still in front of you, I hope your thoughts turn often to Heaven because that eternal perspective lifts the weariness we all face. One of my dear friends who thought well and often of Heaven was named Melina.
Melina was a dark-haired, dark-eyed beauty (think, full-blooded Italian parents!) She and her husband Brian met in 1988 and married a decade later. Together their love produced two adorable little girls, Cecilia and Olivia. Melina was a mortgage broker and Brian worked as an electrical engineer.
It was a beautiful world.
But that was before October of 2003 came. And with it a diagnosis for 33-year-old Melina of colon cancer. I had just met Melina’s younger sister Rina through a mutual friend and I sent Melina a little note of encouragement when I heard about her diagnosis. I knew how important it was to hear from other survivors of “your” kind of cancer. I reminded her that I was still alive after having colon cancer spread to five lymph nodes (she “only” had it in two).
After surgery, Melina started chemotherapy, availing herself of the new anti-colon cancer drugs that had not been available to me back in 1990. But in August of 2004, three weeks after doctors told her there was no evidence of disease, she developed terrible abdominal pain: a grapefruit sized mass was on her ovary. Then a PET scan showed tiny cancerous spots in both lungs.
Melina quit her job to stay home with her daughters and for the next nearly three years, Melina fought back against the cancer, enduring such things as a clinical trial that left her bedridden for five months and a trip to Germany for a new laser procedure to remove the lung nodules. She spent two weeks in California learning about organic and whole food nutrition, and traveled to cancer centers in Philadelphia and Virginia to see what they could offer.
Each new approach seemed to knock down the cancer for a while, only to have it rear its ugly head once again.
Like many cancer patients do during their fight, Melina started a web page. She called it “Melina’s Hope.” As an author who appreciates a really great opening thought, I loved the way Melina began the first page of her site: “You might think my hope is to preserve my earthly life…”
That’s exactly what I was thinking her hope would be. But that’s because I was thinking of her cancer diagnosis as the beginning of her story. She set me and all her readers straight right away by explaining “My story begins one Sunday morning in August 2002.
“What a beautiful day,” she writes. “It was the day I accepted the Lord Jesus into my heart. With that acceptance came a promise: if I trust the Lord with all my heart and acknowledge Him in all my ways, He would direct my paths—and that He did in my journey with colon cancer.”
And that is why Melina said her strongest hope was not to preserve her earthly life, “but more important than that, is my hope that my story changes but one heart to accept the love and protection that comes from our Lord Jesus Christ.”
Trust in the Lord with all your heart and don’t depend on your own understanding. Seek his will in all you do and he will show you which path to take. Proverbs 3:5
That was Melina’s favorite verse—the one on which she firmly staked her life and the one by which she squarely faced her death.
“I can’t abandon the one true healer, Jesus Christ,” she wrote about five months before her passing. “It’s His decision where my healing will take place, here on earth or with Him in heaven. That is where my hope and comfort come from. I trust completely that the Lord will do what is best for me, my family and friends.”
Even though Melina grieved that she was going to leave this earth and not see her little girls grow up or grow old with her husband, she had hope because she knew this life is not all there is.
Hope that she was not saying goodbye forever.
Hope that she was headed to her real Home: Heaven.
Hope that in Heaven she would get a new disease-free body.
Hope that one day there would be a grand reunion of all her family and friends who also trusted in the Lord.
Near the very end of her life, she told her distraught adult family members: “I know you guys don’t want to hear this, but I know where I’m going and I can’t wait to get there!”
Then she added with a smile: “You’ll see me again.”
One of my favorite daydreams is to imagine that upon my arrival in Heaven, Jesus greets me and then takes me to a long line of smiling people: Melina and all of the faith-filled cancer patients I knew. I see that they are physically healed just like we prayed for so many times. We embrace and while there are no sad tears in Heaven, in my daydream I am filled with tears of joy.
But my dream is not just wishful thinking. The promise of Heaven for all who believe in Jesus is real and I know that reunion will really happen.
Another one of the people I look forward to seeing in Heaven is someone I never met on earth: my paternal great-grandmother May Andrews Peirce. She was a prolific poet and I’d like to think my writing ability came down through her genes. In 1928 when she was nearly 60, she wrote a poem she called “HOME.”
In childhood’s days, our thoughts of Heaven
Are pearly gates, and streets of gold.
But in the gathering years,
When time, within its fading leaf
With eyes, perchance be-dimmed with tears,
And hearts oft’ overwhelmed with grief,
We look beyond the pearly gates,
Beyond the clouds of sin’s dark night,
And see a place where loved ones wait,
A place all beautiful and bright.
