REFLECTIONS ON THE JOURNEY OF SUFFERING

Sunday, February 26, 2006

When The Doctor Says “Cancer”---Reflections on the Journey of Suffering is an excellent article by my dear friend, Dan Anders (Deceased).

Yesterday I was looking through a stack of past issues of Leaven magazine and came across Dan’s message. I’m sure I read it when it was first printed. If so, I had completely forgotten it. Maybe it caught my eyes and my mind more now because Dan has passed away. Maybe it’s because I’m older and feel more susceptible to all kinds of dreaded diseases and ills.

I was a junior at Abilene Christian when I first met Dan. He was a freshman and lived in a dorm close to where I lived. In the evenings he and his roommate would walk over to our dorm and go to dinner with me and my roommate. When he was just a teenager he had traveled to distant places with E.W. McMillian visiting missionaries. He was well known in the part of Texas where he grew up as an outstanding “preacher boy.” For two years we went to classes, told stories, joked and laughed our way through college. Then in 1957 I graduated and went to Southern California to preach. Two years later Dan graduated and went to Texas to preach.

Except for an occasional letter I didn’t hear from Dan for several years. One day my phone rang in the church office at El Monte, California. It was Dan. He wanted to come to California to attend Fuller Seminary. He knew that I had been to Fuller and thought I might know of a church close by where he could preach while attending school. I just happened to know the exact place. I was leaving El Monte after eight years and moving to another church just a few miles away in West Covina. I recommended Dan and he moved to El Monte where he preached while attending Fuller. After he graduated he moved back to Texas. After a few years he came back to California to be the preaching minister at the University Church at Pepperdine in Malibu.

It was in 1989 while he was preaching at the church in Malibu that the doctor said, “Cancer.” Dan struggled and fought a valiant fight for the next several years. He would get good reports from the doctors and then later the cancer would reappear. Finally Dan took his wonderful wife, Judy back to Texas. He went home to die.

The final section of Dan’s message on cancer has the title, “When the Thorn Stays.” He wrote: “Perhaps, till the end of our painful journey, we are left with Mystery. With unanswerable questions. With no alternative but trusting God. Then we can say with Job, ‘I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.'” (Job 42:5,6). That, after all, is our rightful human place. Prostrate, in the dust, before our God. Only then can he lift us up.”