Yesterday, I preached at church for the first time since my diagnosis. Even though I've written about my cancer journey at length here, this was the first time I'd spoken 'publicly' about it. I wasn't sure how I'd feel - or whether I'd turn into a blubbering wreck - so I packed an extra hanky. In the end, I managed to get through it without losing it - although there was laughter and tears. I was also aware of an unexpected sense of calm, possibly due to the appreciation that I was coming 'home' to the loving place of unconditional care and support that we've experienced since I was diagnosed 18 months ago. Although our Sunday attendance has been more miss than hit, our church family have been there for us - both practically and in prayer.
I appreciate the concept of church is alien (maybe even painful) to some people, along with the idea of faith in a personal God. I'm the last person to mount a defence of God; I'm not clever enough and I wouldn't know where to start! All I can do is outline how I've sensed God 'caress and collide' (to pinch a phrase from Steve Stockman) with us over the last 18 months. That's what I attempted to do yesterday. You can listen to my talk here or read it (minus a few ad libs and embellishments!) below this picture of a cracking sunrise last week, taken near our house.
My name’s Pete. Myself and my wife Lisa, and our four kids, have been part of Life Church for over 15 years. Some of you may not recognise us as we’ve not been Sunday morning regulars for the last year or two.
The main reason for this is because of a journey we’ve been on. A journey that we never expected. A journey that has turned our lives upside down.
In Spring of last year – 2023 – I was diagnosed with incurable cancer.
On Maundy Thursday, I had a colonoscopy at Burton hospital and a four cm tumour was discovered in my bowel. I remember looking at the tumour on the big live action screen in front of me, unable to compute what this thing, which looked like a mouth ulcer, was. I’d been referred for the colonoscopy after going to my GPs a couple of times with what I thought was IBS. In hindsight, various symptoms that I’d been suffering for around two years were signs of the undetected cancer growing inside me.
After the shock of the tumour’s discovery, a nurse sat myself and Lisa down in a side room and explained that I probably would have treatment, then an operation, and all being well could be in the clear within a year.
A few days later, we had an appointment with our consultant surgeon. The first thing he said to me, with a quizzical look, was: “What are you doing here?!”. I was 48 at the time, fit and in general good health. I did not fit the normal profile for colorectal cancer.
The surgeon pulled up my x-rays and showed us how the cancer had spread from my bowel to some lymph nodes and a few other ‘local’ areas. This meant I had Stage 2 or 3 cancer. However, he also expressed concern at some blobs on the x-ray at the bottom of my spine.
I was referred for a bone scan at Derby Hospital. This scan confirmed that the blobs on my spine were in fact cancer. So now, this meant that my cancer was at Stage 4. There is no Stage 5. My cancer is incurable, and it will be terminal. It’s similar in some ways to the cancer that Sir Chris Hoy revealed he had last weekend, although his cancer has spread from his prostate, not his bowel, to his bones.
So, within a few weeks, we moved from thinking I had cancer which could be treated and hopefully removed, to the reality that the best we could hope for was treatment that would contain the cancer, and prolong my life for as long as possible. A prognosis of a few years’ life if things went well.
In the midst all of this, a prayer evening was organised at church, in this room, for us. We weren’t there but I still can’t believe so many people turned on a Friday night! Afterwards, we were given a thick wad of cards with handwritten messages of encouragement and support. I read them afresh this week and it’s wonderful to see how so many of those words have come true and been real in our lives. But my favourite is still this one, which reads: “So sorry that Pete has left us, but we will meet him one day. May God bless his friends and family at this time.”
I began chemotherapy shortly after my 49th birthday and, apart from a few weeks off to recover in between courses, had chemo almost constantly for 12 months, up until May this year. The fortnightly chemo sessions saw me have a drip of a cocktail of drugs for three days at a time. As well as the physical side effects, the tiredness, and the bizarre things chemo does to your taste buds – the emotional and mental affects were full-on. There was a period in the middle of each chemo fortnight, usually at the weekend when everyone was in the house, where it felt like my mind was folding in on itself. Just getting through the day without losing it was an achievement on those weekends. I had to give up work, and planning anything beyond a few weeks in advance was impossible. The impact on our family and our friends – including some of you here – was often too much for me to dwell on.
Meanwhile, the chemo was basically containing the cancer – with small areas of increase and/or decrease noted during each three-month scan.
Then, in May this year, I had a scan that showed the cancer had stabilised. This was great news.
However, the type of chemo I was on at this point was also causing me to lose feeling in my hands and feet. This numbness was getting worse, so I came off the chemo, as my consultant feared I would be left permanently disabled if I didn’t.
