Is cancer ever a blessing?
No, but only because no human experience, not even marriage, not even the birth of a child, is a sign of God’s favor and a promise of unbroken happiness. Cancer may be a death sentence, but there are many ways to read the sentence. Resignation is only one of them, and a particularly arrogant one at that, because it presumes to know, as it cannot, the outcome in every detail.
But if you are ignorant of the suffering that awaits you when you are first diagnosed, you are equally ignorant of the changes that cancer will work in your thinking and emotional life, some of which may even be improvements in old habits of thought and feeling.
You may, for instance, become more conscious of time. What once might have seemed like wastes of time—a solitaire game, a television show you would never have admitted to watching, the idle poking around for useless information—may become unexpected sources of joy, the low-key celebrations of being alive. The difference is that when you are conscious of choosing how to spend your time, and when you discover that you enjoy your choices, they take on a meaning they could never have had before.
You no longer waste or mark time. You fill it, because now you can see the brim from where you are lying.
- D.G. Myers is dying of cancer...
No, but only because no human experience, not even marriage, not even the birth of a child, is a sign of God’s favor and a promise of unbroken happiness. Cancer may be a death sentence, but there are many ways to read the sentence. Resignation is only one of them, and a particularly arrogant one at that, because it presumes to know, as it cannot, the outcome in every detail.
But if you are ignorant of the suffering that awaits you when you are first diagnosed, you are equally ignorant of the changes that cancer will work in your thinking and emotional life, some of which may even be improvements in old habits of thought and feeling.
You may, for instance, become more conscious of time. What once might have seemed like wastes of time—a solitaire game, a television show you would never have admitted to watching, the idle poking around for useless information—may become unexpected sources of joy, the low-key celebrations of being alive. The difference is that when you are conscious of choosing how to spend your time, and when you discover that you enjoy your choices, they take on a meaning they could never have had before.
You no longer waste or mark time. You fill it, because now you can see the brim from where you are lying.
- D.G. Myers is dying of cancer...
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