Posted on 03/03/2009 1:52:21 PM PST by Michael Eden
My mom was diagnosed with stage II breast cancer a little under five months ago. It had spread into the lymph nodes, and getting the news was one of those things that I will never forget. I would throw myself under the wheels of a bus if doing so would protect my mother; and hearing that she had cancer - the very same form of cancer that took her own mother's life - was frightening.
My mom went through 3 months of chemo that left her as bald as a cue ball, and had surgery this week. She is now home recovering, with another round of chemo and then radiation looming.
My mom had cancer. But she also had God - and the matchless, mysterious peace of Christ - in her life.
I wonder how going through such an ordeal would be different for an atheist.
As a Christian, and a committed member of a local church, my mom had constant prayer support from literally hundreds of Christians in her church. She received cards and encouraging notes and phone calls and "Is there anything I can do?" offers and small "I'm thinking of you" gifts from so many people it was amazing. What an outpouring of support, compassion, and love she received!
I wonder: do atheists have a similar caring community? Or do they often find themselves very much alone when they go through such an ordeal?
Mom lost all her hair, but - as a result of all the prayers, she would tell you - she never lost weight, never got sick, and never suffered nausea throughout her first ordeal of the poison that chemo is. She is normally incredibly sensitive to just about any medication; but apart from losing her hair, she suffered no ill effects.
The news going through the chemo was good right up to the final week when she had a PET/CT scan and an MRI. The surgeon and the oncologist had said that they believed the lumps in her breast and her armpit (from the cancer in her lymph nodes) was shrinking; but the data from the scans just before surgery indicated that very little shrinkage or reduction had taken place, particularly in the lymph nodes. The cancer in the lymph nodes was particularly worrisome, because the cancer was peri-neural and matted, and there was a very real possibility that removing the cancer would leave her left arm paralyzed.
I remember my conversation with my mom about those last scans. I tried to encourage her; she ended up encouraging me. She said, "I never put my faith in chemo; I trusted in Christ to heal me, or to take me home, in His time. I've put myself in His hands, and I want you to put me in His hands, too."
She had no fear, no anxiety, and most certainly no bitterness. Only the peace that comes from having truly trusted in God.
I drove down to the hospital to be with my mom and dad in pre-op prior to the surgery. Her pastor came to visit her, and we joked and prayed for half an hour before the OR nurses came to wheel her away for surgery. By the following afternoon, she had had several more brief visits from members of her church, and flowers, balloons, and a teddy bear let her know that she was being loved and prayed for.
After surgery her surgeon - Dr. Janet Idhe - said that in spite of the results of the imaging, her cancer had "shrunk and softened" dramatically. In fact she was amazed that the imaging and the actual observations of surgery had been so different. The surgery had gone perfectly, and the surgeon was convinced that she had gotten all the cancer without any complications. When I said she had had a lot of people praying for her, her response was, "I consider that even more important than chemo!"
Since coming home, she's had her meals prepared for her by one of her dear Christian friends, who wouldn't take "no" for an answer.
Would my mom had had all this love and attention if she had been an atheist? Do atheists typically show this kind of love and support for one another? I don't know; perhaps when an atheist gets diagnosed with cancer, other atheists come out of the woodwork to call, write, visit, and say, "We just wanted you to know that we're NOT praying for you!"
As a Christian, my mom believes in God, and believes that God has a purpose and a plan for everything that happens in her life - even the bad things. She knows that the Creator of the universe is intimately involved with every single thing she goes through, knowing her sufferings and caring over her. An atheist, by contrast, can rest secure in the knowledge that he or she has no purpose, and no meaning, and that a cold, distant, and completely uncaring universe - that shall ultimately itself ultimately perish - offers nothing but cold death.
As a Christian, my mom believes that a wonderful heaven awaits her when she dies, and that she therefore has nothing to fear in this life. An atheist has the confidence that this life is all there is, and that to get sick and to die is to lose everything you have, and everything you ever will have.
I don't write this to attack atheists - particularly those atheists who are facing cancer. I am writing this just to say that my mom - who gracefully faced her cancer with the courage and conviction that she was loved and cared for by God in Christ, along with the prayerful community, friendship and support of so many caring friends from her church - has the better pathway to healing.
With or without the magical God-human, terminal cancer is Game Over.
That sentence is a microcosm of the difference between the fatalism and hopelessness of atheism, versus the faith and hope of religion.
“With or without the magical God-human, terminal cancer is Game Over.”
For the atheist, it is suffering, then death, then hell.
For the Christian, it is suffering with the comfort of God and His people, death, and then heaven.
I pick Door #2!!
