Cancer will steal your life, if you let it. Bit by bit, word by word, intimate conversations become dominated by it. Even the closest friends and family can seem to lose interest in talking about anything but your cancer. It starts off pleasantly enough, as folks ask after your well-being in a casual-but-not-quite sort of way, and soon every interaction revolves around your symptoms, side effects, aches and pains. The worst conversations are when someone with a depressive or gloomy worldview uses your cancer to validate their priors. You begin to feel bound by social contract to never have or admit to having a good day. Or a bad one. Or one in which, for a blessed change of pace, you went the entire day without thinking about the cancer. People mean well enough, but you begin to cherish the times when they ask about anything else: how is this hobby or that, are you enjoying your new house, etc. You begin to love the jiujitsu partners who make you tap to a choke or arm bar in spite of the cancer, because there is love in that normalcy. You feel a tiny bit more like a person and less like a disease.

In my pastor’s sermons leading up to today, Easter Sunday, as well as in the latest season of The Chosen, we have been reminded in great detail how the Jews believed the Messiah would bring something else: a military victory over their present oppressors. I know The Chosen is extra-Biblical, but I find its dramatizations helpful as I try to understand what may have been the thoughts of some at the time. Either way, Jewish expectations for the Messiah have been covered in innumerable studies and sermons. Even Jesus’ disciples couldn’t comprehend what He was trying to say to them about the manner in which He would conquer sin and the grave. Throughout all of these messages, there seems to be a thread in which the Holy Spirit is saying, elevate your gaze. Look above the horizon. There are greater things being done.

I’ve managed this in large part in our own political turmoil of the present day. I pray for the Kingdom, not the Republic. There are things I would like to see happen in our politics, but they are afterthoughts. What matters is God’s will, not whether the Democrats will win the midterms or Republicans will maintain the presidency beyond the current administration. No matter which party prevails, we will still live in a land ruled by demons and their worshippers. Only God, through revival or return, will ever be able to change that. Elevate your gaze. Look above the horizon. Seek first the Kingdom of God.

This is where I’ve finally arrived with cancer. My attention has been drawn repeatedly to Christ’s words to the disciples regarding prayer, about asking the Father and believing you will receive. I have written a time or two about how I can’t bring myself to pray to be healed of cancer, even though it seems my life revolves around it. Like the politics of today, it’s difficult to see past the next treatment, the next dose, the next blood draw.

In his sermon today, my pastor hit a point he’s fond of hitting: salvation is not the “Sinner’s Prayer”, it is repentance. It is turning from your old ways and following God. I wrote in my book that I spent some time tormented by my OCD as a child, continuously repeating the Sinner’s Prayer. I thought about that as pastor Scott rolled into his altar call. I know I tried and failed to repent many times as an adult, again tripped up by OCD and my own duplicitous nature. In his “Renovating Life” class, he would call this the approach of “trying not to sin” as opposed to becoming more like Christ. It was only that day two years ago, when I had finally had enough and told myself that from then on, I was going to pursue God, that everything changed. I wonder if that means I’ve only been a Christian for 2 years, or only a serious one for 2 years, or what.

I think it was a couple weeks ago that something changed in my perspective. It was as though the Holy Spirit once again challenged me, and has been challenging me ever since: elevate your gaze. Even if I am cured of cancer, I am still in this imperfect mortal body, doomed to die eventually. But I am not this mortal body. I am a child of God. I already have the healing I ask for. I believe it, I ask for it, I claim the victory that Christ gave me by allowing Himself to be crucified. I say cancer has no claim on me or my life, and somehow that is the key to unlocking the puzzle of this “Schrodinger’s prayer” that I’ve been praying for 2 years. I am free to live this new life, and this life is eternal whether I die a mortal death or the trumpets sound first. In some ways, none of this makes any sense to me, but it simultaneously strikes me as the most True thing I have ever written.

I am well aware of the irony that would now accompany my death by cancer, should my life take that course, and how some would use that to claim my faith was in vain. I wonder if Paul felt this same exhilaration when he wrote “the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing”. I’m going to live. My cancer says hi.