Category: attitude

Aug 16

Is Jesus REALLY Enough?

 

 

 

 

 

My cancer diagnosis  in 1990 was especially upsetting to my husband because he had lost his first wife nearly 20 years before to ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) while they were still newlyweds. To watch me then face a life-threatening illness and an uncertain future was more than he felt he could bear.

One day as he was riding home from the hospital after visiting me during my post-surgical stay, he came upon a car with a bumper sticker that read:

As a seminary graduate, my husband theologically knew the right answer to that question. And as a longtime pastor, he often had preached the affirmative answer to that query. But that day he was so overcome with worry and fear of losing yet another wife that he wondered out loud: “Is He really?” “Is Jesus really enough?”

 

Have you asked that same question?

If I lose a breast…is Jesus enough?

If I get sick during treatments…is Jesus enough?

If I lose my hair to chemo…is Jesus enough?

If I have to quit work…is Jesus enough?

And worst of all, if the cure doesn’t come…is Jesus really enough?

 

My husband answered that question for himself two weeks later when he stepped into the pulpit on Sunday morning and preached one of his most powerful sermons ever, entitled “Jesus is Enough.” In it, he reminded all of us—and himself—that God doesn’t need to do another thing for us on this earth. He has given us His one and only Son, and in Him we have everything we need to cope with this life and every promise for eternal life. No matter what else does, or doesn’t happen to us, God doesn’t need to do another thing to prove to us that indeed, Jesus is enough.

 

Dear Jesus, It feels unfair to have to face this illness after I’ve tried so hard to live for You. And then I remember that You lived completely for your Father and life still was very unfair to You. I’m glad You understand what I’m feeling and most of all, I’m so grateful that Your presence living in me is enough for me. Please help me deal with the changes that this disease is bringing into my life/my loved one’s life. I pray they all will be temporary ones and that health will be restored completely. But even if it’s not, I pray that my soul will be satisfied in You alone. I pray all this in Your name. Amen.

Today’s Tip: Listen for the word “ENOUGH” in conversations and when you hear it, remind yourself that Jesus IS enough.

(This blog is adapted from a devotional I had published in the book Praying through Cancer:Set Your Heart Free from Fear, copyright 2006 Susan Sorensen and Laura Geist, W Publishing Co., a division of Thomas Nelson Inc.)

I know I included this same song recently, but I LOVE it and it fits better than any other I could find–please enjoy it again! 🙂 

(If the music video doesn’t automatically load, please copy, paste and insert this link to enjoy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6fA35Ved-Y&list=RDB6fA35Ved-Y )

Aug 09

Serious Illness: An Unwelcome Intruder

 

 

 

 

 

Serious illness is an unwelcome intruder in any person’s life, but for those of us who are organized, well-prepared planners, it can be especially unpleasant.

I’ve always felt you can ward off a lot of problems in life but anticipating them ahead of time. You know, take an umbrella with you in case it rains. Always have restaurant coupons with you in the car in case there’s a last-minute decision to go out to eat. Have an extra wrapped gift at Christmas in case someone gives you one that you weren’t expecting! You get the idea.

Then BAM! cancer hit me at the age of 36 from out of nowhere. I always had been so healthy I hadn’t even had a cold in four years. Cancer didn’t “run” in my family, as I was the first to get such a diagnosis. In fact, I was so young the American Cancer Society didn’t even recommend I get screened for colon cancer for another 14 years! I certainly hadn’t anticipated this and it was too late to get prepared now.

And then something else hit me.

This diagnosis did not take God by surprise. He saw it coming and although I wish He had stopped it from touching me, He was not unprepared to battle it. In fact He would equip me with everything I needed to battle this disease physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually.

The same is true for you or your loved one’s diagnosis. God is not surprised. He is not unprepared. He will equip you with whatever you need to face this unwelcome intruder.

“And everyone will know that the Lord does not need weapons to rescue his people. It is his battle, not ours.” 1 Samuel 17:47

Here is a prayer you might wish to pray today (based on Ephesians 6:10-17):

Dear Lord, I come to you acknowledging that I don’t like the fact this diagnosis has taken me by surprise. It makes me feel anxious and out of control because I didn’t see it coming and I feel woefully unprepared. And yet I also acknowledge that I believe You are not surprised or anxious and You are very much in control. Help me to put on Your armor each day: the belt of Your truth, the shield of Your righteousness, the shoes of Your peace, the helmet of Your salvation and the sword of Your Spirit. Then I know I will be ready to battle this unwelcome intruder. And most of all I will not be afraid because it really is Your battle and I will trust You to fight through me so that I will not be defeated by this unseen enemy. Thank You, Holy Spirit, that I don’t need to be in control to battle this—I just need to be controlled by You. I pray in the name of Jesus. Amen.