>> terminal cancer is Game Over
That’s one way to look at it. Another is, it simply advances you to the next level in the “game” — a game that is never truly over.
SnakeDoc
I am so glad you are still here to share your insights gained through so much suffering. They - and you - are valuable.
I can look at a person in the dying process and see a person, and part of the reason for that (maybe THE part) is because I do not fear death. I don’t have to freak out and avoid the “taboo” of death because (in the words of St. Paul) death has lost its sting because of the work of Christ.
Thank you for sharing that.
Lovely, Michael.
Thank you very much.
Why was cancer even allowed to exist? Why are any horrible diseases allowed to exist? People can’t grow new limbs, but they can die of cancer, why is that?
I am convinced prayer works. I have seen enough results to know there is something there. I also believe that in the future, we will gain more scientific understanding of why it works
I don’t believe at all that faith, science and logic are at extremes to each other and are completely incompatible.
You don’t need to be a god-botherer to care about other people. That is an outrageous conceit amongst some believers if they believe that...
I was just nine years old when my father had a heart attack in 1956; one of the most helpful neighbors was an atheist. I knew he was an atheist because I heard my mother trying to convert him and his wife once or twice. Atheists believe or know that prayer does not help, an offer to pay some bills or buy groceries does. My father lived 47 more years and passed away at 93.
Christians have an answer: God created a good world that was corrupted because of sin. The depravity that tainted God’s image-bearer man tainted the Creation God made for man.
As God said to Adam, “Cursed is the ground because of you...” (Gen 3:17).
God had told man, “If you eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, you shall surely die.” He meant both spiritually and ultimately physically. We chose death, and cancer and diseases now claim our lives as a result.
God created a perfect world for man. Man chose to bring evil into the world. Now we have to live with the reality of that choice.
But let me turn it around on you: what is YOUR explanation? How can you even call such things “bad,” given the assumption that nature is all there is, and “cancer,” “horrible diseases,” are part of nature?
The very fact that you realize that something is wrong, and the world should be better, is itself a proof that you long for the world that God intended, but man rejected. You don’t want “nature,” you want something better, and think there’s something wrong because we don’t have that world.
Romans 8:19-22 says, “For the anxious longing of the creation waits eagerly for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will, but because of Him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself also will be set free from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now.”
In Revelation, St. John says, “And I saw a new heaven and a new earth.”
Thus one day - God has told us - He will one day restore creation, and all will be as He intended it to be. That longing that we have for a better world - a world the way it was supposed to be apart from sin and evil - a world as God intended it to be, will ultimately prevail on the Christian view. And, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus taught us how to live as though that world were already a present reality.
God created man a free-willed being. We have the right to say, “NO!” to God. Can you imagine the love and respect God has for us, to create us with that kind of freedom? But we are responsible for our decisions and actions.
“I am convinced prayer works.”
Except when it involves regrowing amputated limbs. Is God limited? Some Lizards can regrow a tail, but we can’t regrow so much as a lost finger. That gift wasn’t given to humans. Why is that so?
You are clearly struggling with a lot of bitterness to have taken this post the way you did.
But that still doesn’t explain why my dog died.
Its graduation day.
Perhaps this paragraph elicited the response from sinsofsolarempirefan.
“Would my mom had had all this love and attention if she had been an atheist? Do atheists typically show this kind of love and support for one another? I don’t know; perhaps when an atheist gets diagnosed with cancer, other atheists come out of the woodwork to call, write, visit, and say, ‘We just wanted you to know that we’re NOT praying for you!’”
For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. — I Corinthians 1:18 NKJV
I won't deny your personal story. But I wonder: is it normative? Is that the way MOST atheists are? There's that story that your car breaks down in a really rough part of town in inner city Los Angeles in gang territory. And five or six rough-looking men start walking up to you in your car. Would it cause you to relax or be more fearful if you found out that they'd just come out of a Bible study? Or would you be more comforted to learn that they didn't believe in God, but instead believed in mindless and purposeless evolution, and the Darwinian view of the "survival of the fittest"?
Dinesh D'Souza wrote in What's So Great About Christianity, that we "imagine two groups of people—let's call them the secular tribe and the religious tribe—who subscribe to these two worldviews. Which of the two tribes is more likely to survive, prosper and multiply? The religious tribe is made up of people who have an animating sense of purpose. The secular tribe is made up of people who are not sure why they exist at all. The religious tribe is composed of individuals who view their every thought and action as consequential. The secular tribe is made up of matter that cannot explain why it is able to think at all" (p. 16). I found that in an excellent article: http://www.summit.org/blogs/pd/2007/11/atheism_and_the_survival_of_th.php
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