Blog 8: When the World Stopped.

When a Word Changes Everything

 

Before I understood what cancer was going to do to my body, I had to learn what a single word could do to a soul.

Rectosigmoid adenocarcinoma. Stage IIIC.

 I remember the clinical sound of those words. Cold. Precise. Final. They fell into the room and landed somewhere so deep in my chest that I have never fully found the place. And in the seconds after they landed — before I cried, before I called anyone, before I even fully understood what I had just heard — something happened that I have thought about ever since.

 I did not reach for God the way you might reach for someone in a crisis. I did not have a scripture rise up in me. I did not feel peace wash over me. What I felt was silence. An interior silence so complete that it almost felt holy — except it wasn't peace. It was shock. And somewhere underneath the shock was the very first question my spirit had for God.

Do You see me right now?

 

The Question Nobody Warns You About.

 

People warned me about chemo. They warned me about the fatigue, the nausea, the way treatment changes your body in ways you're not prepared for. They warned me about hard days and harder nights.

 Nobody warned me about the theological crisis that lives inside a diagnosis.

 Not a crisis of belief—I want to be clear about that. I did not stop believing in God, and I never stopped knowing He was with me. But something shifted in me the moment I became a cancer patient, something none of my Sunday mornings had ever prepared me for.

 And now I was in the storm.

 All those prayers I had prayed for someone else were suddenly pointing back at me, asking something I had never had to personally answer before.

 Do you actually believe this?

 Not for someone else. For yourself. Right now, in this hospital room, holding this diagnosis—do you believe God is still good?

And my answer was yes.

 But believing God is good did not mean I understood what was happening. It did not mean I was not afraid, angry, confused, or exhausted. Faith did not erase the questions. It gave me somewhere to carry them.

 I am still processing parts of what cancer did to me, but I am not questioning who God is.

 

Why Me — And Then the Harder Question.

 

I asked God why me. I did. I think most people do, even when they feel like they shouldn't. Even when faith tells them that God is sovereign and His ways are not their ways and there is a plan they cannot see. Even the most faithful person I know would lie if they said they never, in the privacy of their own heart, asked why.

 But then the question shifted. And this is the one that undid me.

 Not why me — but why not me.

 That question is not defeat. That question is not what giving up sounds like. That question is the beginning of something uncomfortable and necessary — the beginning of surrender. And surrender, I would slowly learn, does not mean you stopped believing God could heal you. Surrender means you stopped insisting that healing had to look the way you pictured it.

Surrender is when you finally stop trying to be strong enough to carry something that was never designed for your arms alone.

Surrender is when you finally stop trying to be strong enough to carry something that was never designed for your arms alone.

What Faith Felt Like at the Beginning.

 

I will not tell you that faith made the first days easy. I will not tell you that in that hospital room I had scripture on my lips and peace in my chest. I was shaking. I was holding a word I didn’t know how to say out loud yet. I needed to call my husband and see his face on a phone screen just to feel less alone.

But here is the thing about faith that nobody tells you before you need it: faith is not the absence of fear. Faith is not calmness. Faith is not a feeling that arrives when the diagnosis does and replaces everything hard. Faith, in those first days, looked like one thing and one thing only.

I still believed.

Not confidently. Not loudly. Not with the kind of testimony-ready certainty that looks good from a stage. Just quietly, stubbornly, in the most private corner of myself — I still believed. Even when I was angry. Even when I was scared out of my mind. Even when I looked at Kam’s little face and the fear that rose up in me was so enormous I could barely breathe through it. Underneath all of it, something in me refused to let go of God. Not because I was strong. Because He was already holding on to me.

Trusting God did not mean I wasn't scared. It just meant I had somewhere to take the fear.

What I Know Now That I Didn't Know Then.

 

Looking back at those first days — before chemo, before the surgeries, before I had any idea how long, hard, and layered this journey would become — I understand something about God that I could not have articulated at the time.

He already knew. He knew in July 2023 what would happen in 2025. He knew about the recurrence before I rang the bell. He knew about Stage 4 while I was still in the middle of Stage 3. He knew which doctors would fail me and which ones would finally see me.

He knew all of it.

That is not the kind of thing you can feel in the first hours after a diagnosis when you're still in shock. But you can choose it. You can choose to believe — even when choosing is the hardest thing you've ever done — that the God who made you is still paying attention. That your name is not just a folder. That the word that just rearranged your entire world did not catch Him off guard.

He was not surprised. He was already there.

And if you are newly diagnosed and reading this — frightened and raw and not yet sure what any of this means for your life — I want to say this to you directly: the fear you are feeling right now is not a sign that your faith is broken. It is a sign that you are human. God already knows it is there. He was never  expecting you to come to Him without it. Bring Him all of it. The questions, the anger, the grief, the why — all of it.

He can handle every single word of it.

He was in the room when the doctor spoke those words. He was in the room when the world stopped. He is in the room with you right now.

— Von Unfiltered

 

 

"Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me." — Psalm 23:4

 

"Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you."

 — 1 Peter 5:7