Into the Fish Bowl

Whether or not cancer patients intend to share their journey openly with others, they generally find that the cancer situation itself has put their lives into a fish bowl—for public viewing—whether they like it or not. “What were your most recent test results?” “What did the doctor say?” Those questions used to be for me and my family. Now, with a “terminal illness,” they are relevant questions for all who care about my family and me.

My body—its test results, its symptoms—has become a public spectacle, something for public commentary. Some things are kept private. But much that was formerly private is no longer so. Sharing the cancer story, however, can also open the door for many blessings to flow. One blessing is that I have been able to explore—and bear witness to—the ways in which God’s story intersects with the cancer story; how my cancer story is complicated and mysterious but not nearly as compelling as the mystery of God’s love made known in Jesus Christ.

This opportunity came with the initial announcement of my diagnosis, where—in all of the various venues—I included the 3R ejoicing in Lament following words from Question and Answer 1 of the Heidelberg Catechism: “What is your only comfort in life and in death? That I am not my own, but that I belong—in body and soul, in life and in death—to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ.”

Like the note from the fifteen-year-old girl in my church, it breaks through the fog of “terminal” and “incurable” and “cancer” by pointing us to the bedrock of what matters: that I belong, in life and in death, to Jesus Christ. My life is not my own.