I wish to start by expressing my gratitude for all the love, prayers, and thoughts that have come and continue to come my way. Y’all are the winds beneath my wings that keep me going. But there’s so much more involved in my “having to go through this’ that I’d like to try and explain.

As odd as it may seem, I welcome having to go through this treatment for a few important reasons. First, if it puts the cancer back into remission where it can be managed as before, so much the better. That’s the goal, and to me it was worth enduring the unpleasant side effects to achieve it. But there is a much deeper, much more important spiritual reason involved as well.

Each time I’ve had to go through cancer treatments (this is the third in eighteen years) it has forced me to concentrate more fully on God and my relationship with Him. It’s made me focus on His plan and purpose for this and His expectations for what He wants me to do with it. It teaches me to trust Him more completely. It takes me back into the Scriptures, and reminds of the tremendous promises He has made to always be with me. And it gives me an opportunity to share those promises and perspectives with others, with the hope that it will encourage them to grow in their faith, hope, and trust as well. I want to help them experience a little of the tremendous love that God pours out on us during very difficult times.

For a long time now, my prayer to God has been to purify and refine me into an instrument, a vessel fit for His presence and purposes. Sometimes it takes rather extreme measures in order to accomplish that. I’ve fought with some difficult things in my life that many others do, too-pride, lack of patience, lust. In retrospect I realize that it’s taken these “difficult times” to finally break down those terrible things. God has taught me humility and patience through what I’ve experienced, and the lust has been overcome through what I’ve lost in the process. But by being purified from these things, I have been emptied in ordered to be filled with God’s Spirit, Jesus, and God Himself.

The Apostle Paul’s writings have also been instructive, and very encouraging. I smile at this, because as I’ve grown older I’ve learned to appreciate his life so much more. In particular, I have two particular scriptures that are bedrocks for me. The first is: “Therefore we do not give up. Even though our outer person is being destroyed, our inner person is being renewed day by day. For our momentary light affliction is producing for us an absolutely incomparable eternal weight of glory. So we do not focus on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” – 2 Co 4:16–18. The other is: “Therefore, so that I would not exalt myself, a thorn in the flesh was given to me, a messenger of Satan to torment me so that I would not exalt myself. Concerning this, I pleaded with the Lord three times that it would leave me. But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is perfected in weakness.” Therefore, I will most gladly boast all the more about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may reside in me. So I take pleasure in weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and in difficulties, for the sake of Christ. For when I am weak, then I am strong.” –2 Co 12:7–10.

I see my cancer as my “thorn in the flesh”, because God has been able to show His power in me through what He has accomplished with it. My pride has been broken in what I once thought I was and what “greatness” I was meant to accomplish. Oh, there has probably been some greatness there from time to time, but it is God who gets the glory and credit for it. And I have certainly been taught patience by realizing that God’s timetable is vastly different than mine. Times like my current one seem sad and maybe even horrible, but in the perspective of “momentary light afflictions producing an absolutely incomparable weight of glory”, along with the promise that God “will never leave you or forsake you”, I can actually draw strength through the trials.

My hope is that my experiences will be an encouragement to all of you just as you are a great encouragement to me. And if God can show Himself to you a little more through what He is doing through me, then praise His name!