I’ve thought for years that cancer is about 70 percent mental and 30 percent physical.
There is the cancer diagnosis, and then how we think about the cancer diagnosis. There are the cancer treatments and the treatment’s effects, and how we think about these treatments and their effects. First there is the physical, and then there is the mental.
When you drive around, you see bumper stickers that say, “Cancer sucks.” I don’t happen to believe that, but lets say Cancer is not the first choice for my life, if given the option. Like, on the checklist of what I think I need, “More money” or “More wisdom to raise these teenagers,” or even “More food to feed these teenagers” would be near the top, but not “Cancer.” That wouldn’t be on my list, but it happened to be on God’s list eleven years ago.
But cancer is not easy, even if it doesn’t “suck.” How we react to the cancer is everything, for in this we have the possibly to take a situation that is bad in an Earthly sense and make it worse – much worse. How much worse? I would say seven times worse, but that may not be mathematically correct.
How do we make it worse? Well, we can always throw a pity party and a grand one at that. Then the Earth opens up and down into the depths we go, and it doesn’t take long. We have shot ourselves in the foot, knowingly stepped into a bear trap, stepped out in front of a train. And it does’t end: we become addicted to our funk and usually end up in even greater darkness than we began with.
Another way to do yourself in is to ask the question, “Why me?” Well, see how long it takes to get an answer to that one! Round and round we go, like water swirling down a drain, until we get sucked into the sewer system with no answer, still wondering why all this happened to poor me. Similarly unhealthy thoughts go like this: “God is punishing me.” Resist that. It is not so.
A few weeks ago, in one day I became a semi-invalid and was total care. Nothing prepared me for this, I could not have imagined it, and it was an emotional catastrophe. That was the day I crawled down the hallway to the bathroom and even with this, my mind would not work right and kept careening me into the wall to the right, and I could not stop it.
The only thing that helped me is these verses that kept going through my mind:
Without those verses, I don’t know where I would have been – perhaps off someplace in the outer constellations of emotional angst, trying to figure life out without ever succeeding in the midst of being a total wreck.
Then there is something called positive thinking. I hate positive thinking. Positive thinking is where you try to convince yourself of something that you don’t really believe anyway. “I can’t walk, I use a urinal and my wife has to dress me but at least I can still blow my nose.” That’s positive thinking. Usually positive thinking ends up in negative thinking, because that you can still blow your nose just isn’t enough to make you really happy.
These cancer lessons, however, carry over to other areas of life, I bet. Things happen in life, but how do I take them? And what does that say about me?
Cancer Chronicles 