Hope Has A Lesson Plan

SEVERAL TIMES I'VE BEEN ASKED if I were going to write about my "cancer adventure," though none of those who asked me were crude enough to put it quite that way. Most of them referred to my current situation as a fight or a battle. I'm sure that's how they felt it would be for them, had they been the one to receive the diagnosis. It's difficult to put yourself in someone else's position and imagine how you would behave or feel. And so it is with cancer. Everyone who doesn't have cancer thinks of it as a struggle. Those of us with it know it's more about carpe diem. Every day should be seized and the maximum wrung from it.

ALL OF US HAVE OUR MOMENTS in the barrel of life's adversity--we climb in and hope that the ride won't take us over Niagara. But climb in we do--mostly because we have no other choice. The barrel turns and bucks, and we ride in the dark--sometimes fearful, sometimes thrilled. And at a rare and intensely personal moment in that careening and spinning we are given the unmistakable understanding that we are not alone.

IN DISCOVERING MORE AND MORE of those moments, we find we are never alone, we just think we are. And we--muddling along in our self-constructed cocoon--miss most of them. More importantly, we miss out on a firm relationship with God.

I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN GIVEN to introspection but, unfortunately, rarely to insight, and so I can't promise you a front row seat at an earth-shattering revelation. I can only share an ordinary woman's road to faith, and in the process, her road to hope.

I MADE THE TRIP with almost no tools and too much of the wrong kind of baggage, but I made it. Hook elbows and walk with me. We have much in common. Our only real difference is that I know what will probably take me away from this world, and you may not have discovered it yet.

AND, WHEN YOU THINK ABOUT IT, that's not such a big difference.

You're blessed! Be a blessing.