When a life-crisis comes, it can test a person’s faith. Such is the case with the crisis of Mary’s cancer diagnosis 5 days ago. The Bible tells us, “You will have trouble.” (John 16:33) And yet when it comes, we’re never prepared.
Or are we?
In that same verse Jesus is talking, and just before his warning that we’ll all have troubles, he says that even while we’re in the midst of them, he wants us to experience his deep inner peace. He says he makes “his glorious power” available to us to produce endurance and that we’ll be given as much as we need. (Colossians 1:11)
Even though Mary hasn’t known about her cancer for very long, I’ve glimpsed that “glorious power” at work within her already. I look back at texts from Saturday, that long, frustrating day she and Bervin spent in the emergency room, and see how she was suffering: high fever, a bad belly ache, and the sudden onset of jaundice.
As doctors began a string of tests and hinted at what might be wrong, Mary sensed the day wasn’t going to end well. The two of us were texting off and on, and midday she wrote, “Don’t worry. Just keep praying.”
As the diagnosis came closer, she knew it was more than just a bad case of the flu but wrote, “‘Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say rejoice.’ I’m glad God is near.”
Between those words I could hear the Lord’s strength growing within her and knew he was preparing her for what was ahead. Three hours later she texted, “The Lord is near.”
Hours after that, just after she and Bervin had heard the words “pancreatic cancer,” she texted this: “I’m sorry for how this will affect you and yours as I walk down the same road as Nate. I know this is hard all around, but amazingly I’ve been at peace all day.”
Those were the words of a woman who had been supernaturally prepared by God to stand strong even in the face of cancer. One of Mary’s last texts on that awful day, coming after the diagnosis and well after midnight, was, “God is good.”
How can someone who’s just been told she has cancer actually believe God is good? The only reasonable answer is that he had personally prepared her ahead of time by strengthening her faith in him. Though she may not have felt it while it was happening, it was. She has always trusted God to do what was best, so he readied her for Saturday’s events.
That’s not to say Mary’s “trouble” isn’t going to be hard. The enemy of faith, the devil, is going to do all he can to make her miserable and shake her trust in God, but I believe he’s going to be sorely disappointed. This faith-test is only going to polish her into brightly shining faith-gold.
“I have set the Lord always before me; because he is at my right hand, I shall not be shaken.” (Psalm 16:8)