Two Years With Cancer

You Can Have Your Engagement Ring Back

You get some test results and find out you are in a relationship with a total jerk.

I was happily engaged in something else entirely. Coming out of a season where I wondered if I could be of any use to God, I had found a community that welcomed me with open arms. In academia, I loved studying, reading, and writing papers. I was the intern of my favorite professor and personal mentor. The world was my oyster.

And then, I was saddled with cancer.

I joined David’s melody in Psalm 88:14:

“But I cry to you for help, Lord; in the morning my prayer comes before you. 
Why, Lord, do you reject me and hide your face from me?”

As in, picture me sitting working hard on my Hebrew flash cards. My phone vibrates and I pick up the call. I’m told to buckle up because the cancer rollercoaster has left the station. Immediately, I felt like God had forgotten me or did not see the effort I was putting into my studies, and the diagnosis made me feel like he was hiding his face from me.

And a month later, entombed in the bowels of an MRI machine, I joined Job’s poem in Job 23:8-9:

“But if I go to the east, he is not there;
If I go to the west, I do not find him.
When he is at work in the north, I do not see him;
when he turns to the south, I catch no glimpse of him.”

“The world is my oyster” was replaced with “WTF?!”

I believe David and Job felt the same confusion and anger toward God. Because of our vantage point, their words don’t hit us as hard as they did their contemporaries. David’s buddy who first heard those lyrics probably clutched his pearls at how David spoke to God. But David was being honest about what was stirring in his soul.

For me, that anger and confusion led me to this song by Taylor Swift. It’s called Down Bad.

(I am posting the clean version, but to maintain my authenticity you need to know I did not listen to the clean version)

In hopes that it might help you process confusion and anger you may have toward God, and inspired by the honesty David and Job practiced, I want to share some of my journal entries from the season when I was trying to make sense of losing the “the world is my oyster” life I loved and accepting “cancer is my toxic boyfriend I can’t kick out.” The lyrics gave words to what I was feeling and fueled conversation between me and God.

Verse One

Did you really beam up
In a cloud of sparkling dust
Just to do experiments on
Tell me I was the chosen one
Show me that this world is bigger than us
Then send me back where I came from
For a moment I knew cosmic love

God, I don’t understand what you are trying to teach me or what you are disciplining me for. You lifted me into a world of study and imagination—academia, comedy, advocacy, the sense that I could help women like me. You showed me that I could become something meaningful. And now you rip it away. Are you just doing experiments on me? Were you taunting me? Testing me? Are you a God who shows his daughter a big world and then swipes it away? Because I don’t understand a God who is sovereign over everything and either drops the ball on preventing cancer or sends cancer to his child. God, you know how much I love school, and now my calendar is full of doctor appointments, scary tests, and surgery.

Read “Him” as the “life is my oyster” path I wanted to keep walking down.

Read “Down bad” as the soup of my fear, confusion and anger that held me down.

Chorus

Now I’m down bad, crying at the gym
Everything comes out teenage petulance
“🤬it if I can’t have him” 
“I might just die, it would make no difference” 
Down bad, waking up in blood 
Staring at the sky, come back and pick me up 
🤬it if I can have us 
I might just not get up I might stay down bad 
🤬 it if I can have him 
Down bad 
🤬it if I can’t have him

God, everything I say to you sounds horrible. I hear other Christians telling me that I need to trust you and that you will redeem this. They say that you are good, that you love me, and that I shouldn’t be mad at you. But I don’t care. If you are over everything, why did you not stop this from happening? And not just to me—I see the fear in my husband and my kids. How can you do this to them? Come back and pick me up. I don’t want cancer. I don’t want to give up what I was doing. I am so angry at you. I find myself saying, Fine—🤬 it all if I can’t have what I thought you were handing me. And it makes me feel like if this is the kind of bait-and-switch you do, then 🤬 it all. I’ll just go back to not caring about you. I’ll disappear from academia. I’ll become another statistic—someone who once was zealous for the Lord, whose roots died. What is the point of fighting if this is what I’m going to have to survive?

Verse Two

Did you take all my old clothes? 
Just to leave me here naked and alone 
In a field in my same old town 
That somehow seems so hollow now
They’ll say I’m nuts if I talk about the existence of you. 
For a moment I was heaven struck

God, what is happening? Last week I was dressed in intellectual excitement—deep creative stores ready to be used, bravery to help people. For the first time in my life, I felt like I was celebrating the gifts you have given me. But now I feel naked and hollow. Life feels too familiar, stripped of sparkling color and potential. You saved me from this. You took me out of this “same old town,” and for a moment I was heaven-struck. Now I feel left naked and alone because I can’t tell anyone how mad I am at you or how untrustworthy you feel to me right now. And maybe, because I feel those things, you and I never really had a real relationship. Maybe I’m nuts for thinking you’re real.

