“Where, O death, is your victory
Where, O death, is your sting”
I Corinthians 15:55
BSB Bible
Cancer, Where Is Your Victory
It is a strange set of affairs.
Like a tearful old man who refuses to surrender to the years, I love to walk—to wander the glens and shorelines of Scotland, to breathe in the salt of the sea and the clean bite of Highland wind. The hills keep me young. The paths call to me. Though I carry a little extra weight these days, I am healthy in spirit and full of delight. There are still so many places I have not seen. I have never stood beneath the wide skies of the Outer Hebrides, nor travelled far north beyond Inverness where the land grows lonely and magnificent.
I once visited the Island of Islay on Scotland’s western edge, a place of peat and prayerful silence. Yet recent discoveries in my family’s DNA have tied me more deeply to that soil. I must go back—walk it again, this time with the eyes of belonging.
And yet, quietly, I feel the doors beginning to close.
Just over two year ago, I underwent a battery of medical tests. When the consultant called me in for the results, the air in the room felt unusually heavy. The verdict was unwelcome: cells that had served me faithfully all my life had turned rogue. There was rebellion in my prostate, my pancreas, my liver. A quiet uprising in the citadel of my own flesh.
The consultant studied my face.
“You seem very bravado about this,” he said, almost puzzled.
“Oh, I understand what you’re telling me,” I replied gently. “But there is a young man inside me who has walked with me all my life. And I will still return one day after I close my eyes.”
It was not denial. It was not stoicism. It was something deeper.
I ask you, reader—though perhaps you do not need to be asked—do you sense that younger self within you? That companion who has moved with you through childhood, through love, through loss? The body alters, the mirror shifts, but something remains curiously unchanged. The inner life grows richer even as the outer frame declines.
As we age, that inner presence becomes more vivid. It presses forward in quiet moments. It whispers of continuity.
May I share what I believe about this?
Long ago, a wise king wrote words that have echoed through centuries:
“He has made everything beautiful in its time.
He has also set eternity in the hearts of men.”
— Ecclesiastes 3:11 (Berean Standard Bible)
King Solomon spoke of a wisdom given to him in youth—a gift from God. And in that line lies a mystery that science has never solved. There are many clever explanations offered for consciousness, for longing, for the depth of the human soul. Scholars have opened skulls, mapped neural pathways, dissected grey matter into slides and specimens. Theories are proposed, revised, discarded.
But no theory explains why eternity hums within us.
No scalpel has ever located the place where hope resides.
We have rich inner lives because we were fashioned for more than decay. We were built for eternity.
On the morning of my appointment, before stepping into that consulting room, my wife and I read a verse together:
“He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High
will abide in the shadow of the Almighty.”
— Psalm 91:1
After reading it, I turned to her and said quietly, “We are going to receive bad news today.”
It was not dread. It was recognition. A sense of being gently prepared. There are moments in life when scripture does more than inspire—it speaks. With over 31,000 verses in the Bible, what are the odds of opening the pages and finding the precise words needed for that exact morning? Some may call it coincidence.
I do not.
God has always spoken, but sometimes His voice is unmistakably intimate.
Cancer may tighten its grip. It may close doors. It may shorten horizons. But it cannot extinguish the eternity placed within the human heart. It cannot silence the young man who still walks the Scottish hills inside me. It cannot erase the promise of something beyond the final breath.
When Jesus told the thief beside Him, “You will be with Me in Paradise,” I often wonder what that landscape will be like. Will it surpass the heather-covered slopes of Scotland? The long light over Islay’s shores? The wild northern skies?
Surely—without question—it will.
Cancer, where is your sting?
You may trouble the body.
You may summon tears.
You may alter the calendar.
But you cannot defeat the promise.
The hills still call. And beyond them, something greater awaits.