It’s Okay to Be Me

“It’s cancer,” my doctor told me over the phone, choking up, devastated. Earlier, he had diagnosed the little lump in my breast as only a cyst, nothing to be concerned about, but now…
I was not devastated. Rather, I felt like a warrior emerging from months-long training to engage in battle. When I told my sister the news she seemed confused. “I hear the words you are saying,” she said, “but the tone of voice doesn’t match. Are you HAPPY about this??” She didn’t understand my “warrior” voice.
The last three months had been boot camp training for this daunting challenge, though I had not known it at the time. In April, our pastor told his leadership team to begin studying what the Bible said about spiritual warfare. I put the two passages he mentioned on my list of verses to memorize, and repeated them out loud five times a day. One word flashed like a neon light as I meditated on Ephesians 6:13 (New International Version): “Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand.” WHEN the day of evil comes. . . Not IF, but WHEN. The day of evil would come. I could count on that. The only question was, would I stand firm, fully protected by God’s armor?
This thought, that the day of evil would certainly come, did not engender fear in me. I simply mulled it over, letting it become a fact of my worldview. It changed the level of my expectations. If I expected life to be without a fight, then I would be devastated by something like a cancer diagnosis. It’s not that my outlook became grim, expecting any moment to get bad news. Rather, I realized that standing in the fire with God is a much safer place than abandoning His presence in an attempt to avoid the flames. The temptation is always to try to hide from the truth that He insists upon making clear to me, and to instead think that worrying about my situation will be much more effective in fighting it than running to Him for protection and provision.
2 Corinthians 10:3-6 and Ephesians 6:10-18
A reference to the story in Daniel 3:13-27 of the three Israelite captives who were thrown into the fiery furnace for worshipping God rather than King Nebuchadnezzar’s image. When the king looked into the furnace he saw four men there, and one of them was the Son of God. When they brought the three Israelites out of the furnace, they were not burned and didn’t even smell like smoke.