The Waiting Game
Cancer has taught me many so many lessons: some obvious- such as to thank the Lord for every day granted, and to never put off telling your nearest and dearest that you love them – some less so, such as the fact that time is relative. It isn’t that the errant cells in my body have suddenly enabled me to comprehend Einstein’s theory of relatively; my appreciation of the relativity of time is not scientific and based entirely on experience.
It all began nearly two years, when I was initially diagnosed with advanced breast cancer. Up until that fateful day, time was generally running at its regular pace, even if there seemed to be too little of it to encompass the demands of work and family, not to mention church and prayer life. My tomorrows crept on their petty pace from day to day with predictable regularity, but from the moment I discovered my unwelcome passenger, time seemed to morph.
After the initial shock, the minutes and hours seemed to elongate and began to pass by in slow motion. I had the impression that I stood outside of my own existence, and was able to examine each gradually moving moment; to turn it over in my mind’s eye, to taste it, to feel its texture and to mine it for meaning.
On that first day, as I sat in the consulting room, I was able to objectively study the contours of the doctor’s face, to observe the dance of his hands in a beam of sunlight that stole through the blinds of his office window as he drew unwelcome parameters around my future existence.
And as I commenced treatment, every moment took on an almost supernatural intensity. On bad days, I would lie in pain watching the clouds inching their way across the sky through the skylight above my bed. On better days, I would wander up the green lane opposite our house, where the air seemed thicker, electric, sharper and brighter than I remembered.
It was as the world had ceased to turn on its axis and every blade of grass, veined leaf, wheat stalk and gnarled trunk, ripening apple or blackberry, stood out in sharp relief. All around me I sensed life: butterflies flitting among the late summer blossoms, the song of starlings above, the scuttle of a shrew into the undergrowth, rabbits heading for burrows and deer heading for the woods.
The air was alive with the presence of God and, as I waited on my healing, each moment appeared pregnant with potential – and I realised that this time was God’s gift.
In the months since, God has worked a miracle and my health and pace of life has been restored. And with each day that I grow stronger, the minutes seem to rush in upon each other, packed with the hectic practicalities of a ‘normal’ life.
The surreal intensity of those former days has become but a distant memory and I am slowly coming to terms with the notion that my time may not – after all – be running out; that I have been delivered from the dominion of darkness and into the light.
As far as I am concerned God has healed me, but the medical establishment quite rightly wants to keep an eye on me. So, just as the pace of my life has attained some predictability, I have once again entered the limbo of uncertainty with which every cancer patient is familiar.
I now play a waiting game as radiologists pieces together the myriad of images from my latest CT scan, and reflect on theologian Henri Nouwen’s advice that patient people are willing to stay where they are, to live out a given situation to its full holding onto the belief that some hidden meaning will become manifest.
So for now, I once again exist only in present; the past is behind me and the future has yet to reveal itself. I am suspended in this moment in time, held in my Father’s embrace, waiting, trusting.
"Be still and know that I am God" (Psalm 46:10)