Coming face-to-face with death, especially when it’s unexpected or imminent, is daunting for believers and non-believers alike. There are the worldly concerns, “What will I do?”, and the spiritual ones, “What comes next?”
Without knowledge or belief in God, these concerns are overwhelming. I’ve been there twice. Thankfully, my faith in God never wavered.
The first time was in September 2003. My husband Jim, a successful doctor in Miami Gardens, Florida, and the father of our two children, experienced numbness on his upper lip. He went to the doctor to check it out. He was so shaken by the diagnosis—a golf-ball-sized mass behind his nose—he couldn’t drive himself home.
A CT scan revealed that Jim had a tumour growing back towards his brain. A subsequent biopsy revealed that the mass was an insidious form of cancer. Jim had two months to live.
“You have to pray”
When Jim told me about the cancer, he didn’t share the prognosis with me—probably a good decision on his part. I looked but couldn’t see. I listened but couldn’t hear. I was numb. All over. Yet, through the numbness, one single clear thought emerged: “Mary, you have to pray.”
Prayer has been part of my life since I was a girl growing up in Taiwan. My faith is simple. I trust in the Lord, and I trust in the Bible. God gave every one of us His mercy and grace, and I trust in Him.
So, I prayed. A close friend called me every day. She said to imagine we were walking through the Red Sea like Moses! She encouraged me to visualize taking just one step at a time. Her advice was a good match for my personal philosophy. I always take one day at a time, doing the best possible job on the task at hand. Tomorrow will bring a new task, but I never think about it today.
We leaned on our friends and family and asked them to pray. Prayer requests inspire all kinds of prayers. Some are strong, forceful prayers commanding the tumour itself to leave in Jesus’ name; others are prayers that beg God to do what they themselves see as what’s best.
No one knew for sure what the doctors were saying about the kinds of cancer cells, or about a surgery that might require extensive, disfiguring facial cuts, or what Jim’s chances of survival really were at that point. Often, the Holy Spirit intercedes for speechless believers who are praying wholeheartedly for divine help in such emotional and complicated situations.
In the days immediately following Jim’s dire prognosis, God looked after us in big ways and small.
We overnighted a biopsied sample from the mass to a specialist at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. It arrived on Saturday. The specialist went down to the mailroom and looked through dozens of packages to find ours. Then, he went immediately to the lab and put the sample under a microscope.
In the meantime, our son Gordon and his fiancé Jessica, students at the University of Miami’s Miller School of Medicine, had agreed to move up their December wedding to that very same Saturday so Jim could attend. Our church typically has events booked almost every weekend, but they just happened to have an opening this Saturday. Jessica’s dress and the bridesmaid’s dresses weren’t due in for weeks, but they just happened to arrive on Friday.
A miraculous phone call
And then, the miracle I’d prayed for. As Jim was standing next to Gordon and our oldest son, Chris, waiting for Jessica to walk down the aisle, Chris’s phone rang. It was the specialist from MD Anderson.
“Chris,” the specialist said, “I know what the other pathologist told you, but I think this is a weird kind of B-cell, non-Hodgkin lymphoma that we’ve seen before.”
Chris was doing a cardiology fellowship at Cornell University Medical College in Manhattan. He knew exactly what the doctor was saying. He grabbed Jim and hugged him. “Dad, there’s hope! He thinks it’s lymphoma!”
The doctor was right, and while there were still plenty of chemo and radiation treatments in Jim’s future before he was cancer-free, my numbness, at least, dissipated.
Jim and I, along with our two sons and their wives, would turn Jim’s initial experience navigating a confusing, uncoordinated healthcare system into ChenMed—a mission-driven healthcare provider bringing better health to thousands of underserved senior citizens in 15 states.
We continued to grow even during 2020—the year Covid put other healthcare practices out of business. The pandemic, however, touched us deeply that summer, and the numbness returned.
Covid strikes and retreats
Our son Chris, now ChenMed’s CEO, came down with the virus.
At first, I wasn’t worried. Chris runs, swims and bikes. He could hold his own in a triathlon. When he started running a fever, I believed he could fight off the virus on his own.
I was wrong.
I had to remind myself how God brought us through Jim’s cancer misdiagnosis, and now I trusted that He would get us through this trial as well.
The fever led to sweats and the sweats led to diminished lung capacity. Before long, Chris was in the ICU—a few short, laboured breaths away from going on a ventilator.
When Chris went into the hospital, the numbness returned, but worse. Chris was my son. This time, the sensation was so intense, I didn’t think about that walk through the Red Sea or taking one day at a time. I had to remind myself how God brought us through Jim’s cancer misdiagnosis, and now I trusted that He would get us through this trial as well.
Once more, we called on everyone we knew to pray for Chris. We had to trust God to lead us in every decision and provide what we needed; we had to believe that God is who He says He is, despite a very nagging darkness that hung onto us like a short coat.
Chris survived and is back to leading ChenMed, as well as being a great husband and father.
Stepping out in faith
God keeps His promises. Until you experience it yourself, though, believing it requires stepping out in faith, something we hesitate to do because we’re unaware that our very limited worldly knowledge is what we use to evaluate our supernatural God. We live by trusting what we feel or see or think about what’s right there in front of us.
Stepping out in faith requires us to forget about what makes sense to us at the moment. We have to back off and get out of our own way before we can call on our Creator. Then, unless we take the time to watch Him work, we’ll never see what He can do.
The world has been collectively experiencing some of the darkest moments of our lifetime throughout the pandemic. While we didn’t see it either time, it is clear that God was showing us how fragile and unpredictable life is. He taught us to become more compassionate, more efficient with meeting the needs of others and more appreciative of His intervention.
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image 1: Pixabay;’ image 2: Bjørn Bulthuis
