Beauty That Breaks Through

Joshua and I had just settled into our little corner of the cancer center when one of my favorite nurses rolled over the little metal table loaded with needles and Band-Aids that went along with the day’s treatment.

“Hey,” she said, both troubled and teasing, “so, before you leave for Spain, we need to talk…because I have a hard time believing in a God who lets this happen. How can there be so much suffering in this world?”

Kate had seen a lot of suffering. A lot.

***

Last March, Joshua and I were just a few months away from our move to Madrid—our next chapter of international ministry. I was ready. I made sure my girl was listening to Spanish audiobooks every single day; I had farmed out my favorite items to my favorite people (my sweet little 70s Schwinn bike, our favorite midcentury modern chair, my XL cast-iron skillet); I had even—on multiple occasions—refused to buy a coneflower for that bare spot in my front garden, because we wouldn’t be around long enough to see it establish itself and flower in late summer. We were heading to Madrid, and I was so ready. 

And then I had a mammogram (indicating that maybe things didn’t look quite right),

then a biopsy (“It’ll be fine!” I kept telling my friends. “I’m sure it’s nothing”),

then a partial mastectomy and more bad news (and our concrete plans were slipping, like a million grains of sand, through my fingers). 

Then, with chemo and radiation on the horizon, we canceled our summer flights to Madrid.  

Sigh. 

***

God gave us a beautiful spring that year. Joshua and I would sit on our side porch in the morning, looking up at the light filtering through the leaves of the maple tree above us, silently—like our brains and bodies were on pause. We weren’t sure what the next medical exam would reveal. We weren’t exactly sure what the implications were or would be—for me, for us, for our four kids, for our next year, our next 10 years. We sat quietly—confident in the goodness of our God, but also aching—because this wasn’t the way things were supposed to be. 

Sometimes Joshua would reach over and lay his hand on my chest and pray that God would completely heal me, that the cancer would be gone. Gone, gone. So gone that the scar from my lumpectomy would disappear.

A God who conquered death could do that. We knew He didn’t have to. But we knew He could, and so we asked. 

I would look down at my chest. The scar never disappeared. 

***

Instead, the God who conquered death revealed Himself to me in a different way: In the subsequent path of chemo and radiation, in the nausea and weakness and loneliness and disappointment and mental fog, the Church stepped up and cared for me.

Jennifer cleared her calendar so that every third Wednesday on chemo treatment day, she could take our eight-year-old daughter, Roma, for a sleepover. Bridget came and sat with me on post-chemo Sundays and watched the church livestream with me. Heather helped me make sense of my biopsy and lab results when the oncologist couldn’t see me till the following week. Ruth brought me flowers, all the ginger ale I could ever dream of and helpful suggestions for how to manage radiation burns.  

On the weekend we drove to Kentucky to drop our 17-year-old daughter, Selma, off at college, my home was scrubbed clean by a team of skilled women. My fridge was constantly filled with dinners—meatballs, salads, chopped watermelon. Day after day, I received cards filled with prayers and words of life, visits from friends from faraway places, and care packages dropped off on my porch. The body of Christ faithfully dying to themselves: their time, their affection, their grocery budget, their comfort, their skills, their prayers, poured out for me.  

***

The suffering that intertwines itself in the fabric of this world is a shadow that hangs heavily over us all. I experienced only a drop of it this past year with my cancer diagnosis. 

I don’t have the perfect answer for Kate—and other men and women, more brilliant and articulate than myself have given good answers to her age-old question.

But when I fumbled through a foggy-brained answer to Kate, this is what I kept coming back to: As the body of Christ cares for the suffering in simple, humble, selfless service, light breaks through the darkness—and the beauty we experience points us to a God who conquers death.