What I Learned From Dying: I may be dying but I still have hope

Dave Taylor

A little more than a week ago I was preparing for my chemotherapy but when I told the nurse about my neuropathy and a spate of blisters that had broken out on my hands, they canceled that session. When the nurse was explaining the reasoning behind canceling she said something that, while true, hit me pretty hard.

She said that doctors must balance the accumulation of side effects versus the effect of treatment on patients, and “especially on someone who’s never going to be healed and who’s going to have to have treatments for the rest of his life.”

Ouch.

Granted, from everything medicine knows right now she was right. There have been no hints by any medical professionals that I’ll ever be free of this cancer or that it’ll really do anything other than progress to the point that it eventually kills me, more likely sooner than later.

But still, everyone’s always danced around that fact, keenly aware that it’s there and never denying it, but still never shining too bright a light on it.

But here’s the thing: I will be healed. Maybe I won’t be healed in the traditional sense that I’ll get a scan that shows no more cancer and I’ll be ringing the cancer-free bell, but I serve a God who’s bigger than this cancer and if he decides not to rid me of cancer in this life, it certainly won’t be coming with me when I go to Heaven.

That very fact is where my hope comes from. God has never failed me throughout the entirety of my life and I see no evidence that he’s going to start now. Cancer is a big deal here in this life but this life is but a tiny blip in comparison to eternity.

The Bible makes it clear that this earth is not my home, so whatever happens here isn’t permanent and it’ll be a distant memory by the time I make it home, where cancer and death don’t exist and where everything’s perfect.

It is Heaven, after all.

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