Cancer

In May 2020, two months after the world shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Tim Keller was diagnosed with a particularly invasive and lethal form of cancer. The following year, in an essay for The Atlantic titled “Growing My Faith in the Face of Death,” he gave powerful voice to his sadness—and his unshakable hope.

Keller wrote, “[My wife] Kathy and I cried a lot together last night. Sometimes the reality of the shortness of what we have left just overwhelms us.” But then nstead of trying to “make a heaven out of this earth”—whether through things like vacations (in Kathy’s case) or ministry productivity (in Tim’s)—they were coming to apprehend a surprising truth: When you stop trying to manufacture heaven, it actually enhances earthly joys:

The joys of the earth are more poignant than they used to be… There’s a whole lot of things [Kathy and I] never really enjoyed that much. But the more we make heaven into the real heaven, the more this world becomes something we are actually enjoying for its own sake—instead of trying to make it give us more than it really can. So oddly enough . . . we’ve never been happier. We’ve never enjoyed our days more. We’ve never enjoyed hugs more. We’ve never enjoyed food more. We’ve never enjoyed walks more. We’ve never enjoyed the actual things we see, touch, taste, hear, and smell more. Why? What’s the matter with us? And the answer is, we got our hearts off those things and so, weirdly enough, we enjoy them more.

The ex-head of Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, Masao Yoshida, 58, died at a Tokyo hospital of esophageal cancer on July 9, 2013.

When the tsunami devastated Japan's Fukushima nuclear power plant on March 11, 2011, Masao Yoshida worked to control the damage caused by the failing reactors. He disobeyed a company order and secretly continued using seawater, a decision that experts say almost certainly prevented a more serious meltdown and has made him an unlikely hero. He chose to place himself in danger, exposing himself to extreme radiation. And his story is just one of many at the plant.

Remembering the disaster, he said "The level of radioactivity on the ground was terrible…but the workers of the plant leaped at the chance to go trying to fix the situation with the reactors…. My colleagues went out there again and again."

Possible Preaching Angle:

What a beautiful picture of sacrificial, Christ-like love.

“Most of us will live an amazingly long life and should not worry so much about dying young.” Those are the words of Jonathan Clements, 61, who wrote more than 1,000 personal finance columns for The Wall Street Journal between 1994 and 2015. Plan on living past 90 and save accordingly, he advised, when he wasn’t running marathons or riding bicycles.

In May of 2024, he saw a doctor about some balance issues. Two days later, he received a devastating cancer diagnosis. Scans revealed a golf-ball-size tumor on his lung, and the disease has spread to his brain, his liver and elsewhere. Anything beyond 12 decent months would be a victory. “I’m definitely on the clock here,” he said as we sat at his kitchen table this week.

Clements said, “The No. 1 thing money can do for us is to give us a sense of financial security, and the way it does that is not to spend it and to hang onto it.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Clements did not know that there is only one source of true security, and it is not money. “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble” (Psa. 46:1).

For Mike Witmer, it began as a neighborly holiday game. Now it has become an enduring tribute. The Witmer’s Christmas lights were already up when Mike heard that his daughter’s friend from the swim team, Kevin, age 11, was coming home from the hospital, having been hospitalized with cancer. So, Mike decided to write “Get Well Kevin” in lights, and Mike’s wife told Kevin’s folks to swing through their court on their way home from the hospital.

Kevin loved the display, and he asked his mom, “Do you think Mr. Witmer will put my name in lights every year?” When Mike heard that his heart crushed and he thought, “Well, how can I not?” Kevin’s cancer went into remission, but every year Mike would hide the words “Hi” and “Kevin” in his display for Kevin to find it--like a Where’s Waldo? game between them.

Sadly, Kevin’s cancer returned, and he died at age 19. Mike spoke at Kevin’s funeral, telling the mourners he’d be making his “Hi Kevin” sign bigger that year, so Kevin would be able to see it from heaven. It has been on Mike’s garage roof every Christmas ever since.

“In the beginning,” Mike said, “my annual ‘Hi Kevin’ was just a silly gesture to a really nice kid who had been through some tough times. But it has been my honor to keep the salute going for his friends and family.”