(This blog is adapted from a devotional I had published in the book Praying through Cancer:Set Your Heart Free from Fear, copyright 2006 Susan Sorensen and Laura Geist, W Publishing Co., a division of Thomas Nelson Inc.)

(If the music video doesn’t automatically load, please copy, paste and insert this link to enjoy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7x2IpLSfqp8 )

Jul 05

An Amazing Story of the First Survivor I Ever Knew

 

 

 

 

“There is something you must always remember.

You are braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.”

Christopher Robin to Winnie‑the‑Pooh in Pooh’s Most Grand Adventure

I love these words of encouragement from one best friend to another. They were the sentiment of a life-changing pep talk given to me in high school by my dear friend Cecil, who is the first person I knew who survived cancer.

We met in a speech class in the fall of 1968. I was a junior and he was a sophomore at Victor Valley High, where he was without a doubt the best orator. When he chose me to be his debate partner, I was thrilled. I didn’t know that the year before he had been diagnosed with fibrosarcoma (a rare cancer of the soft tissue), only that he always had a large Band-Aid on his forehead and that its self-described “flesh” color did not match his black skin.

I’m not sure if either one of us ever used the “C” word. In the sixties, cancer was something adults whispered about and doctors tried to keep from patients’ knowledge.

“Why do you always wear a Band-Aid?” I naively asked him one day.

“Because I’m very embarrassed about my scars” was his quiet reply.

The scars were the result of multiple surgeries—beginning when he was fifteen—to try to cut away the cancer and extend his life.

“The fibrosarcoma was eating through my skull,” Cecil explained as we chatted on the phone about this chapter.

Back then chemotherapy was in its infancy, and radiation therapy couldn’t possibly be safely aimed at a patient’s head, so his doctors simply sliced away, waited for the cancer to grow back, and then cut it out again.

By the fall of 1968, doctors were so pessimistic about Cecil’s future, they recommended he drop out of high school. “Once it hits the optic nerve, it will go right to the brain. Go home and don’t even worry about school anymore,” they advised.

But Cecil had other plans.

“Not only am I going to go back to school, I’m going to graduate,” he told them. “And not only am I going to graduate, I’m going to go to college. And not only am I going to go to college, I’m going to go to the best college!” he defiantly added.

His equally strong-willed mother approved, saying, “If you want to go back to school, it’s fine with me. I don’t want you to just lie down and die.”

So Cecil went to school, ran track, and played basketball and football, wearing a customized helmet to protect his forehead as he darted downfield with the ball. (Bet that wouldn’t be allowed these days!) Just about every Saturday for the next two years, we were together at a speech meet or a debate competition, eventually becoming the first students from our school to make it to the speech state championships.

But in the summer of 1970, right after I graduated, Cecil’s cancer came back, and more surgery ensued. The hole in Cecil’s forehead was getting rather large, so doctors stitched his left forearm to his forehead for six weeks in an attempt to graft skin there. However, in the fall of 1970, the relentless cancer returned.

Surgeons wanted to operate again and now sew his right arm to his head, but his mother refused. She moved him to another hospital, ignoring the doctor’s warning that if she did he’d be “dead in two weeks.”

Physicians at the new hospital did the same kind of surgery, without stitching his arm to his head. At Cecil’s first recheck, they were pleasantly surprised the cancer had not returned. Three months later, they were shocked to find no sign of it. Three more cancer-free months later, they were speechless.

“We can’t take any credit for this, because we didn’t do anything different from the other doctors,” they told the then-eighteen-year-old Cecil. “The fibrosarcoma was like a runaway freight train on a dry, straight track, and it just stopped. In medicine we call it a spontaneous remission.”

Cecil finished high school, serving as student body president, and went on to graduate with honors from Harvard University, where he played football, ran track, and coached the debate team. As I write, he is a sixty-three-year-old longtime university law professor with many accolades and former students across the country who say his teaching expertise and friendship changed their lives.

