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At the same time, chemotherapy has led to kidney damage, hearing loss, debilitating weakness and nausea, and the loss of all body hair. Cancer now afflicts Wilson's liver, and doctors are trying to prevent a recurrence in his stomach.

But the Wilsons have also taken the Psalms to heart by rejoicing, even around total strangers. Bill Wilson, now 62, even traveled this year to watch the Daytona 500 in Florida. He's signed a do-not-resuscitate order to prevent intervention under certain circumstances, but neither he nor his wife can remember what those circumstances would be.

"All of the discoveries, the medicines, the physicians who care for us — these are all gifts from God, gifts that he intends for us to use," Nancye Wilson said in an interview. "He will not give us burdens that are too much for us to bear."

Meanwhile, researchers are considering what lessons to draw from the Dana-Farber research. The study concluded that pastoral counselors and religious communities should discuss how positive religious coping may sometimes be associated with certain negative outcomes, such as a "poor quality of death."

Others add that the study may offer insights to guide the practice of medicine. Kenneth Pergament, a psychologist at Bowling Green State University who studies religious coping, said health care workers too often embrace a "bias against religiousness."

As a result, they often fail to appreciate how motivated religious patients routinely are to overcome illness.

"It's been terribly problematic in psychology and medicine, where the assumption has been that religion is a force of passivity, a defense, a way of avoiding life situations," Pergament said. This new study "challenges the notion that religious people are passive, never experience any anxiety and enter into a kind of gradual and happy decline to death."

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Christianity Today's Senior Managing Editor Mark Galli writes about this study in this week's Soulwork column. CT also has more articles on science and health.

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March (Web-only) 2009, Vol. 53