Actress and former Seinfeld star (as Elaine) Julia Louis-Dreyfus has had moments when tragedy and comedy get put in a blender. Monday, September 18, 2017, was one of them. Louis-Dreyfus and the hit TV show Veep had triumphed at the Emmys the night before. By morning, her doctor was on the phone telling her she had cancer. The first thing she did after hanging up was double over with laughter.

She said, “I mean, it felt like it was written. It felt like it was a horrible black comedy. And then it sort of morphed into crying hysterically.” [But she was also] terrified. “You just simply don’t consider it for yourself, you know, that’s sort of the arrogance of human beings. But of course, at some point, we’re all going to bite it.”

"I feel like a monster," Gabriel Marshall said to his dad. Eight-year-old Gabriel had recently undergone surgery to remove a tumor from his brain, and he now bore a conspicuous scar on the side of his head. His dad, Josh, had an idea: he got a tattoo on the side of his head that was in the exact shape of Gabriel's scar. He told Gabriel, "If people want to stare at you, then they can stare at both of us."

A picture of the two sporting their scars eventually won first place in a Father's Day photo competition run by St. Baldrick's Foundation, "an organization dedicated to fighting childhood cancer."

Possible Preaching Angle:

In some ways, their story might remind us of another story: about an empathetic Father, a wounded Son, and scars that were chosen because of love.

Texas pastor Tan Flippin was left thanking God, after a cycling accident in 2018 landed him in the hospital with fractures to his hip. His ride that eventful day, past a stretch undergoing repair, beside a subdivision, led to the crash that threw him off his bicycle. He said later, “I’d gone through that area before with no issues.”

When the doctors at the hospital ordered a CT scan to check for a concussion, what they discovered was shocking. They noticed a large malignant tumor on the front of Tan’s brain. That discovery began a long journey of treatment that eventually led to bone marrow and stem cell transplants. Today, he is cancer-free.

Flippin said, “God allowed the accident for my brain tumor to be found.”

The story has led to Flippin's testimony being shared on a regular basis. He said, "People want me to tell this story and that my faith has inspired them and been an encouragement. I hear that about every week.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Similarly, God can use the challenges and unpleasant situations we encounter to work out something good in our lives and to bring glory to his name. We can trust God to work out something meaningful through them (Phil. 1:12-18).

Kim Kuo tells of the 10-year-long battle her late husband, David, had with terminal cancer. David was the former deputy director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. Much of his time was spent in pain from the vicious side effects of surgeries, radiation, and medications. But, instead of considering the alternative of euthanasia or becoming passive, he chose to focus his remaining time to spiritually touch the lives of people.

Especially in suffering, we can dive below the shallow waters and touch another’s heart and soul. Steve Jobs, who died of pancreatic cancer in 2011, shared this wisdom at a commencement speech at Stanford University: ‘No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life’s change agent.’

Colin Powell, the great American military leader, was also a life-long fixer. According to an obituary in the New York Times:

Until his final days, Colin L. Powell remained preoccupied with fixing things. The former secretary of state and four-star general tinkered endlessly in his garage — sometimes with his welder and sometimes on a succession of [automobiles]. He was a regular at the neighborhood hardware store in McLean, Va., where he rummaged through parts for his house’s malfunctioning dishwasher or leaky faucets.

His plywood-and-wire fixes often left something to be desired aesthetically. But they satisfied his … compulsion to repair rather than discard what was broken. When he was fixing things, one longtime friend said, “there was a result at the end of the day. It’s why he was so happy as an Army officer: You take a platoon, and you make it better.”

But there were some things he couldn’t fix. In 2019, he was diagnosed with plasma-cell cancer. He died in October 2021. He also admitted that were a lot of things broken in this world that neither he nor the United States could fix. Once he told his assistant: “Going into the garage, I can see that the carburetor is the problem and fix it—unlike foreign policy, where nothing gets resolved. You’re just spending four years doing the best you can.”

Possible Preaching Angles:

(1) Servanthood; Leadership—Use the first part of this illustration to show how servants or leaders take what they’re given and make it better. (2) Death or Brokenness—Use the full illustration to highlight how even someone as competent as Powell, a lifelong fixer, was powerless to fix death or to fix the world’s brokenness.

