Faith and God’s will

A very good friend of mine from high school just lost his wife after a two-year bout with cancer. He delivered a very thought provoking account of their struggle during the wake. His wife was his world over the past 40 years of their marriage. What they endured tested the limits of modern day science as well as faith in an Almighty God they knew loved them.

First, let me tell you about EQ. In high school he was the guy we trusted the most and wanted the most to have as a friend. EQ chose to have a public service career. A few years ago, he retired as DPWH Undersecretary after over 30 years of service to the government, unscathed by any scandal or question of impropriety in a bureaucracy known to be ground zero for corruption. He is now a governor of the Philippine Red Cross. He is just that kind of guy.

I thought I would share EQ’s reflections. I feel something is to be gained from how my friend, in his sorrow and loss, managed to strengthen his faith in our God.

My friend EQ told the gathering of relatives and friends at his wife’s wake, “how this journey with Clem has also taken me deeper into the heart of God. Over the last few years… God has been leading Clem and myself deeper and deeper into an understanding of His will…”

EQ continued: “in the last few years, in the midst of Clem’s two year battle with cancer, I have had many opportunities to engage with this, the idea called the will of God.”

EQ went on to relate about the many ups and downs of their two-year journey. It started off with what they thought was a mere inconvenience. “A quick checkup revealed a clean, localized growth in her left lung, only slightly bigger than 1 centimeter. In medical terms, that is cancer Stage 1B.  A PET CT scan told us that it was localized, and that it had not metastasized, that is, spread, to other parts of the body.

“At that time, we looked at her condition as worrisome inconvenience, and an interruption to a trip to Europe that we had been planning. We prayed about it, yes, but in very routine ways. We asked God for a quick solution with little downtime, so that we could go on with our travel plans.

“We got the services of the best cardio thoracic surgeon in the country, because we wanted human expertise to deliver the swiftest, most painless remedy. We wanted to get back to our normal lives. We remained locked into our own plans. We were in denial about the will of God.”

Things were not as they had hoped. The surgeon “found nodules in her lymph nodes that meant that Clem’s cancer was not localized. In medical terms, her cancer was in Stage 2B, and with this came the emotionally laden medical term: chemotherapy… ”

 Things turned for the worse. EQ related: “our prayers took a different turn. It was no longer, take this inconvenience away. It was now: we know this illness is real. Please heal Clem. Please make her recover. There was a certain level of insistence about our prayers, which is not necessarily wrong, because we do have a Heavenly Father who asks us to come to him with persistence and importunity. So we prayed, over and over, for Clem’s healing.

“Clem had six chemotherapy sessions in the last half of 2012. We were grateful that her side effects were not devastating. She had no hair loss, no violent bouts of nausea. We hoped that she had weathered the worst of it. She came home to rest and recover, and we hoped that she was in the clear…”

Complications arose. “She began to accumulate fluid in her lungs… The doctor ordered a time of rest, followed by chemotherapy to be administered orally... Clem was told to rest for two months, then to come back in December. We hoped that by then, she would be cleared…

“But over time, Clem had developed very strong aversions to certain types of food… Clem had embarked, against doctor’s orders, on an eating pattern that left her with a severe nutritional deficiency. Her immune system became compromised.

And then another blow came, EQ recalled. “When she went back for her CT scan in December last year, the test results showed that her cancer had recurred, and it had now spread to the right lung. It did not seem that the cancer would go away.

“It was no longer a simple matter of taking medications and undergoing chemotherapy. It was at this stage that we began to encounter real and persistent fear about Clem’s condition. We were also becoming more and more confused about the decisions we had to make. Should Clem undergo chemotherapy when she was so weak? Should she eat this and not that?

“Again I sensed a subtle shift in the way that we prayed. We were beginning to see the limits of medical help and human expertise. We pressed closer to God, and we said, alright, if this is the way you want us to go, then teach us to do it your way.  We were moving into conforming with God’s will…

“It was a sad Christmas for us… she began to experience vertigo, saying she felt she was falling even though her position was upright. She was also showing seizure-like symptoms. The symptoms showed that something seemed to have affected her brain, and I was terrified that the cancer had spread that far.

“Clem was taken back to the hospital. The diagnosis was that her new symptoms were the cumulative effect of chemotherapy sessions. The nerves around her right eye had been affected, leading to the vertigo. Thankfully, her seizures and migraines were not because of cancer spreading to her brain. A brain scan showed that her brain was clear…

“Clem’s post-Christmas return to the hospital was the beginning of a one-month confinement and a series of battles involving infections… She was also in danger of contacting pneumonia. We reached a point that all of the devices we thought were life saving, and even the hospital environment itself, were becoming more and more of a threat to Clem.”

This was about the time, EQ related, when they felt really vulnerable. They had seen the limits of medical technology. It was becoming clearer that even the best hospital facilities could not always bring healing, and could even at times do harm.

EQ confessed that his prayers shifted ever so subtly. “I knew that sickness never came from God, but for some reason he had allowed it. I would accept it… medical interventions were beginning to fail. My prayer now would be, God, help me do everything in my power to help my wife endure this.”

In his hours of despair, EQ relates that he found solace in The Way, a book of St Josemaria Escriva. The message was this: “We are but mere blocks of stone in the hands of a Master Cutter. It is He who knows best how to shape us, to bring out the best in us so we should not resist. By trying to avoid the blows of life, we make things worse for ourselves and bring suffering upon us anyway. But if we learn to accept and love the will of God, we discover firsthand that his burdens are not heavy and that joy, peace, and happiness are ours for the asking.”

EQ’s take: “I took this as God’s message for me. I was to learn not just to conform to God’s will, or to accept it. I was now being called to love God’s will. I had asked, over and over, for God to help me understand all of this suffering.

“I believed then that I could only love God’s will if I just fully understood it. But as I put myself more and more into God’s hands, the message I am getting is different. I can learn to love God’s will without fully understanding it. I can learn to love God’s will simply by accepting, by faith, that something good will come out of this suffering, something good will come out of Clem’s death.”

As we approach Holy Week and meditate on the suffering of our Lord Jesus Christ, I see from EQ’s experience a parallel. Even Christ, the Son of God, in his Seven Last Words, revealed feeling abandoned before He finally accepted the will of His Father.

Our prayer this Holy Week should probably ask God to give us the wisdom and strength to accept His will in the challenges of our daily lives…even if we just can’t seem to understand. We sometimes call it Faith and we are told, it is all we need.

Boo Chanco’s e-mail address is bchanco@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @boochanco