Over the years I’ve talked with hundreds of cancer patients. For a brief moment they would allow me access to their most intimate and desperate emotions. Now, those conversations are coming back to and speaking volumes into m life.
There was a young man in Cottage Grove who needed a bone marrow transplant. The community came together to take the test to see if someone was a match. I was covering the story and I hate to do bloods tests. There was only one test left and the line had disappeared. I was the only one left and did not want to do it. But I looked at this young man; I struggled with my selfish heart, and finally gave in and did the test.
A few months later he died. His mother called me to tell me that her son had remembered that moment. He knew that I did not want to take the test but did anyway and he wanted her to thank me after he died.
Now as I sit here, with cancer in my body, I hear his voice and understand the magnitude of what happened that day. Maybe it’s not the cure we must find but the process of people interacting with the possibility of death and disease. Maybe recovery, for this boy, was not about getting better but seeing God’s grace through the eyes of all those people who showed up that day.
What would happen if we saw grace, the way God see’s grace and longed for it more than life? Would we welcome strife knowing it’s path would lead to Him? Could we welcome pain and disease if we knew, on the other end, the great mystery would be revealed? I have a feeling I’m about to find out and their voices will come back to me and get me to His feet.
