Brevity of Life

Today a co-worker passed away at noon.  Only three weeks ago she found out she had cancer.  Stage five.  I didn’t know there was a stage five.  Stage four is the most difficult to treat and the most invasive; five must be when humans give you no hope of healing and your death is imminent. My take on this is that when the doctors gave up God stepped in.  God healed her and took her home to be with him.  That’s the kind of healing that lasts forever.  Cancer does not win. Ever.

The passing of this sweet woman makes me yearn to be in the presence of Christ myself.  She was so beautiful and gentle. Now she walks with the most beautiful and gentle of all – face to face and in person.  Wonderful!  Glorious!  Yes, she leaves a grieving family behind but one that understands the healing of God.

I think we misunderstand healing sometimes.  We often think of it in terms of the physical and emotional.  When we are saved we think of it in the spiritual realms.  What we forget is that our concept of healing often isn’t God’s concept.  God doesn’t always grant us the miracle of physical and emotional healing.  In fact, he often asks us to wait.  Sometimes our healing comes by the hands of the physicians he places in our path.  Sometimes it comes by the change in our lifestyles and our eating habits.  And sometimes it comes through death.  Through death we are ushered into the presence of God.  It is a healing that is immediate and forever.

Cancer is a blessing.  I know most people will disagree because they see it as a death warrant.  I have friends who see it as a reason to mourn you before you’ve passed.  They certainly think you should act differently.  Perhaps they’d be more happy with my behavior if I clothed myself in rags, sat on a trash heap, and felt sorry for myself and what God has done to me – because surely I must have committed some huge sin to be stricken with cancer.

Sorry, folks, that’s not how it works. Truth is that cancer has taught me more in a year than I learned previously my whole life. It has taught me what is important (doing God’s will) and what is not (who gets credit for what great idea or the number of calls taken at work).  It’s taught me a great deal about love and about fear.  It’s taught me how very short our lives are and how very little time we have to be about the work God has set before us.

Fear.  It’s an ugly word.  Pastor G talked about fear today in his sermon.  Fear, he said, is a great tool for the enemy, who walks about like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour.  When we open ourselves to fear, we open ourselves to the enemy’s destructive wiles.  The fear factor is why we need the armor of God and why we need to stand firm and be alert. 

Satan hates it when the love of God pushes fear to the rear.  He would rather we be timid and fearful all the time, because when we are timid and fearful we don’t do anything.  We curl up in a little ball and bemoan our existence.   It’s then that we start blaming God for all the things we’ve gotten ourselves into (probably with a little help from the enemy). We become distressed, discouraged, and depressed.  We also become ineffective in the Kingdom’s work. 

We do not have to be bound by fear.  God did not give us a spirit of bondage.  Romans 8:15 says:  The Spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again; rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. And by him we cry, “Abba, Father.”  We may fight against principalities and powers but we never fight alone.  God is with us through his Spirit.  When his children cry out, he hears, listens, and takes action.  With his presence, evil and fear must flee.  Bye bye, Satan!

We can become trapped in our fears, to the point where they destroy everything around us – our families, our health, our future, our careers, our faith, our testimony.  We even conjure up our fears from things that don’t even exist – ooooh, she doesn’t like me, I can tell by the way she looks at me. We invent rumors and then believe them, we read more into an e-mail than is really there, and we expect more from people than they can give.

But when we choose to trust in the Lord, by action as well as by word, we automatically put fear away.  Love and fear cannot co-exist, Pastor G says.  I think he’s right.  Where one is, the other is not.  When I am afraid of outcomes or presentation, I don’t work from love, I work from mis-trust and sometimes resentment.  I find myself waiting for someone to disapprove or call me a failure.  I won’t take risks.  And like Pastor G says, I begin to withdraw from people for fear they will hurt me.  I build walls a mile high and hide behind them in bitterness, defeat, and loneliness.

Then Pastor G lays down the bombshell – so why we told to fear the Lord?  He gave us an acronym for it:

F     aithfulness of the Father

E     ver interceding Christ

A    rmor of God in place

R    einforcement of angels round about us

Fearing God is a healthy thing.  When we fear God we know how big he really is and how powerful he is.  We respect and worship him because he deserves our praise.  No one can defeat him.  With God on our side who could we possibly be afraid of?

It is long past time to be sitting behind our walls fearing everyone and everything around us.  Life is short.  It’s brevity is like a vapor.  We need to be about God’s business.  We need to be running toward people to share our joy and hope with them.  They are in need of what we have – our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.