This was a blow but led to an opportunity for us to apply for clinical trials at cancer-specialist hospitals in Manchester and London. I was matched to a clinical trial at the Royal Marsden in London in July. But then I couldn’t go through with it because fresh scans showed my cancer still was stable. To be accepted on a trial, your cancer needs to be growing, and mine wasn’t.
This was bittersweet news. However, it’s now five months since I last had treatment and, it seems, my cancer is somehow still stable!
We’ve made the decision, with the experts, that I will stay off treatment until my cancer begins to grow again. This freaked me out initially, but the last five months have been a wonderful reprieve. We’ve been able to enjoy holidays and other activities, have been able to make plans. It feels like a tinge of normality has returned. While I dreamt this sort of break from treatment might happen, I never expected it. I am grateful.
The reality is, however, that I am not in remission. My cancer remains and one day it will wake up and begin to spread. That could be next week or it could be next year.
So, let’s talk about some stuff we don’t always talk about in church, shall we?!
Before I started preparing for today, I listened back to Steve’s last two sermons. Steve passionately outlined the desperation of the people involved in two miracles in the Gospels – the raising of Lazarus, and the healing of the woman who was haemorrhaging. Jesus worked with this desperation to overcome death and bring life.
I’d like us to explore a little bit what happens when it seems like, instead, death has won. When silence and pain dominate, and happy endings appear to be thin on the ground.
Let’s read a famous passage in Acts 12:
It was about this time that King Herod arrested some who belonged to the church, intending to persecute them. 2 He had James, the brother of John, put to death with the sword. 3 When he saw that this met with approval among the Jews, he proceeded to seize Peter also. This happened during the Festival of Unleavened Bread. 4 After arresting him, he put him in prison, handing him over to be guarded by four squads of four soldiers each. Herod intended to bring him out for public trial after the Passover. 5 So Peter was kept in prison, but the church was earnestly praying to God for him. 6 The night before Herod was to bring him to trial, Peter was sleeping between two soldiers, bound with two chains, and sentries stood guard at the entrance. 7 Suddenly an angel of the Lord appeared and a light shone in the cell. He struck Peter on the side and woke him up. “Quick, get up!” he said, and the chains fell off Peter’s wrists.
This passage made me sit up, not long after my diagnosis. I’d previously read it focusing on the miraculous escape of Peter from prison. But now, for the first time, the 13 words in verse 2 leapt out: “He had James, the brother of John, put to death with the sword.”
James, Peter and John were Jesus’ three closest friends – the trio of disciples who Jesus confided in and depended on. James was also Jesus’s cousin; their mothers were sisters.
After Jesus’s ascension, the early church came under brutal attack. Peter was imprisoned but somehow released by an angel. However, James was killed – the first disciple to be martyred and only the second to die after Judas.
Why wasn’t James spared by an angel? Why did he die but Peter didn’t? The bible doesn’t tell us.
But one thing we learn from the bible – and from church history – is that many of the early church leaders were killed, including Paul, who tradition tells us was beheaded. Peter himself was spared by an angel here but, history records, later crucified upside down.
We sometimes forget that hardship and death are spoken of as a given – maybe something that is more likely – for followers of Jesus. Jesus famously said that whoever follows him must “take up their cross”. In John’s Gospel, Jesus says: “unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.”
Death and sorrow are hard baked into the lives of those who follow Jesus. But we don’t like to hear this.
One of the first books I read after my diagnosis was by Catholic contemplative teacher James Finley. Finley suffered violent abuse as a child at the hands of his stepfather and was then sexually abused at a monastery as a young man. His first marriage collapsed and, more recently, his second wife died after having Alzheimer’s.
It’s with these ‘qualifications’ that Finley writes: “If we are absolutely grounded in the absolute love of God that protects us from nothing even as it sustains us in all things, then we can face all things with courage and tenderness and touch the hurting places in others and in ourselves with love."
And that, in a nutshell, is the God we’ve experienced in the past 18 months. The God who protects us from nothing but sustains us in all things.
It’s been a painful lesson in learning that God is not ‘in control’ in the way that I thought before.
At the same time as dozens, maybe hundreds, of people were praying for my healing, I sensed God gently drawing me into a quiet place to grieve.
But it wasn’t just me grieving. God was grieving too. Grieving that he couldn’t prevent my cancer from becoming incurable. Grieving for the loss of my future. Grieving for the pain my death will cause Lisa, our kids, my parents – all of those who love us. God was grieving with me and for me.
I felt God gently but persistently leading me to this place of grief, encouraging me to face up to my disappointment with God. This felt at odds with how I’d grown up in the faith – where we sung about this mighty God who could do anything. Instead, over a period of many months, God dismantled my faith in God. This at times left me desolate.
