Hopetober 2017 – Breast & Cancer Awareness Month

Hopetober 2017 is inspired this year by the autumn hues of goldenrod and burnt orange, in addition to the pink associated with breast cancer.

Unlike Hopetober 2016 that saw one new breast cancer addition in my life circle, this year’s inventory includes 6 individuals with different types of cancers, 3 others with breast cancer, 2 with heart issues, and a stroke out of someone’s much too young left field. Each of them is an old friend, a new friend, or closely related to dear friends. Twelve difficult journeys…at today’s count. Ten are women. Two are men (in one case, a teen male). Most live in my town; a few are long distance.

While some have been given a clean bill of health, some have been traversing ’round the cancer or disease mountain far too long or more than once. They remain on the list when I really would rather have been able to remove them due to health and healing. These new cancer diagnoses or life-threatening medical conditions cropped up faster these past nine months than I could keep up.

The most recent was revealed to me four days ago as I sat in my hairdresser’s chair. The same one who shaved my head when chemo was taking its toll on my locks. She’s given me produce from her garden and done my hair for over 35 years. I held her in my arms and whispered I’m here for you.

There are days when the latest announcement of yet another one diagnosed with cancer or suffering from massive heart or stroke issues, finds me only able to utter the name of Jesus. No other Name is fully adequate to shoulder the sorrow, fear, pain, and uncertainty that comes when one’s life with health as they knew it is now threatened. At such times it does no good to pretend or deny. We are too quickly and too deeply thrust into identification with the Lamenter:

I say, “My splendor is gone and all that I had hoped from the LORD.”
I remember my affliction and my wandering, the bitterness and the gall.
I well remember them, and my soul is downcast within me.
Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope:
Because of the LORD’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail.
They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.
Lamentations 3:18-24

We have hope when we remember the Lord’s great love.

To not have hope firmly rooted in the Lord’s great and personal love for us is to suffer a fate worse than a cancer diagnosis, heart attack, stress-laden stroke, or any other type of life-threatening medical issues and conditions that strike us at once or bit by bit. This same hope applies in every other area of life too.

While I navigated through my two cancer journeys, I learned about active waiting. It was not about being placed on the sidelines for a time-out from life even as my focus and energy was redirected to a journey I had not asked to go on. During both the hard and inactive days, I discovered it was not about gritting my teeth to simply get through the journey and resume life as I knew it. It was about far more.

It became about responding to the Lord’s personal invitation into the activity of His purpose. In the midst of my waiting through what I was experiencing in my physical person, His Holy Spirit became my ever-present Teacher. At times the words of the Lamenter opened my understanding experientially:

I say to myself, “The LORD is my portion; therefore I will wait for him.”
The LORD is good to those whose hope is in him, to the one who seeks him;
it is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the LORD.
Though he brings grief, he will show compassion, so great is his unfailing love.
For he does not willingly bring affliction or grief to anyone.
Lamentations 3:25-26, 32-33

It was one thing to say ‘the Lord is my portion’, another to willingly wait for Him. It was about choosing to believe that the Lord is good in spite of what my current circumstances daily tempted me to believe.

It was about allowing Him to teach me the purpose in his bringing grief. Where it carved deep places, there was more room to be flooded with His compassion and unfailing love; indeed, His waters of life.

How easily we can hold our heart an arm’s distance away from Him because our head gets in the way. What we cannot well reason can become, if we are not attentive to our thoughts and attitudes, a wedge between our need and the only One who can truly – and desires to – meet our deepest needs. Including the ones we don’t know we have.

Everybody has a story – including twelve unique ones represented in Hopetober 2017. The common denominator in the midst of our uniqueness, however, is the same source of hope for every one of us:

Whom have I in heaven but You?
And I have no delight or desire on earth besides You.
My flesh and my heart may fail,
but God is the Rock and firm Strength of my heart and my Portion forever.
Psalm 73:25-26 (Amplified)

My prayer this Hopetober is that you and your loved ones would come to know this truth in a transforming, life-changing way. From glory to glory.

~ Nancy

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