December 14th, 2015

When we got the diagnosis over a year ago now, I took the news much better than a lot of other people. Better than anyone, honestly. While, as I have talked about before, some of this is due to my generally carefree nature, I attribute a good part of this that to the fact that I, not someone I love, would have to go through it all. It would be far worse to have to watch someone else I care about enduring round after round of chemo, surgery followed by surgery, followed by still more surgeries, and  truly nasty radiation treatment. On the other side of the coin, several people have expressed to me that they wish it was them, not me, going through it all. It is, I think, a natural reaction when we see people we care about suffering. We want to take it from them, to carry their burden and give them some respite from their trials. I would never let someone I care about take my cancer from me, even if that were possible.

In so many ways, I am grateful that it is me, not other people I know and love, going through this. For one, my body seems to handle craziness well, and to look at me now you would likely never guess what I've gone through this past year. My hair and beard are back, and I look rather fit and healthy, on the whole. I know that not everyone is so robust or able to handle such stress--mental and physical--without it taking a more serious toll on their bodies and their baseline level of health. I may be down about 50 pounds from where I was before this whole ordeal began, but it just makes me look like a runner, rather than a...whatever I looked like before. Couch potato, maybe? I haven't had any serious or trying long-term effects from my treatment this past year. That just isn't true for a lot of people going through this type of treatment, for various reasons. One of those reasons must be that, for whatever reason, I heal quickly. For that, I am immensely grateful.

But my thankfulness that it is me and not my wife, or brother, or sisters, or any number of other people going through this extends well beyond the practicality of how my body has handled it all and come out as unscathed as possible. The mental anguish that others must have handled this past year is not something I  would care to deal with. I really doubt I would have remained half so calm and happy as I've been this past year were it my wife, not me, going through all the miserable treatments. That's why when people have expressed to me that they wish they could have this instead of me, I think 'well, that's really sweet, but I'd never let you.' Cancer treatment is not something I'd ever let someone I care about deal with, if I had the ability to go through it on their behalf.

Perhaps that’s how God feels. Perhaps for God it was so unbearable to see people muddling through their own mistakes that God came down to go through it all for us, giving us a way to be free from our wrongdoings and the suffering they can bring. Much like the people who have expressed that they wished they could take my cancer from me and go through the treatments themselves, God looked at humanity and could not help but become incarnate as a person, to go through the human experience of life, to endure the consequences of sin on our behalf. While it's impossible, of course, for any of us to actually take someone else's disease and go through their misery for them, it's comforting to have a God who can do much the same thing, and in fact already did.