Bootstrap

Find New Life: The Temptation to Turn Back

Blog / Produced by The High Calling
3489151194 e7be6f754b z 1

I watched as my oncologist heaved open my giant medical folder. “I’ve got a big chart,” I said, laughing. “At Dr. Jeffrey’s office, they created a Part 2 for me.” As a long-term survivor of stage four cancer, I’ve seen many doctors for years.

“Yes, well, a big chart is better than the alternative,” my doctor said, kindly. We’ve been filling up this folder together for seven years now. In addition to lab results and checkup notes, I’ve seen Dr. Paxton scribble recommended book titles and the names of my husband and stepsons in that file. When I became a vegan, he wrote it on the inside cover.

For this appointment, I came knowing I was doing okay. The results of my every-three-month blood tests usually are revealed during these appointments, but a couple of days before, I found myself shaking with tears and curled up in a ball in my swivel chair trying to work in my home office. My prayers were desperate, and I just knew the cancer was back. Even though I had no symptoms, I knew it.

So I called the office instead of waiting. The nurse told me the results were normal; we were both relieved. The anxiety can be more malignant than the tumors.

My doctors and I are more philosophical than scientific during most of my medical encounters. Though my cancer returned three times after my initial diagnosis, I’ve defied every statistic and remained not only cancer free but extremely healthy for the past two years. Words like “odds” and “prognosis” and “cure” just don’t make sense anymore. Instead, we talk about hope and life and surviving. This appointment was no exception.

“So, is there anything else new going on?” Dr. Paxton asked in passing. We were wrapping things up by that point. I was half-dressed and covered in a paper sheet.

“Well, I’m about to publish my first book,” I announced. “I co-wrote it with a friend.”

He stopped to give me his full attention. He asked me what it was about. I told him.

“Bring me a copy to your next appointment,” he said. “I want to buy it.”

“Okay,” I said, giggling. The moment struck me as funny, my renowned oncologist buying a book about living a writing life. But maybe he was one of the “secret” writers I’ve been encountering as I tell people about the book, people who have rich, rewarding careers doing other things but who have always wanted to write too.

I suspect his interest had little to do with the content of the book, though. I think we both were marveling that I had lived long enough to write and publish a book. He often calls me his “all-star patient.” This latest accomplishment would merit a big, hand-written note in my chart.

Tempted to Turn Back

Being a cancer survivor isn’t always so victorious, though. Some days, I’m tempted to go back—not back to my naive, precancer days. This disease has hardened me enough to realize that can never happen; I expect difficulty ahead. Instead, I’m tempted to go back to those months just after my diagnosis when hope seemed like a bad joke and the future seemed like something only other people were promised.

In those early days, cancer bore down on me like a task master; I was enslaved to its limits. I was unmarried and childless when I received my diagnosis; I assumed God had set my course to remain that way. When I felt like it, I went to work, but I had stopped writing, stopped dreaming, stopped planning for the future. Eventually, although the cancer came back, so did my spirit. I began to hope again, to dream, to write. It wasn’t exactly a parting of the Red Sea so I could walk boldly into the Promised Land, but God led me into the wilderness, shackleless.

Why would I ever want to go back to those soul-wrenching days of fear? Why would I ever want to chain myself up to hopelessness again? Maybe it’s the same as asking, why couldn’t Israel just enjoy the manna and create new recipes for quail?

New life—freedom, victory, hope—inflicts a pain of its own. Change, uncertainty, disappointment: they tempt us to go back. The past few weeks at my church, we’ve been reading about the wilderness wanderings from Exodus on Sundays. I shake my head at the foolish Israelites when they say, “Why did you bring us out of Egypt just to let us die in this desert,” when clearly God was providing food, water, and protection.

But I turn inward and realize how often I say the same thing to Him: “Why did you bring me through cancer, Lord, just to paralyze me with anxiety over test results every three months?” I also wrestle with another reality: cancer may yet come again. “Why, Lord, did you allow me to live again if you are just going to take it all away?”

Vulnerability of New Life

I know how it sounds, especially when the Lord is so clearly providing and leading and moving. But new life leaves me vulnerable, like soft, healed skin after the bandaid is removed. Sometimes, I want to keep it all covered. That feels safer, somehow.

Yet …

On those days when I am stuck, when I long for the melons and meat pots—and the brutal slavery of fear—I pray, if you can call it that, then get up from the swivel chair and call for the test results, whatever they reveal. I take a deep breath and get back to the keyboard to work. I rely on strength I don’t believe I have to keep moving forward, strength I receive when I need it most.

After Dr. Paxton and his nurse left the room and I was getting dressed, I thought about bringing a copy of my book to the next appointment. I counted out the months; I would be back in February. I took a deep breath, resisting again the urge to imagine all the difficulty that could happen in six short months.

I opened the door and walked down the hall, smiling.

______________________________

Find New Life

Feeling lost? God invites you to inhabit new life. Wherever you find yourself on the journey, God is always calling us to something even more. The Bible reassures us that God is doing a new thing (Isa. 43:19), and yet we sometimes pass over the new thing in search of the next thing. But what if what God has for you is in the letting go of what you know and what you've already done? To find life, we must first lose it (Matt. 10:39). But what does that mean, really? Join us for this series, Find New Life. Together, let's find our footing. Let's embrace the new thing God has for each of us.

Featured image by Morgan. Used with Permission. Source via Flickr.

{ body #wrapper section#content.detail .body .body-main blockquote p { font-size: 0.875rem !important; line-height: 1.375rem !important; } }