Personal Blogs

Dealing With Cancer In the Quiet Hours

It’s the wee hours of May 26, 3:30 a.m. to be precise, and I’m wide awake. I know this feeling; God has summoned me to come and speak with Him. He knows what’s in my heart.

I have a decision to make.

There is treatment that may preserve life, yet it comes at a cost. The chemotherapy tablets carry higher stakes than before. Neuroendocrine tumours are growing in my liver and must be suppressed, but the price of that suppression may be profound tiredness. But that's okay; It beats the alternative.

For the first time in this cancer journey, I find myself truly pensive. Perhaps rightly, perhaps wrongly, I feel more aware of my mortality than ever before. Although, that conclusion  may be a considerable distance away.

In the quietness of this special hour, I spend time with God in prayer. Afterwards, I open my Bible, and it falls, as though guided there, to Psalm 5:11:

“But let all who take refuge in You rejoice;
let them ever shout for joy.
May You shelter them,
that those who love Your name may rejoice in You.”

There is a weariness that comes not only from illness, but from weighing life itself in the balance. Yet somewhere beneath the uncertainty, I still search for peace; not the peace of easy answers, but the peace of knowing that even here, in the dim hours before dawn, God has not stepped away from me.