And over all, we’ll see the face of Him
Who’ll bring us to our own—
Not to some far-off, distant place.
For Heaven is, after all, just HOME.
Today’s song is a real OLDIE (but goodie) from a live performance by Keith Green in 1977. Five years later he was killed in a plane crash at the age of 29. I’ve also included a “bonus,” more contemporary song about Heaven. (If the videos don’t automatically load for you, please copy and paste these links to hear.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbzJYqj2xC4https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1lrfjmSFkU
Mar 08
My 4-year-old grandson Benjamin may look more like his mother, but he is a total Daddy’s boy—as in, the best time of day is when Daddy comes home and the worst time is when he leaves.
So it wasn’t surprising when we were all at a local pizza buffet restaurant recently and Benny looked up and asked: “Where’s Daddy?”
“He’s at the buffet getting salad,” I replied. “Remember, he told you he was going there and he would be right back?”
“No, I can’t see him,” Benny said as his inside “restaurant” voice got a little louder.
“I can see him, Ben,” I calmly told him. “He’s right there,” I said, gesturing to the salad bar at the end of the room.
Benny surveyed as much of the room as he could see from his height advantage and frantically announced: “I can’t see Daddy!”
Quickly he jumped down from our table calling for his father: “Daaaaaaaaddy!”
“Over here, Ben!” his Dad quickly replied, as the little guy followed that familiar voice to the salad buffet, where, surprise, surprise, Daddy stood smiling. The two joined hands as Ben swallowed his tears and waited patiently for Daddy to finish and walk back to the table with him.
Poor little Benny: he was worried and afraid because he lost sight of his Daddy.
Do you know how he felt? Have the struggles of this world—in your life or in someone’s life that you care for—weighed you down so much you’ve lost sight of your heavenly Father?
You’re straining to see how it’s all going to pan out. You’re wondering if God really can work all things together for good. You really need to feel His reassuring touch.
I suggest you follow the steps my worried little grandson took.
It was wonderful to watch my son-in-law Frank quiet Benjamin with his love. It’s even more wonderful to feel God quiet us with His great love. May you see your Abba Father today and let Him love you as only He can.
(If the music video doesn’t automatically load below, please copy and paste this link to enjoy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzfPHnoT0-0 )
Mar 01
I remember so well the first cancer support group meeting I attended at our community hospital. It was the summer of 1990. I was a reporter for a local newspaper and recently had interviewed Mary, the new group’s facilitator. When I showed up at a support group meeting just eight weeks after my story ran, Mary naturally assumed I was visiting the group as a follow-up to my published article.
“How sweet that you would come to our meeting,” she said with a big smile.
“Actually, I was diagnosed with colon cancer last month,” I told her as her jaw dropped.
It was an incredible irony. I had to talk myself into attending that meeting because I wasn’t sure I really wanted to be with a bunch of people with cancer. As introductions were made around the table, I happened to be the most newly diagnosed and the last to introduce myself.
I burst into tears before I could even get out my name.
I felt really silly for falling apart like that, but I had been trying to hold it together in front of everyone else for so long that it seemed good to let down my feelings with others who had “been there, done that.”
After my friend Ken was diagnosed with tongue cancer in 2002, he believed for a while that he wouldn’t need things like support groups.
“I assumed that because of my (spiritual) faith I wouldn’t need other forms of support such as groups, family counseling and massage therapy, but I was dead wrong,” Ken explains.
Many years later and still cancer-free, Ken urges newly diagnosed patients not to try and go it alone.
“Circle the wagons—family, friends, co-workers and anyone else who can and will be an available asset in your battle,” he says. “You can never have too many assets!”
Before I retired as a patient advocate, I always was inviting cancer patients and their caregivers to my support group meetings* (see note at end) and I heard a lot of reasons why they didn’t attend. Often people told me “I’m not really that depressed that I need to come.”
To which I replied, “I need people there who aren’t depressed to support those who are!”
I believe there are two reasons for people to attend support groups for whatever problem they face—either to be encouraged or to be an encourager. And I’m pretty sure you could fit into one of those categories!
What life difficulty are you facing or has God already brought you through? Divorce? Addiction? Weight issues? Prison? Special needs child? Relatives with dementia? Abuse? Loss of a job? Infertility? Grief?
The list of life’s trials is endless…and so is the grace of God to see us through.
“God is our merciful Father and the source of all comfort. He comforts us in all our troubles so that we can comfort others. When they are troubled, we will be able to give them the same comfort God has given us.” 2 Corinthians 1:3-4
Don’t waste the pain you’ve encountered by failing to share your experiences with others. The troubles you’ve faced with God’s strength will be a comfort to those facing the same kinds of circumstances.