Bridge

I loved your hostile takeovers 
Encounters closer and closer 
All your indecent exposures 
How dare you say that it’s– 
I’ll build you a fort on some planet 
Where they can all understand it 
How dare you think it’s romantic 
Leaving me safe and stranded 
🤬it I was in love.

God, I loved that you took over my life—that my music, books, and conversations reflected you. I was almost hostile in my evangelism, insisting people know who you are and that you had become my life because of the way you revealed yourself to me. But now I feel like some indecent side of you—or of life with you—has been exposed through this diagnosis. People say I shouldn’t talk like that, but it’s true. Is life on earth just suffering? Is the Bible really telling us that life is terrible and then you die? Can I only expect peace in a fort on some planet in eternity? If that’s true, why am I telling people about how you want to redeem their lives? Why does it matter if I love people? Some say to me, “Don’t worry, God is writing a redemption story through your cancer.” And to that I say, “How dare you think it’s romantic to leave me stranded.”

Refrain

Taylor Swift added “Down Bad” to the Eras Tour, giving me an even more concrete picture of how I felt. She sits on a moving platform—what Swifties affectionately call her roomba—a spotlight beaming down on her like a “Beam me up, Scotty” ray of light connecting her to a spaceship hovering above the stage. She stares into it and sings, begging to be taken back.

Over and over, I begged God to beam me out of cancer and back to the path I wanted. I was in love. I loved studying God. I loved imagining a world where women like me could breathe and belong. I had given myself to that vision, and now it felt stolen.

And I sat there in that posture for a long while. What I will say for myself is this: although I was hostile and petulant, I was honest. And that honesty gave God space in my soul to cook. There is no way to connect the dots in any linear fashion, but much like Taylor being driven around by her roomba, God steered me toward the parts of him that I misunderstood. Maybe this is just me, but along the way some truths about God commingled with junk—assumptions I had filled in myself. This happens with a God who is knowable and also unknowable.

I sensed God saying (in my soul and through my friends):

I didn’t leave you anywhere.
I didn’t write this for your life.

You don’t need to be beamed out of this.
This is a tragedy—and I’m going to be right here with you the whole time.

Dissonance

I believed, without realizing it, that God worked with a stop-start system. That he beamed you up when you did it right and put you in time-out when you didn’t. That suffering was God-leveled discipline. That cancer was a consequence of something I had done wrong. (I did fail a lot of Hebrew quizzes😜) And because I believed this, even unknowingly, I passed this distortion of God on to other people. Consider yourself notified: I was wrong.

Life with God isn’t a punishment–reward cycle. As my therapist Dana, (a fan favorite around here), says, life with God is a becoming.

Not linear.
Not perfect.
Not interruption-free.

It’s growing and stretching and being formed with God inside a broken world—not escaping it.

The path is still sparkling dust.
It’s still bigger than us.
It’s still cosmic love.

But God is not running experiments on us.
He does not author “down bad.”
He does not leave us naked and alone.

Reverberation

We often imagine God’s sovereignty like a massive Risk board—our names on tiny pieces, moved around at will, assigned suffering or success as he plays to win. That is not the sovereignty Scripture describes.

Acts 17:28 says,
“For in him we live and move and have our being.”

Our very existence flows from God. What kind of God would breathe out a creature whose being is held in him—and then inflict cancer on that being? That wouldn’t be sovereignty. That would be cruelty. Although I spent months questioning God about this, I can confidently say the God I know and love does not treat his creation that way.

God did not choose a broken world for us. We did. And he chose not to abandon it. At times we wish he would beam us up out of here, but his promise is that he is coming back here—to his creation.

So now I walk forward. After cancer, life is never the same. I had to grieve and give up the season I loved so much before cancer. I try to remember that God is holding me, and that no matter what, my becoming never stops—and it never will.

Am I scared cancer will come back? One hundred percent.
But I no longer believe God inflicted it on me.

I may find myself down bad, crying at the gym again.
But he didn’t drop me there. He’s spotting me as I lift weights.
He’s with me there. And he’s with you too.