It was June 2009, I was 35 years old; married with two kids. I went to bed one evening, and woke up in the middle of the night with terrible (what I thought was) gas pain in my abdomen. I woke up the next morning, and I still had a small pain on the right side of my abdominal area — I thought it was a pulled muscle or something. Fast forward a few months, in late October 2009, I was sitting in a hernia specialists office (after having a CT scan and emergency Ultrasound a week prior); and (after my wife and I had convinced ourselves that I was fine) he dropped the bomb on me (I was by myself) that they had found a large softball size tumor by my right kidney — my head began doing somer-saults, and my stomach dropped into my feet. Fast forward another few weeks, after much consternation we received the CT guided needle biopsy results; it wasn’t lymphoma like they initially suspected, it was something worse, something much worse — a highly rare cancer with the ominous title of Desmoplastic Small Round Cell Tumor-sarcoma (DSRCT). This we found out the day before Thanksgiving 2009 (so almost two years ago now, wow!). We were led to a wonderful team of doctors, at one of only two sarcoma centers in the country at OHSU in Portland, Oregon; that we just “happened” to live by. We began the hardest core regimin of chemo that someone can receive around December 5th 2009. This began a long tormentuous journey of many cycles of chemo; cycles of chemo that ultimately almost killed me at points; cyles of chemo that perpetrated some heart damage and caused me to have 10 units of blood through transfusion; cycles that gave me neuropathy in my feet (nerve damage that I still have), and many many nights and days in the hospital with all kinds of conditions as a result of the nasty poison known as chemo therapy; cycles that caused me to go from 200 pounds to 155 pounds of skin and bone; cycles that did more to me, that I don’t want to share at the moment. But the chemo was effective (which it usually isn’t on my kind of cancer); it shrunk my tumor from the softball size to a golf ball size at the point of my resection surgery which happened on May 6th, 2010 (after 7 cycles of grueling chemo). The seven hour surgery that resulted in the successful removal of my tumor and tissue margins; along with my right kidney, and 3 inches of my inferior vena cava turned out to be the final knell in the coffin of my cancer that has led to me writing this post. After recovering from my surgery I did two more cycles of chemo, and then called it quits. By God’s grace I am alive and still cancer free!

I write all of this, just to provide context for what I want to write about next; facing death, for real. What’s it like to face imminent death? We all, in reality are facing it. But normalcy of day to day life often has the capacity to drown the drone of this reality out; it’s not something we want to dwell on, in fact we weren’t designed to die or dwell on death. I was forced to though (so was my family). After I found out that I had a cancer that is pretty much a death sentence (15% survivability rate, which I didn’t know until about 6 months ago … I just knew my cancer was deadly!) this, as you can imagine, placed me into an almost alter state of consciousness. I can remember going to bed at night (with the help of my anti-anxiety drug), and then waking up in the morning forgetting for just a moment that I had a tumor in the back of my abdominal cavity; and then the reality would come rushing in like a flood that “oh yeah, I have cancer, and could die!” This never went away; the whole time I had cancer, I had this experience every single morning that I woke up. I can remember in between chemos, when and if I had the strength (sometimes after being in the hospital for blood transfusions and treatment of neutropenic fevers etc.); I would walk around this really nice neighborhood that was behind our run-down neighborhood (we’ve moved since then 😉 ), and the big Evergreen trees would be blowing gently in the noon-day sun. I would just look up, and have a sense of God’s ever present presence; I would make a correlation between his sustaining hand upon those trees, and realize that if he willed, he could sustain me and save me from cancer. I remember on those walks how I would just seek the LORD’s peace, and plead for him to heal me of this dreadful disease!

Even though I was a Christian; I still didn’t want to die from cancer! Even though I was a Christian; I still had moments of deep deep fear of anxiety about dying. I didn’t want to leave this earth, my beautiful family this way! Something I realized more clearly then than ever; was that we were not created for death. That my God is not the God of the dead, but the living! Surely I could’ve died, and been better off in the LORD’s presence. But something I realized was that no matter how difficult this life can be; it is an absolute gift from God! What dawned on me was that my cancer was not my own; that the God of life in Christ bore my cancer in his body on the cross. And that he buried it, and rose again without it on the third day; and that he ascended to the right hand of the Father without it so that I could have a guarantee that cancer, while still an enemy, is under his bruised heal.

I am motivated by the love of Christ! He is my Savior! And for some reason, because of his grace and mercy, he has allowed me to continue to live on this earth and be an ambassador for him to a lost and dying world, an ambassador for him to his church, and most importantly, an ambassador for him to my beautiful family! Life is beautiful! We serve the God of the living not the dead!! If you have had a loved one die; take heart, we still serve the God of the living, not the dead. If they knew him, they are in his presence where there is fullness of joy!

Why did I share this? Because, it helps me to write some of this out still. There are more reflections that I want to share from this period, and I plan on doing so in the days to come. If you are interested to read my other blog where I blogged through this season of life; you can do that here.