When the Apostle Paul was down and out, God sent his friend Titus at just the right time to him.
“When we arrived in Macedonia, there was no rest for us. We faced conflict from every direction, with battles on the outside and fear on the inside. But God, who encourages those who are discouraged, encouraged us by the arrival of Titus. His presence was a joy.” 2 Corinthians 7:5, 6
God knows exactly what you need to deal with today’s discouragement. Ask Him to bring a “Titus” (or two) into your life to encourage you. (He might even direct you to a support group with a bunch of Tituses!). Or ask how you can be the Titus-encourager someone else needs to meet.
I pray that we each see one another through the eyes of God–the God who encourages those who are discouraged. Yes, Lord, “give me your eyes for just one second.”
If today’s music video doesn’t automatically load, please copy and paste this link to enjoy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mhpLjPslbM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mhpLjPslbM
*** If you are seeking a faith-based cancer support group, I’m compiling a state-by-state list on my website www.lynneib.com . Or if you are thinking about starting one of your one in your area, there are free helps available there to do just that.***
Feb 22
“To handle yourself, use your head; to handle others, use your heart.”
Attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt
“Oh, my grandmother had that kind of cancer—she didn’t last long.”
“Just stay positive and you’ll be fine.”
“My neighbor had that—he was in a lot of pain.”
“God doesn’t give you more than you can handle!”
Heard any of these insensitive (dare I say stupid) remarks? I’ve heard them all and then some. I remember bumping into a church friend at the grocery store shortly after I began chemo back in 1990. She apologized for not being in touch with me.
“I thought I heard you were going to die. I didn’t know if that was true, so I just didn’t know what to do,” she quickly spit out.
She kept babbling for a while, and I remember I ended up trying to comfort her in the fresh vegetable aisle.
I think relatives, friends, and acquaintances are usually at a loss for words when they hear about someone’s diagnosis or recurrence, so they say something to either a) try to identify with the person or b) try to lift the person’s spirits. Often they succeed with neither, especially when they immediately begin quoting Bible verses.
My Arkansas physician-friend Tom has been dealing with prostate cancer since 2000. He knows exactly what I mean.
“When people told me ‘all things work together for good’ or otherwise dismissed my fear, anxiety, or sadness, it upset me,” Tom recalls. “It doesn’t sound good when you are in the midst of a tornado. It made me feel like they had no idea what I was really going through.”
That same verse from Romans 8:28 was quoted to my western New York friend Ken moments after he was given the devastating news of tongue cancer that required life-altering surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy.
“I only heard the first few words and wanted to scream at my friend, ‘Stop! Just stop!’” he recalls fourteen cancer-free years later.
I’m willing to bet you can remember some not-very-helpful comments made to you or your loved one. How do we handle such insensitivity?
I like former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt’s advice: To handle others, use your heart. We need to hear beyond people’s words and instead hear their hearts.
Do you think my friend at the grocery store saw me standing by the romaine lettuce and thought, I’ll walk over to Lynn and say something that will make her feel really bad? Or I plan to fall apart so much she’ll end up comforting me?
Of course not. I’m sure her heart was feeling love for me and concern over my well-being, however poorly she expressed it. And the same was surely true for the Bible-quoting friends of Tom and Ken.
Think about the last cancer-related (or any other life-struggle) conversation you had with someone that left you feeling worse instead of better. Ask yourself whether you think that was the person’s intention. If yes, I recommend you speak with someone who can help you establish healthy boundaries with a spiteful person! But if you answered no, then throw away that person’s words and just hear his or her heart for you. Replay the scenario like I did and consider whether the person really wanted to make you feel bad. (This also works well in other situations whenever people don’t act the way we wish they would; e.g. I had to ask myself today, Do I really think my husband wanted to annoy me by eating the last Planters Peanut Bar while I was busy writing a book to help people facing cancer?)
We always want people to give us the benefit of the doubt or cut us some slack, but we have to admit, it’s not always easy to do the same for others—especially when our world has been rocked by a life-altering event. Our emotions are fragile, our bodies are hurting, and our spirits can be wounded easily. That makes it hard to be patient with well-meaning but insensitive folks. Nevertheless, if we want to find peace in the face of cancer (or any other difficulty), sometimes we will have to hear people’s hearts and ignore their words (and perhaps their actions, too).
I am leaving you with a gift—peace of mind and heart. And the peace I give is a gift the world cannot give. So don’t be troubled or afraid. –Jesus, speaking in John 14:27
We experience peace when we hear people’s hearts and not just their words.
If the video below doesn’t automatically load, please copy and paste this link to enjoy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BMIJHZSavo
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.