Author Judi Ketteler wrote an opinion column for NBC news that reflected on the complicated legacy of the late talk radio icon and conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh. In it, she highlighted a tragic irony: Limbaugh died as a result of complications from lung cancer after spending the majority of his career either downplaying or outright denying the dangers of cigarette smoke.

Limbaugh was masterful at creating and reinforcing narratives that lionized his allies and demonized his enemies, and it’s what made him popular. Often those narratives were rooted in truth … yet in the case of his own health, he continued to deny the conventional wisdom that smoking causes harm.

Ketteler went on to highlight several areas where many people struggle with self-deception. These include overconfidence, misinformation, and a phenomenon known as motivated reasoning, which is “thinking through a topic with the aim of reaching a particular conclusion.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

We all have areas where we struggle, but if we ignore the truth long enough it will eventually catch up with us.

Victoria Price was working as a reporter for her local NBC affiliate station when she received an urgent suggestion to seek her doctor. But the idea didn’t come from a coworker or a supervisor; rather, it came from a viewer.

"Hi, I just saw your news report,” began the email in her inbox. “What concerned me is the lump on your neck. Please have your thyroid checked.” By itself, those words might be generally concerning, but it was the next bit that propelled Price into action. "Reminds me of my neck. Mine turned out to be cancer. Take care of yourself."

Price did consult her doctor, and it turned out--that eagle-eyed viewer was right. The lump was cancerous, and she eventually scheduled a surgery to get it removed.

Price expressed her gratitude on a subsequent Instagram post. Price said, "Had I never received that email, I never would have called my doctor. The cancer would have continued to spread. It's a scary and humbling thought. I will forever be grateful to the woman who went out of her way to email me, a total stranger. She had zero obligation to, but she did anyway."

Possible Preaching Angle:

Life is full of surprises, so it behooves us as Christians to be humble enough to listen to prudent counsel.

The morning after winning Emmys for being the producer and star of VEEP, Julia Louis-Dreyfus said that her doctor called to tell her she had breast cancer. She said, “I howled with laughter, which turned into hysterical crying. I mean, it’s a blow.”

Now cancer free, she was asked, does the “keen awareness of the dearness of life last?” She replied:

No. It comes and goes. But once you’ve walked through a life-threatening illness, there’s this little nagging thing with you all the time. That fear doesn’t completely go away because you’ve been face to face with it. But you know what? We walk through our lives so oblivious to the fact that our lives are going to end. We really don’t consider that. Ever. Almost ever. Maybe that’s a good thing. But it’s a cold, hard fact, and it is a strange thing to reconcile.

James Bedford was a psychology professor at the University of California. Prior to his death from cancer, Bedford expressed his desire to be cryogenically frozen. His hope was that his body could be repaired and his consciousness revived with more advanced future technology. Bedford willed $100,000 for the preservation of his body.

However, when he died in 1967 everyone was caught off guard. The science of cryogenics was little more than a fringe idea and there was no cryonics industry equipped to preserve a body. To honor his wishes, Bedford’s nurse reportedly ran up and down the block collecting ice from home freezers of neighbors. She then called the Life Extension Society, founded to promote cryonic suspension of people, and Bedford became the first human to be cryogenically frozen.

After 50 years the cost of preserving his body has long exhausted the $100,000 Bedford had set aside. Frustrated by the high cost of storage, Bedford’s son moved his father’s body to a self-storage facility and periodically topped the container with liquid nitrogen himself. In 1982, Bedford’s body was entrusted to Alcor Life Extension Foundation, but how well his body was preserved is open to question.

With the prospect of reviving a frozen body so improbable that there are many within the scientific community who believe that selling even the hope is unethical. Even if a medical breakthrough is made, it is highly unlikely that Bedford, with his crude vitrification process, could ever be brought back to life.

But the hope that the future will change continues to drive customers to cryonics facilities. Over 300 bodies and brains are currently preserved in between them, with 3,000 more signed up to join them.

In his book The Grace Awakening, Charles Swindoll recounts an experience he once had while ministering at a Bible conference. On the first night he had briefly met a couple who seemed to be friendly and quite glad to be at the meetings. However, as the week went by, Swindoll noticed that roughly ten minutes after he would start speaking at every meeting, the husband would be fast asleep!

