This is a Post About Hope

2012 was off to a great start. 

Work had been busy, but everything else was falling my way.  My wife liked her new job and we both liked the extra money that came along with it. We’ve been having what seems like the mildest winter in the history of Nashville.  Our social life had recently begun to flourish, and it promised to get even more vibrant on the news that one of my best friends might move back to town.

Things were good.  But good times never last on this side of Paradise.

On Thursday, just as a medical scare on my wife’s side of the family subsided, we learned that my brother has cancer. 

It’s in his colon.  After the surgeon removes the mass on Monday, the doctors expect six months of chemotherapy to follow. With one test result, my brother, his wife and their three kids just got the biggest challenge of their lives thus far handed to them: they must defeat cancer.  

But this isn’t a blog post about cancer. 

I refuse to let cancer define this column, just as my brother refuses to let it define his life.  
  

This is a post about hope.

I used to joke that hoping is the first step toward disappointment.  That is technically true, but hope is also the fuel that powers our lives.  A person without hope doesn’t have much reason to get out of bed in the morning.

Hope doesn’t come naturally sometimes.  Life goes wrong for reasons no one can explain, and there’s no guarantee that things will ever flip right-side-up once they’ve been turned upside down.

My brother isn’t worried about that.  He says that his diagnosis is an opportunity.  He says that his life’s story is now a megaphone to the world to show that adversity can be overcome, and that he serves a God who holds closely those who seek His comfort.

He and my sister-in-law are convinced that he will beat this, and that this grueling process will bring hope and inspiration to someone facing their own struggles that they can also do all things through Christ who will give them strength if only they seek it.  

That kind of faith is inspiring, but hope doesn’t always come as easily for me.  After all, God promises to be with us through our pain, but there’s no guarantee that bad things will eventually turn out the way we’d like.  And if there really is a God with a purpose behind all of this, couldn’t that purpose have been equally served by afflicting the disease on me, my brother's childless sibling with the same genetic code?

I don’t have answers to that or the many other questions I keep asking in my head.  I don’t understand why disease exists in our world.  It seems like God could have just as easily created a world without it, and we still would have had no shortage of challenges to help us grow. 

I don’t know why we live in a world with so much suffering or why bad things happen to good people. 

But I do know that the world looks different to me now than it did this time a week ago.    

A week ago, when Green Day’s “I Walk Alone” came on my mp3 player while I was at the gym, my heart sang along enthusiastically, convinced my life represented an isolated battle against the population at large.  Today, I’m overwhelmed by the number of prayers at my side and the compassion of those around me, who have consistently delivered the exact message I needed to hear at the exact moment I needed it.   

The world looks different to me now than it did four years ago.

In 2008, I let political debates damage some of my closest relationships.  This election year, I’m not revealing to anyone who I’m voting for unless they specifically ask, and even then, I’m not going to try to convince them that I’m right. 

Last year, when a series of aggravating misfortunes hit at the same time, I felt God had abandoned me and would never return.  This week, even during the moments when some unexpected sudden thought reduced me to tears, I’ve sensed a peace that I haven’t known in quite some time.  

I don’t know the end result of my brother’s challenges, but I have hope because I see God working through them already.  I’ve learned that I don’t walk alone, that petty things don’t matter, that God seems closer when I call for His presence than when I ask for a favor, and I’ve been reminded that life really does work better when I don’t try to rely on my own strength to navigate it.  

If I’ve already been reminded of these things, I can only imagine what else is in store for the hundreds of others in my brother’s life.

It would be easy to say that cancer caused all this, but this isn’t a blog post about cancer.

This is a post about being thankful for the outpouring of support my friends have given me.

It’s a post about how I’ve realized in the past few days how much time I’ve wasted on stuff that doesn’t really matter, and how I’m going to live my life differently going forward.  

This is post about remembering all the other times I’ve felt God’s presence in my life through hard times that were ultimately endured. 

It’s a post about being thankful, in the midst of all the other garbage, for a reminder of all these lessons.

I am still devastated by the news.  Several times a day I have a passing moment where I wonder if maybe this is all just a bad dream from which I'll eventually awake.  Sappy songs on the radio bring me to tears at inopportune moments, and I constantly despise myself for not knowing the right things to say to make those around me feel better. 

But I take some solace in the fact that I can already see a change in my life through  what is maybe the worst news I’ve ever received. That makes me realize there’s a greater purpose at work here than what I can comprehend.  

And that fact gives me all the hope I need.