Washington Post Op-Ed: Cancer May Take My Life. Here’s What a Hymn Made Me See, by Megan Basham:
As a Christian, I wish I could say I received my 2024 diagnosis of early-onset advanced colorectal cancer in a beatific fashion, battling fear and grief with the time-honored spiritual weapons of prayer, fasting and scripture reading. Though there was some of that, I devoted more time to developing a new set of bad habits and bizarre fixations. …
I felt as if I were a ball on a roulette wheel that kept bouncing into a losing slot. If only I could learn the formula of the game, maybe I could live to see my daughters, then 10 and 15, marry and have babies, or at least go to prom.
What finally brought my odds-fevered mind some peace was a hymn that reminded me what I believe — that someone is in control of the wheel, and the ball, and the number of pockets, and the length of the spin. And statistics and probabilities hold no sway over Him.
A friend dealing with his own cancer shared a performance of the 17th-century German hymn, “What God Ordains is Always Good.” For some reason, I didn’t stop to look up his survival rates, I just clicked play. This is what I heard:
“What God Ordains is always good;/ His will is just and holy./ As He directs my life for me,/ I follow meek and lowly.”
As these words rolled over me, I sat on my kitchen floor and cried. By the end of that afternoon, I must have played the song 15 times. The theological term for what it describes is providence. It is the doctrine that the Westminster Larger Catechism defines as God “preserving, and governing all his creatures; ordering them, and all their actions, to his own glory.” Or as Presbyterian theologian R. C. Sproul put it, there is not a single rogue molecule in the entire universe. God is guiding every one.
This Christian doctrine holds not only that God will eventually use events for the good of his creatures but that nothing can occur outside his will. He is continually governing all things, from galaxies to governments to individual joys and suffering. …
Belief in providence does not anesthetize fear or grief. It does not make chemotherapy pleasant or prognosis irrelevant. But it has released me from the illusion that my life depends on my ability to outrun the numbers. It allows me to stop living like an orphan who must decode the universe to survive, and to live instead like a daughter whose father knows the end from the beginning.
When a new pathology report showed that a spot on my lung was indeed metastatic and necessitated that I be restaged from 3 to 4, I still cried. And I still asked my doctors what it means for my chances of long-term remission. But I also felt a strange peace. One might say the kind of peace that passes understanding.
My life doesn’t hang on a coin toss. It is not at the mercy of a cosmic roulette wheel. It will be decided by the one who loves me more than any other. There is nothing to fear in that.
Editor’s Note: If you would like to receive a weekly email each Sunday with links to faith posts on TaxProf Blog, email me here.
