By Jill Fennema –

Battling cancer is hard. It’s hard for the cancer patient and it’s hard for the people who travel that road with them. In this edition you can read four stories of people who have done battle with cancer and have found their way to a place of peace.

Talking with any cancer survivor will teach you one thing for sure – no one’s journey is the same as another’s. Cancer doesn’t care if you are young or old. Cancer doesn’t care if you are male or female. Cancer doesn’t even care if you are old enough to read the words on your medication bottle. Cancer just takes.

But the journey with cancer does not have to be all about  the losses – the loss of hair, the loss of appetite, the loss of life, or the loss of limb or organ. I think that the four individuals whose stories you read in this paper show what cancer can’t take. It can’t take your joy. It can’t take your faith. It can’t take your hope.

Cancer can also be hard on their families, especially the person who is their primary caregiver at home.  I have never had cancer myself – although it might be just a matter of time, given how many relatives I have with cancer.  But I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.

I do have experience as the caregiver. As most of our readers know, my two oldest boys had cancer when they were little boys of 4 and 5 years old. They will celebrate their 19th (Seth) and 20th (Micah) birthdays this month. In August, it will have been 15 years since they were diagnosed. (They were diagnosed one week apart in August 2007.)

When they were diagnosed we were devastated. But there was hope – a good prognosis and years of research built on the backs of all the young people who had gone before them. But the path looked so daunting. They would each (simultaneously) have 3.5 years of treatment. When you are a mom with young kids, three years seems like forever.

It strikes me now, 15 years later, that just like Ryan Blom says in his article – the time plodded on and it seemed like we would never see the other side. The first four months were the hardest with a lot of heavy chemotherapy (vincristine, L-asparaginase, doxorubicin, cyclophosphamide, cytarabine and dexamethasone to name a few). And then we settled into a routine of going once a month for three years.

Just like our featured survivors said – they got to know the doctors and nurses pretty well and they became friends. And we, too, were amazed to live in a community where people we barely knew would drop off meals and write out cards that said they were praying for us. People gave us gas cards and the boys had more toys than any family ever needed!

But then we were done with treatment and as the mom, I was so glad to be done, and so terrified at the same time. What would happen when the medicine stopped? Would the cancer come back?

I remember that those days after treatment were even harder than the days in treatment. I have often found myself to be a peevish worrier rather than a praying warrior. It’s hard to lay that worry down. I was raised in a church that really focused on God’s plans for us. Like Elaine Prins, my verse was Jeremiah 29:11 – I know the plans that I have for you. I also believe that everything God does, he does for His glory and our good.

There was a day when I was stuck in my worry. I thought to myself, what if God is more glorified in their dying than in their living? What if that is what His plan is for us?

And then I read Romans 8: 32: He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things?

That’s where the Sovereignty of God and the Love of God collided in my life and I came to understand that whatever happened with the boys, it would be because God cared for them and me. He gave up His Son because He loved us –  so that one day we could go to heaven.

Of course, it’s a lot easier to believe that on this side of treatment. Those strong little boys are now muscular young men! And for that we are so thankful. But just like Elaine said, there is such a thing as survivor guilt. We know of several children whose battle ended with a funeral. For their families, the grief is overwhelming and our hearts hurt for them.

I’ve come to see that for the survivors, their job is to not waste the lives they have been given. To be an example of hope and to share their stories of faith and perseverance. And that is what this edition of the paper is all about.