“Despite all the dark predictions, I’m alive and doing just fine,” he says. “I believe to this day that God healed me despite all the gloom and doom. And it has never come back because He had other plans for me.”

 

I’m so grateful that meeting Cecil was part of God’s plan for my life. Before we participated in our first debate meet, I was scared and not at all confident in my speaking and writing abilities. I felt insecure because I was the youngest in my class (I graduated at sixteen) and because my father’s job had forced me to twice move midyear to new high schools. But Cecil shared words very similar to Christopher Robin’s with me, and I took them to heart. And as they say, the rest is history.

 

When we face the trials of life. including cancer, we discover the incredible strength of the human spirit as we do things we never thought we could. But I hope you also are discovering that the greatness of God is the reason you are braver, stronger, and smarter than you realized.

 

Find a mirror, look straight into it, and tell yourself: “I am braver than I believe. I am stronger than I seem. I am smarter than I think. God is much greater than I can imagine.”

And then share those words today with someone else who needs to hear them. You never know how God may use them to change a life.

(If the music video below doesn’t automatically load, please copy, paste and click on this link to enjoy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0ynr-qAhUY )

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0ynr-qAhUY

Jun 28

Do You Need a Good Cry?

 

 

 

 

You can beat this. Think positive. You can do it. Stay positive.

I know people mean well when they say those things to people facing serious tough times, but I must admit they often rub me the wrong way.

Many caring people uttered those kinds of “encouraging” phrases to me after my cancer diagnosis, but I always had the feeling that they did more for the person saying them than they did for me.

In fact, rather than being comforting and encouraging, those phrases often created more distress in me.

I’m feeling worried the cancer may return, but I have to think positive so the cancer doesn’t come back.

I’m feeling down thinking about all I’ve endured, but I have to think positive so I get healthier.

And the real kicker: If I don’t get cured, it must somehow be my fault because I didn’t think positive enough!

 Don’t get me wrong, I am by nature an optimistic person, but I am also positively positive that being positive all the time is not necessary for those living in cancer’s shadow and in fact I wouldn’t even recommend it for most of us!

In fact, trying to live life by being “up” all the time can create a new problem: “the tyranny of positive thinking.”

That’s the phrase used by Dr. Jimmie Holland, chairman of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. In her excellent book, The Human Side of Cancer: Living with Hope, Coping with Uncertainty, she explains the phrase:

“All this hype claiming that if you don’t have a positive attitude
and that if you get depressed you are making your tumor grow faster
invalidates people’s natural and understandable reactions to a threat to their lives.
That’s what I mean by the tyranny of positive thinking.” [1]

The truth is, Dr. Holland says,

“stress, depression, and grief do not increase the likelihood that cancer will develop or
 that it will come back if you’ve been treated before.” [2]

I can tell you for sure that if not staying positive made cancer recur, I would have been dead many times over.

Now if by some slim chance you are really the kind of person who likes to think positive all the time, copes with life by always thinking positive and finds it impossible to think any other way, I certainly am not going to tell you to stop thinking positive. But, please don’t expect that everyone else needs to be just like you.

I believe we were created to feel many emotions and that life is best lived when we acknowledge those emotions and express them in a healthy manner. Moreover, I believe tears are really a gift and that everybody—even positively positive people—benefits from a “good cry” now and then.

If you ever tasted a tear trickling down your face, then you know they are salty. But tears are much more than salty water. They’re actually a complex combination of proteins, enzymes, lipids, metabolites and electrolytes.

We all have three different kinds of tears: “normal” tears which continuously keep our eyes lubricated; irritant tears which wash away foreign substances; and emotional tears which we cry for reasons like sadness and pain. Scientists who study tears can look at these tiny drops of water and tell the difference between the first two types and the third kind because emotional tears have much more protein and less oil.

Some tear researchers theorize that emotional tears carry hormones from the brain, which release calming endorphins and flush toxins out of the bloodstream. This helps our body return to a reduced-stress state.

I’m glad my dear friend Norma was willing to cry with me throughout my chemo ordeal. Norma, survived three different cancers before she passed away in her 90s. Her second diagnosis was just a few months before mine, and she called me every month to chat.

“Wanna have a pity party?” she’d ask.

I’d say sure, and for the next half-hour we’d trade poor-me complaints about the side effects of our treatments. Pretty soon we’d had enough moaning and started laughing at ourselves for all the complaining we were doing. (The moral of the story: pity parties are great occasionally; just keep them short and only invite friends who still like to laugh!)