This experience began to irritate Charles so much that by the time of the final meeting, he was convinced that the man was there only to please his wife, and was "probably a carnal Christian." At the conclusion of the final meeting however, the wife requested to speak to Charles for a few minutes. He figured she wanted to talk to him about her husband's lack of interest in spiritual matters.

Imagine how greatly embarrassed he was when the wife mentioned that her husband had terminal cancer and that they had attended the conference mainly at his request. It was his “final wish” to be at the conference even though the pain medication he was taking made him drowsy. She then said, "He loves the Lord, and you are his favorite Bible teacher. He wanted to be here to meet you and to hear you, no matter what." Charles Swindoll wrote, "I stood there, all alone, as deeply rebuked as I have ever been."

What a dangerous thing it is to judge others. Jesus said, "For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you" (Matthew 7:2).

Good vibes have abounded over a viral video of two high school football players kneeling in prayer after the game. And while football players praying isn’t quite as novel a sight as it used to be, the jerseys told the story. Instead of teammates, the two young men had been opponents on the field.

Wide receiver Gage Smith had just led Sherman High School to a rousing victory over Mesquite West. But afterward, he knelt to pray with Mesquite’s Ty Jordan, whose mother was battling cancer. The two opponents had known each other from having played on a select 7-on-7 squad, and the final score was the last thing on either of their minds.

Smith said, “When you're playing the game, you're playing to win, and the other team is the enemy. But afterward, you still have respect for the other opponent. Football brings people together in so many different ways, and that was just one example of it that night.”

Possible Preaching Angle: We embody the love of Jesus when we can overlook petty differences to serve each other in times of need.

The first time you park your car in the vast, cold cavern of the underground garage and step onto the [hospital] elevator, you may feel alien and forsaken. Perhaps you’ll feel that you have been singled out unfairly, plucked from your healthy life and cast into this cruel ordeal [of cancer].

Walking through the lobby with a manila envelope of X-rays under your arm and a folder of lab reports and notes from your previous doctor, you’ll sense the deep tremor of your animal fear, a barely audible uneasiness trickling up from somewhere inside you.

But there is good news, too. As you pass one hallway after another, looking for elevator B, you’ll see that this place is full of people—riding the escalators, reading books and magazines, checking their phones near the coffeepots. And it will dawn on you that most of these people have cancer. In fact, it seems as if the whole world has cancer. With relief and dismay you’ll realize, I’m not special. Everybody here has cancer. The withered old Jewish lefty newspaper editor. The Latino landscape contractor with the stone-roughened hands. The tough lesbian with the bleached-blond crew cut and the black leather jacket. And you will be cushioned and bolstered by the sheer number and variety of your fellows.

This strange country of cancer, it turns out, is the true democracy—one more real than the nation that lies outside these walls and more authentic than the lofty statements of politicians; a democracy more incontrovertible than platitudes or aspiration.

Frome in Somerset, England has seen a dramatic fall in emergency hospital admissions since it began a new collective project. The source for this medical breakthrough was surprising. It's called community.

After a trial study, the data showed that when isolated people who have health problems are supported by community groups and volunteers, the number of emergency admissions to hospital falls spectacularly. One doctor remarked, "No other interventions on record have reduced emergency admissions across a population."

The Compassionate Frome project was launched in 2013 by Helen Kingston, a GP there. She kept seeing patients who seemed defeated by the medicalization of their lives: treated as if they were a cluster of symptoms rather than a human being who happened to have health problems.

So she helped set up a directory of agencies and community groups. They employed "health connectors" and trained voluntary "community connectors" to help their patients find the support they needed. The goal was to break an unhealthy cycle: illness leads to isolation and loneliness, which then exacerbates illness.

Dozens of other studies have reinforced these conclusions. For example, HIV patients with strong social support have lower levels of the virus than those without. Women have better chances of surviving colorectal cancer if they have strong connections. Most remarkably, older patients with either one or two chronic diseases do not have higher death rates than those who are not suffering from chronic disease—as long as they have high levels of social support.

Possible Preaching Angle: Caring; Church, community; Fellowship; Support – Research again verifies God's design for the church; that fellowship and caring are literally good for physical (and spiritual) health.

