Allow Me to Put This All in Perspective For You

Are you in the final whirlwind before Christmas? Stressed out? Planning your travel or cleaning with reckless abandon as guests are headed your way? Looking under the tree and thinking it is too empty or you clearly spent too much? Got disqualified from a ballot in Colorado? (I’ll deal with that one shortly)

Let me put this in perspective for you.

Seventeen years ago today, I started the day losing my job and ended the day looking my wife in the eyes to tell her she was going to die.

So, your day could be worse. The doctors thought they had found cancer in her lungs of a variety that had aggressively spread. She had, in their estimation, six months.

Thankfully, within 24 hours, doctors realized they had misdiagnosed my wife, and within 72 hours, a company swooped in to buy my company and keep me on the payroll.

But, those hours…. They were hard, harder because of a one-year-old and five days to Christmas.

There were a few lessons learned in all of this.

First, God is good.

Second, the “peace that transcends all understanding” is a very real thing that is hard to explain but can be obvious when felt.

Third, life is neither fair nor easy.

In 2016, doctors diagnosed my wife with lung cancer. It is stage four of a genetic form of lung cancer for which there is no cure. But she takes a pill every day that keeps the tumors from growing. The pill should work for two years. For her, it has worked for seven. In 2016, my wife expected never to see her child walk across the graduation stage from high school as her own mother died before her.

Instead, my wife began a new orbit around the sun on Monday, and today, as you are reading this, we are loading her up and taking her to learn how to race Porsches as a birthday present. She’ll race a rear-engine 911 GT3 and a mid-engine 718 Cayman GT4. The rest of us will watch. In five months, our daughter will graduate high school.

Providentially, had my wife not been misdiagnosed in 2006, they would have never known in 2016 that she might have lung cancer. They called and suggested she get checked and the Mayo Clinic found it. Again, providentially, the doctor who really is the expert on her form of cancer is at Emory University, an hour from us, and he oversees her care.

In that awful day in 2006 when I had to look my wife in her eyes and tell her she was going to die, I did not then know in that terror, God had blessed us. Only a decade later, with two kids, did it ever hit us that but for that, the cancer discovered in 2016 would have gone unchecked until it could not be managed.

I get atheists all the time who ask me how on earth I could believe in a God who would give my wife cancer or let her get cancer.

My answer is very simple.

We live in a fallen world.

The foundation of all evil, disease, despair, illness, and corruption of our bodies, each other, and this planet is sin. It so polluted the earth that God wiped out all but Noah and his family. But they were just enough to allow the foul stench of sin to spread again.

God offers us no reprieve from our fallen condition except Him. And He loves us so much, though He will not yet allow us an escape from the fall, He came to earth as a newborn baby, lived a perfect and blameless life, died the death of a sinner so vile the sun refused even to shine on Him, and conquered death that though we die, we will live.

God wants a relationship so badly with us, He sacrificed His only Son for us and that Son overcame death so we can have eternity.

This life is not fair. It can be cruel, cold, and miserable. But there is also in it great joy. And those of us of faith turn our attention to the Christmas joy and its meaning this week.

We have what no one else has — the hope of the resurrection and that hope is not wishful thinking as we hope for the winning lottery ticket. The word, from Greek, is better translated as “profound certainty.”

We have the profound certainty of the resurrection of Christ and the life eternal because God loves us so much, He sent his Son, born to die that we might live.

I’ll take it, and I will remind you that we who have this eternal life and joy should do a better job acting like it all the time — so much so in our response to others and life’s challenges that those around us wonder why, in the trials of life, we smile and, in that wonder, might see Christ reflected in us.