People like Norma and me who don’t repress our tears may have better health, according to many “crying” researchers who think emotional tears may remove toxins from our bodies. Some even theorize that women on average live longer than men because they on average cry twice as much as men!

Many of us need to tell ourselves the truth: that weeping is not a sign of weakness or shame; that tears are indeed a gift to express our deepest feelings. The shortest verse in the Bible is John 11:35: Jesus wept. So if the Son of God can cry, I think we can, too.

Lord, I’m thankful that one day in Heaven You will wipe away every tear from our eyes, and until then, I’m positively happy that we don’t have to stay positive all the time! I pray in the Name of Jesus, who wasn’t afraid to weep. Amen.

[1] Jimmie Holland and Sheldon Lewis, The Human Side of Cancer: Living with Hope, Coping with Uncertainty (New York: Harper Collins, 2001), pg. 14.

[2] Ibid, pg. 30-31

If the music video below doesn’t automatically load, please copy, paste and click on this link to enjoy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J46hMyrTL7Y )

Jun 14

Finding Peace When You Didn’t Think You Would

 

 

 

 

 

 

Everybody reacts differently to the diagnosis of cancer or any other life-threatening condition. Your reaction or your loved one’s reaction and mine probably had many things in common, but no doubt there were differences as well. You might have feared this illness for years because other relatives already had been diagnosed. Maybe you checked for lumps and watched for telltale signs, knowing for certain your turn was next. Or you might have thought, like I did, that you had taken such good care of yourself you would never have to face such a diagnosis.

I’m guessing that neither of our reactions was completely peaceful. I’ve met literally thousands of newly diagnosed cancer patients and I’ve yet to hear one say: “As soon as I heard it was cancer, I felt total peace.” (Go ahead and write me if you said that!)

But even though peace is not a natural response to a life-threatening illness, it can be a supernatural one.

Over the years my dear friend Prudence let me bring hundreds of cancer survivors to her country tearoom for free or really inexpensive tea luncheons (with the world’s best scones and clotted cream). And then endometrial cancer struck her.

“That upset me,” she says. “I didn’t want to have anything inside me that wasn’t supposed to be there.”

But shortly after her surgery, despite the fact no one was guaranteeing a cure, Prudence says she amazingly “was at peace with it.”

“Christ gave me a wonderful release from worrying and obsessing about it,” is her explanation of the unexplainable.

In 1998 when forty-five-year-old Chrystine was diagnosed with late-stage ovarian cancer, she was shocked and afraid she would die because she’d never heard of any survivors in her situation. But as she describes: “God showed up right away.”

As she was heading into surgery, a female anesthesiologist came over to Chrystine’s gurney and started prepping her.

“She told me she had ovarian cancer four years before and I felt such hope that she had survived,” Chrystine recalls.

What’s really incredible is that a few minutes later a male anesthesiologist came over to her gurney and told the other doctor that Chrystine was his patient and he took over her care.

“I went into surgery feeling totally at peace because God sent me hope in the ‘accidental’ meeting of an anesthesiologist who had survived,” Chrystine says.

It is one thing to read the Apostle Paul’s description of  “the peace of God, which transcends all ­under­standing.” It’s quite another thing to see it on the face of cancer patients and their caregivers.

It is a peace that makes no sense.

It is a peace that cannot be explained.

It is a peace that goes beyond our human understanding.

It is a peace that ­only God can give.

It is a peace I hope you’ll feel today.

I’d like to share with you the rest of the verse from Philippians 4 where Paul writes about this peace because I believe it shows us clearly how to get it.

Do not be anxious about anything, but in ­every­thing, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all under­standing, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ ­Jesus. Philippians 4:6-7 NIV

We get peace from God when we take our worries to Him in prayer, all the while thanking Him for all our blessings. He replaces our worries with His peace and it is enough to fill our heart and our mind.

Would you allow me the precious privilege of praying for you to feel God’s peace that passes understanding today?

Lord, I have no idea what is troubling my friend today, but You do. By the power of Your Spirit please let Your peace come and settle down on her/his life as she/he trusts in You. In the Name of the Prince of Peace. Amen.

If the music video below doesn’t automatically load, please copy, paste and click on this link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTDRjqVIyVY )