I still have fleeting moments where I’m really truly afraid. They’re less fleeting than I would like; wherever the balance is between “be anxious about nothing” and a normal instinct for self-preservation, I’m far too much on the anxious side.
Yet: “Yes, we are of good courage, and we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord.” 2 Corinthians 5:8. Scripture is very clear — in more places than just this one verse — that Christians are to live as though this life is not something to be grasped at. Living is not preferable to dying. Living should not be more comfortable than dying. Or, to paraphrase John Piper, we should not feel at home here.
These past few weeks I have been experiencing a sort of second shock, I think, about the “whole cancer thing.” It’s like there was the initial moment, that first awful and glorious week, and then a long respite of relative ease… and now I’m doing radiation and trying to figure out working and health insurance and future plans and realizing that my life will never, ever be the same. There’s the scars and tattoos that will be there forever, and the reddish tinge to my skin that will soon develop into a full-fledged burn that will take a year to fade. And I am starting to hurt, physically, and I’m honestly having a really difficult time not feeling sorry for myself. All of this is coalescing into the dread realization that I have cancer, and that while the statistics are in my favor, they’re by no means certain, and since God is in control anyway, statistics are fairly irrelevant.
These past few weeks have been almost as difficult emotionally as the first week in May. Maybe even more difficult. There have been times when I’ve been quite literally on the edge of falling apart — I think this is much exacerbated by my physical condition (which is not so good right now), but it’s there and I’m having to learn how to trust God even more. It’s harder, in some ways, because it’s not as easy to find the energy to actually think about things, so my sinful reactions are coming more to the fore.
And in these dark nights of mine, the one thing God keeps bringing me back to is that I am just passing through. I will be here and I will keep breathing until He is finished with having Julie Fuller here. Not a moment more or less. And that is comfort: I can trust that all my purpose here will be completed, not cut a moment short, and that He has planned the final moment with precision and perfection. My problem and the reason for my sinful worry is that I get caught up in my purpose instead of His. Hebrews 11:13-16, out of the “faith” chapter, has been increasingly convicting to me: “These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth. For people who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been thinking of that land from which they had gone out, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city.”
Strangers and exiles on the earth. Seeking a homeland. Not thinking of the land from which we’ve gone out. Desiring a better country. This is me, too! In the world but not of it. This body in which I reside is fallen and sinful and tainted and scarred and to be rid of it is to be with Christ. To be rid of it is to be freed from sin! Why on earth am I not begging God with all my heart to make it so?
The answer is very obvious: I am much too infatuated with the things of this world. Good things, like marriage and family. But even the highest of these things is secondary to my calling as a child of God. Seth and I are married, yes, but we do not “belong” to one another; our deepest sense of ownership is possessed by God and God alone. We are here for the furtherance of His kingdom, and we are just sojourning here briefly until we join Christ and all the saints in heaven. Marriage is a beautiful and wonderful and ever so fun and enjoyable gift, but it’s an earthly gift. It’s a precursor to the ultimate wedding of Christ and the Church, and precursors melt away when their fulfillment is complete. We are to rejoice in that! If I am so tied to my husband that the thought of leaving him to be with Christ causes me to stumble, then we’ve tied ourselves together with the wrong sort of thread! You can’t take Christ out of your definition of love, and real love is never about clinging to something when it isn’t yours to cling to. And eternally, I have no right to cling to Seth. He is God’s; I am God’s; God can render us asunder at His pleasure.
I wish I would, with the people of Hebrews 10:34, gladly abandon these things I hold dear with equanimity because I know I have “a better possession and an abiding one.” That is the promise we have been given, and we have the God Who orchestrates every atom in the universe as Guarantor. That future “possession” of ours is everything we were created to desire, perfectly suited for us in every way, the summation of everything we yearn for, and the beginning of things we have not even begun to glimpse. This is through a glass darkly; that is face-to-face. Face to face. There is no thought of heaven that shakes me as much, that thrills me and terrifies me and that makes me hunger as nothing else.
But it is one thing to know, and another to live and to trust. I am learning — very slowly — that I must have the spirit of a sojourner, who stays in a strange country for a time and for a purpose, but never loses sight of the homeland, and who waits, every day, for word that the return ship has arrived in port, and that soon she will be going to the home she’ll never have to leave. Coming to a point where that is real, day-to-day, internalized, and instinctual is so infinitely much more important than getting better. I am not and have not been such an alien to this world.
I am so thankful that God does not abandon us to wallow in our misery and try to make sense of things on our own. He has never left me in the darkness, and I am continuing to see how He is using this “awful” circumstance for my greater good, and how He continues to teach me to praise Him for these things that my fallen self finds so unpraiseworthy.
