The night before was intense: a nine-hour surgery, church members whom I will never forget in the darkness of that day, and the ride home full of tears, questions, and an attempt at explaining to my three teenage daughters that everything was going to be alright. Would everything be all right? Where will this pain lead us? Whose problem is the problem of pain, mine or God’s? “Is she going to die?” my youngest daughter asked.
C.S. Lewis says, “Our design is a less formidable one: it is only to discover how, perceiving a suffering world, and being assured, on quite different grounds, that God is good, we are to conceive that goodness and that suffering without contradiction.” As I looked over at my wife who on that August morning was pained, I found myself thinking about God. I cried.
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Now almost two years later here’s what God taught me through cancer.
Darkness comes.
John 1:5 tells us the light shines in the darkness. John’s darkness is not existential like the pain of cancer. His darkness is spiritual, a darkness of a world minus Christ at the center. John’s darkness is philosophical, the logos of Christ come as flesh and blood, truth and grace, but ignored by the masses. John’s darkness is personal, evil roaring throughout the earth seeking whom he may devour. Paul speaks of the dark as sin, evil lurking in the heart to undermine light in the soul: foolish talking, pornography, greed covetousness, and dirty jokes (Eph. 5:3-4).
If there’s anything I’ve learned, darkness comes. It comes in the morning. It comes at noon. It comes in the afternoon. It comes in the sunset of life. It comes when life rides high on the crest of a wave. It comes suddenly. It comes surprisingly like an intruder at the door with noises that go bump in the night.
For our family darkness arrived in a chariot of sickness with its prisoners of pain, uncertainty, and grief chained to it.
“Tell me what you’re thinking,” I once asked my friend Frank as he lay dying. “I’m afraid,” he said. Fear swells in the soul when darkness comes. The Gospel writer John reveals God’s peace throughout the pages of his book. John summarizes Christ as the life, not biology where cancer cells race through the body seeking to ravage, but zoe, the life of God in the souls of man or woman. John knows that in life and in death, life, zoe, serves as the fundamental stuff of genuine life.
John Calvin says, “Where the brightness of God does not shine, there is nothing but fearful darkness.” Fearful darkness creeps into the soul when darkness comes.