surviving 2 thriving

There will come a time when you believe everything is finished.
That will be the beginning.
Louis L’Amour

Two years, ten months, and five days after I left the ministry, my eyes began to open. The hard survival instincts of my senses started to soften and my desire to have hope and purpose was rekindled. I met my wife, Jane. I met her in church.

I walked, with trepidation, for the first time into a Bible study class for older singles (it was in a room down in the church basement set aside for the old divorced people because we didn’t really fit in anywhere else) and there she was. She requested prayer that day, telling the group that she had been diagnosed with cancer and was beginning chemo and radiation treatments.

My connection with her was instantaneous, which I later attributed directly to God. At first, it wasn’t a romantic thing. But instead, I actually felt compassion. I hurt for her. Here was a divorced woman who was on her own (with a thirteen-year-old at home) who had been told she had cancer.

Would I have been so moved in any other context? If I had met her at the grocery store or in some pool hall would I have been touched? I’ll never know. But of this I am sure, it was part of God’s plan, his new hope for me, and I was certainly in the right place to be open to it.

God, who had comforted me in spite of myself, was now about to remind me that he had called me according to his purpose. And he would use a woman greatly struggling herself to do it.

Jane and I almost immediately sensed that our relationship was a gift from God. We were both pretty beaten up by life, and like two shipwrecked survivors clinging to a life raft, we were holding on to what God had sent us.

As we encouraged one another, this verse of Scripture came to mind for both of us: “For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”[i]

On any given day, that verse might not have moved either one of us in any extraordinary way. But for a woman with a serious form of cancer and a down-and-out preacher it seemed to be God telling us why we were together.

I’ve never known Jane without cancer. Not one single day. She had it the day I met her. She was going into her first cancer surgery the day I proposed to her. She had surgery the week we returned from our honeymoon. She had brain surgery the Monday before our first Christmas. And she has had multiple surgeries and treatments ever since.

In fact, she is going in for major surgery (an eight hour operation with several surgeons) this Friday at M.D. Anderson—surgery that was originally being done for the sole purpose of reducing the chances of further recurrence. This week, however, her surgeon, doing a routine pre-operative exam, discovered yet another tumor, so the surgery is now more than a preventative procedure.

Why did I ask her out in the first place? Why did I ask her to marry me for crying out loud? There is no adequate human explanation. God knew I needed someone just like her and she needed someone just like me. She was part of a new hope that God had for me, and I was God’s plan for her.

I will confess that the new hope and future we have embraced has been thoroughly tested. Friday will be her fifth cancer-related surgery and her sixth extended stay in the hospital in a year and a half.

Whatever the future holds, it is a good thing to know that the traumatic events of life, whether the result of our own doing or not, don’t eliminate us from God’s purpose. On the contrary, he takes our mistakes, sorrow, and suffering and uses them, usually in a whole new way.

There is a hope and a future for the survivor. Unfortunately, we are usually too pre-occupied with our circumstances and our pain to sense it. Be ready. You might discover it in some unlikely place like a basement. And she might have cancer.