Daylily,
You sent me a very kind and wise PM when my wife was diagnosed almost two years ago which I still remember and thank you for.
I remember very clearly what it felt like to watch her face as she received the news on the phone from her doctor. I also remember very clearly all the fear and despair over the next year and a half. But the point is they are memories, because we have the chance for an even fuller life after cancer than we had before.
I hope and pray they have found it early and you are cured. But I want you to know that if, like my wife, they did not, there is still a wonderful life to be lived. Maybe in some ways a better, more honest life. There is always someone hovering in the room with us now, but he was really always there before. We just pretended he wasn't, as in some way I think we all do until he catches our diverted eye and forces us to look him full in the face. But pretense is not honest life. Life after a cancer diagnosis should be life stripped of its pretense and lived as God intended.
If we let it, it can make us smaller, but that is only if we turn inward. If we turn to God He will work even this, especially this, together for good for those who love Him.
Without doubt cancer is not a good thing. But it's consequences can be. It makes us confess that even our flesh is as grass, but gives us the opportunity to live an honest life, whether long or short, with that knowledge in our hearts not just our heads.
My wife is in some way that can only be known by going through it, freer than she has ever been. Cancer is not a death sentence, life is. Cancer can and should be, cured or incurable, an emancipation proclamation from living life not to die.
I pray you are cured, but I pray even more you are set free as my wife has been.
mud