In this life, there are friends … and then then are friends.

In May 2009, Dillon Hill's best-friend-since-fourth-grade Chris Betancourt got a diagnosis of chronic myeloid leukemia. Since the two became friends through their mutual love of video games, Hill made frequent visits to Betancourt, playing games to lift his spirit. After lengthy chemotherapy treatments and hospital visits, Betancourt was cancer-free, and remained so throughout his teenage years.

So when Betancourt got the news that his leukemia had returned and wouldn't be curable without a bone marrow transfusion, Hill subsequently dropped out of college and started a campaign to honor his friend. He asked Betancourt to make a list of all of the exploits and hijinks he wanted to do before he died, then began posting videos of their adventures to raise money and awareness.

One of the items on the bucket list was to get matching tattoos. Their recent ink was an homage to the FX series It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, a quote by character Frank Reynolds, played by Danny DeVito:

"I don't know how many years on this earth I have left, but I'm gonna get real weird with it."

Pictures of the tattoo circulated on Reddit and social media, and got the attention of Rob McElhenny, one of the show's co-stars. McElhenny was so moved by Hill and Betancourt's friendship that not only are they scheduled to meet DeVito in person.

Potential Preaching Angles: True friendship goes the distance, persistence will eventually be rewarded, we find joy from bearing one another's burdens

Kim Kuo writes in "Assisted Suicide and Real Death with Dignity":

My husband, David Kuo —former deputy director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives—fought cancer with dignity and courage. He endured 10 years of chemotherapy, radiation, alternative therapies, and clinical trials. Yet he never stopped fighting. To survive, we had to immerse ourselves in Scripture to reassure our hearts that God had a plan in the midst of our suffering. We never stopped believing that God could heal David—and if not, that God would use him fully for as many days as he had.

Three separate times, starting in 2003, David was given anywhere from 6 to 12 months to live. But we soon learned that people—even doctors—are ill-equipped to play God in determining the end of life. After the doctor's diagnosis and timeline, David went on to live 10 years. During that time, we had two beautiful children, while David wrote a book, struggled, fought, and touched many lives. No one below the throne of God can predict how the journey of life will go, and we shouldn't pretend to.

David had severe seizures. Over time he lost the ability to walk, then to write. His personality changed markedly due to the vicious side effects of surgeries, radiation, and medications. And the end was brutal. Every function of his body slowly collapsed.

Still, every day of David's life mattered. Even in semi-lucid deterioration, David challenged his ICU doctor to read Mere Christianity. His conversations with his neuro-oncologist resulted in her later starting a ministry to homeless cancer patients. David's last days healed divides between political enemies and deep wounds among friends and family. Especially in suffering, we can dive below the shallow waters and touch another's heart and soul.

We had many moments when we thought we couldn't take any more. But the hard truth is that our experience transformed our hearts and radically challenged many others. If our lives are truly about glorifying God, then our only option is to glorify him where we are.

William Breitbart, the chairman of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at New York's Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, specializes in end-of-life care for terminally ill cancer patients. For much of his career Breitbart has been surrounded by suffering people who just want to die. Breitbart said, "When I walked in the room, my patients would say, 'I only have three months to live. If that's all I have, I see no value or purpose to living.'" One of his patients, a former IBM executive who had been diagnosed with colon cancer, said, "Everybody said how important it is to have a positive attitude, but...I want to jump in the grave."

If death means nonexistence, Breitbart's patients reasoned, then what meaning could life possibly have? And if life has no meaning, there's no point of suffering through cancer. By the nineties, physician-assisted suicide was a hot topic in Breitbart's circles and beyond. As Breitbart heard more and more stories of assisted suicide, he began to wonder what specifically was driving the terminally ill to give up on life. The assumption had been that the ill chose to end their lives because they were in terrible pain. But when Breitbart asked patients why they wanted a prescription for assisted suicide, many said it was because they had lost meaning in life.

Breitbart knew he could treat depression with drugs or therapy, but he was stumped when it came to treating meaninglessness. "What I suddenly discovered," Breitbart explained, "was the importance of meaning—the search for meaning, the need to create meaning, the ability to experience meaning—was a basic motivating force of human behavior. We were not taught this stuff at medical school!"