This is an outstanding testimony from Tony Snow, President Bush's Press
Secretary, and his fight with cancer.
Commentator and broadaster Tony Snow
announced that he had colon cancer in 2005.
Following surgery and chemo-thrapy,
Snow joined the Bush Administration in April, 2006, as press secretary.
Unfortunately, on March 23, 2007,
Snow, 51, a husband and father of three, announced that the cancer had
recurred, with tumors found in his abdomen, leading to surgery in April,
followed by more chemotherapy.
Snow went back to work in the White House Briefing Room on May 3, but has
resigned since, 'for economic reasons,'
and to pursue 'other interests.'
It needs little intro . . . it speaks for itself.
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'Blessings arrive in unexpected packages,
- in my case, cancer.
Those of us with potentially fatal diseases
- and there are millions in America today - find ourselves in the odd position
of coping with our mortality while trying to fathom God's will.
Although it would be the height of presumption to declare with confidence
'What It All Means,'
Scripture provides powerful hints and consolations.
The first is that we shouldn't spend too much time trying to answer the
'why' questions:
Why me?
Why must people suffer?
Why can't someone else get sick?
We can't answer such things,
and the questions themselves
often are designed more to express our anguish than to solicit an answer.
I don't know why I have cancer, and I don't much care.
It is what it is, a plain and indisputable fact.
Yet even while staring into a mirror darkly, great and stunning truths began to
take shape.
Our maladies define a central feature of our
existence:
We are fallen.
We are imperfect.
Our bodies give out.
But, despite this, - or because of it, - God offers the possibility of
salvation and grace.
We don't know how the narrative of our lives will end,
but we get to choose how to use the interval between now and the moment we meet
our Creator face-to-face.
Second, we need to get past the anxiety.
The mere thought of dying
can send adrenaline flooding through your system.
A dizzy, unfocused panic seizes you.
Your heart thumps; your head swims.
You think of nothingness and swoon.
You fear partings;
you worry about the impact on family and friends.
You fidget and get nowhere.
To regain footing, remember that we were born not into death, but into life -
and that the journey continues after we have finished our days on this earth.
We accept this on faith,
but that faith is nourished by a conviction that stirs even within many
non-believing hearts
- an institution that the gift of life, once given, cannot be taken away.
Those who have been stricken
enjoy the special privilege of being able to fight with their might, main, and
faith to live fully, richly, exuberantly
- no matter how their days may be numbered.
Third, we can open our eyes and hearts.
God relishes surprise.
We want lives of simple, predictable ease,
- smooth, even trails as far as the eye can see, - but God likes to go
off-road.
He provokes us with twists and turns.
He places us in predicaments
that seem to defy our endurance and comprehension
- and yet don't.
By His love and grace, we persevere.
The challenges that make our hearts leap and stomachs churn invariably
strengthen our faith and grant measures of wisdom and joy we would not
experience otherwise.
'You Have Been Called'.
Picture yourself in a hospital bed.
The fog of anesthesia has begun to wear away.
A doctor stands at your feet,
a loved one holds your hand at the side
'It's cancer,' the healer announces.
The natural reaction is to turn to God
and ask him to serve as a cosmic Santa.
'Dear God, make it all go away.
Make everything simpler.'
But another voice whispers: 'You have been called.'
Your quandary has drawn you closer to God, closer to those you love, closer to
the issues that matter,
- and has dragged into insignificance
the banal concerns
that occupy our 'normal time.'
There's another kind of response,
although usually short-lived,
an inexplicable shudder of excitement
as if a clarifying moment of calamity
has swept away everything trivial and tiny, and placed before us the challenge
of important questions.
The moment you enter the Valley of the Shadow of Death, things change.
You discover that Christianity
is not something doughy, passive, pious, and soft.
Faith may be the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not
seen.
But it also draws you into a world shorn of fearful caution.
The life of belief teems with thrills, boldness, danger, shocks, reversals,
triumphs, and epiphanies.
Think of Paul, traipsing through the known world and comtemplating trips to
what must have seemed the antipodes (Spain), shaking the dust from his sandals,
worrying not about the morrow, but only about the moment.
There's nothing wilder than a life of humble virtue,
- for it is through selflessness and service that God wrings from our bodies
and spirits the most we ever could give, the most we ever could offer, and the
most we ever could do.
Finally, we can let love change everything.
When Jesus was faced with the prospect of cruicifixion, he grieved not for
himself, but for us.
He cried for Jerusalem before entering the Holy City
From the Cross, he took on the cumulative burden of human sin and weakness, and
begged for forgiveness on our behalf.
We get repeated chances
to learn that life is not about us,
that we acquired purpose and satisfaction by sharing in God's love for
others.
Sickness gets us part way there.
It reminds us of our limitations and dependence.
But it also gives us a chance to serve the healthy.
A minister friend of mine observes
that people suffering grave afflictions
often acquire the faith of two people,
while loved ones accept the burden
of two peoples' worries and fears.
'Learning How to Live'.
Most of us have watched friends as they drifted toward God's arms, not with
resignation, but with peace and hope.
In so doing, they have taught us not how to die, but how to live.
They have emulated Christ
by transmitting the power and authority of live.
I sat by my best friend's bedside a few years ago as a wasting cancer took
him away.
He kept at his table a worn Bible
and a 1928 edition of the Book of Common Prayer.
A shattering grief disabled his family,
many of his old friends, and at least one priest.
Here was an humble and very good guy,
someone who apologized when he winced with pain because he thought it made his
guest uncomfortable.
He restrained his equanimity and good humor literally until his last conscious
moment.
'I'm going to try to beat [this cancer],'
he told me several months before he died.
'But if I don't, I'll see you on the other side.'
His gift was to remind everyone around him that even though God doesn't
promise us tomorrow, he does promise us eternity
- filled with life and love we cannot comprehend, - and that one can, in the
throes of sickness, point the rest of us toward timeless truths that will help
us weather future storms.
Through such trials, God bids us to choose:
Do we believe, or do we not?
Will we be bold enough to love,
daring enough to serve,
humble enough to submit,
and strong enough
to acknowledge our limitations?
Can we surrender our concern
in things that don't matter
so that we might devote our remaining days to things that do?
When our faith flags, He throws reminmders in our way.
Think of the prayer warriors in our midst.
They change things,
and those of us
who have been on the receiving end
of their petitions and intercessions
know it.
It is hard to describe,
but there are times
when suddenly the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, and you feel a surge
of the Spirit.
Somehow you just know:
Others have chosen,
when talking to the Author of all creation, to lift us up,
- to speak of us!
This is love of a very special order.
But so is the ability to sit back
and appreciate the wonder of every created thing.
The mere thought of death somehow makes every blessing vivid, every happiness
more luminious and intense.
We may not know how our contest with sickness will end, but we have felt the
ineluctable touch of God.
What is man that Thou are mindful of him?
We don't know much, but we know this:
No matter where we are,
no matter what we do,
no matter how bleak or frightening our prospects, each and every one of us who
believe each and every day, lies in the same safe and impregnable place, in the
hollow of God's hand.'
T. Snow