The root meanings of the words for faith and trust in the New Testament are very similar. And slowly but surely, this year, my trust in God has been put back together, reshaped.
This trust, or faith, is not as certain as before, maybe not as easy to pin down, and definitely more fragile. But it is more real. More pervasive. I sense God in my bones, not just in my head. There have been a few times when God has felt so close that it is almost too much to take. A sense of God sustaining us, loving us, one day at a time – with no guaranteed outcomes.
I’m no theologian, and we don’t have the time to look at the theological arguments about the limits or otherwise of God’s power. But Thomas Oord, who is a theologian, says: “God works to squeeze whatever good can be squeezed from the bad God didn’t want in the first place. God redeems.”
I don’t think it is God’s will for me to have incurable cancer, any more than it was God’s will for millions of Jewish people to die in the Holocaust, or is God’s will for Palestinian children to die today from bombing and starvation. I reject the idea of a God who “allows” these things to happen for “a reason.” I don’t want to know that God.
The mighty God I know took on human skin and became a tiny, weak, baby, dependent on his mother’s milk.
Hebrews 1:3 says that Jesus Christ is the "exact representation" of God's being. So, if you want to see what God looks like, look at Jesus - crying, laughing, loving, forgiving, healing, Jesus.
Jesus who couldn’t perform miracles in places where there wasn’t enough human cooperation. Jesus who wept blood as he faced death and cried out for the support of his sleeping friends - Peter, James and John - not just once but twice, three times. Jesus – the humble God who needed help carrying his cross. Jesus, who needed others.
Jesus who says: “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” (Matthew 5:4)
Paul, in his letter to the Philippians, says: "Rejoice in the Lord always. Again, I will say, rejoice". Reflecting on this, American author Frederick Buechner points out that Paul wrote these words as he grew old, after years of hardship and suffering.
Buechner says: “Rejoice is the last word and can be spoken only after the first word. The sheltering word can be spoken only after the word that leaves us without a roof over our heads…”
Our pain and suffering can be a gateway to a new land. If we can sit with our tears for long enough, they are the water that fertilises the soil of our hearts and, slowly but surely, brings new life. Our temptation is to seek a short-term spiritual fix to bypass the pain.
But, if we listen carefully, God will keep calling us back to the pain until it begins to transform us. My experience so far is that God does this in a quiet, gradual way - not in a way that overwhelms or re-traumatises us, but gently, at our own pace, and with great care. My soul is like a baby content in its mother’s arms… (Psalm 131:2)
Mike Petrow reflects on some wisdom he received, during a time of grief, from his spiritual director: “She (the spiritual director) said, ‘… the suffering carves a space out in your heart. In that wide open space, you can feel not only your pain but the pain of others and the pain of the world. The people I know who’ve really faced suffering and tragedy are the quickest to tears, but also the quickest to laughter, and the quickest to joy’.”
In these last few months off treatment, it feels like we’ve begun to experience joy again. It’s a quiet joy, but a joy that is deeper and wider and higher than the joy we used to know. It’s a joy that is somehow wrapped up with the pain and given more value as a result.
US poet Christian Wiman, who also has cancer, explains it like this: “There is some inexplicable connection between suffering and joy. One of the greatest graces of this existence is that we are able to experience joy in the midst of suffering… there can be moments of great joy in the midst of the worst suffering. I take that to reveal that these two things are ravelled up in ways that we don’t understand, but which are essential to our existence."
And there’s new purpose too. Having to retire just over half-way through my working life was not something I expected. But now I’m starting to do other things, like running for charity and volunteering at Oxfam. And every day and every relationship seem more precious, because we realise how finite they are.
Father Adam Bucko says: “Contemplation is about receptivity, about deep listening, about wrestling with questions like what breaks your heart, what makes you truly alive, and allowing those questions, as well as the pain of the world, to shatter us. When we do that, in the midst of all of that, we discover that there’s something arising deep within. For me, that’s the Holy Spirit looking to essentially flow into our lives, take whatever is left of us, and reassemble it into something that can become our unique gift to the world.”
I’d like to finish with some verses from Ephesians 1:
"With all wisdom and insight, he has made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure that he set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth……"
…. things we don’t understand or can’t explain, things we regret, things that wound us with no response, things that pierce our souls. Things that God ravels together to somehow create joy, meaning and purpose; things that he makes bearable to sit with and stare in the eye. Things that he shines a gentle light on to slowly dry the moisture of tears. The what if’s, the missed opportunities, the silent, deathly sighs that bolt doors behind us. All these he gathers up like spilt beads and carefully threads onto a length of cotton to hang around his neck, to caress between his fingers, to love and to cherish, to have and to hold.
That’s the God who loves and sustains us.