I sat with the doctor three years ago and he got straight to the point. He’d examined the scan and he said, “Mike, you have cancer.”
I’ve been with family and church members and heard this diagnosis scores of times, but I’d never heard it pronounced to me. I didn’t know how to respond other than to ask, “What do we do?”
The kindly doctor on that Monday suggested we do surgery on Friday, and we did. I spent one night in the local hospital and went home after successful surgery.
The nurses that night kept asking me if I wanted medication “to stay ahead of the pain.” I told them I was already ahead of the pain and didn’t need it. Actually, I had no pain. The bottle of pain pills they sent home with me remained unopened in the cabinet.
I remember the good nurses asking if I wanted to shower on Saturday morning before discharge. I agreed but explained I was too weak to stand. They put me in a shower chair and two of them and my wife gave me a shower. I was vulnerable and weak, but refreshed by the warm water.
Fortunately, I’ve had three and one-half years of good labs, and I don’t take this for granted. Many wonderful people aren’t as fortunate as me to have successful surgery and recovery. Each day is a gift, and I try to remember this every day. I also normally get emotional with the doctor at these check-ups, telling him before his recent retirement how much I appreciate what he did for me.
I recalled all this lately when I thought of Paul’s strange word: “When I am weak, then I am strong.”
He was referring to his “thorn in the flesh,” a mysterious issue that dogged his steps. Was it bad eyesight, or a tortured memory of persecuting the church? Or perhaps wounds that never healed or bones that never got properly reset after his stoning at Lystra? We don’t know. All we know is that his weakness became a source of God’s favor.
Perhaps this is one way we understand the tribulations of life. God in his wisdom allows trouble so that we acknowledge our weaknesses. No one of us is self-sufficient, nor were we created to be. We need God and we need one another. In the church we proclaim both. We commit to loving and serving God, and we commit to do so while loving and serving one another.
This is what John Wesley meant when he said, “No man goes to heaven alone.”
We share the journey, both the good and the bad, with brothers and sisters in the faith.
