I’m considering expanding my blog to my own website and making this cancer journey a subtopic on a much grander scale. God’s really been speaking to me loudly over the last year and it’s all along the lines of suffering and what God teaches you in the journey.
Through this entire cancer journey I’ve rubbed shoulders with so many people in the deepest depths of suffering and have been able to share experiences and life stories with them over this journey. Some of them embraced their suffering and allowed God to teach them while others allowed their pain to eat at them as they become hardened and bitter. This has sparked so many questions in my own life.
With many of my writings, I really like to use imagery to get my point across. It just works for me. One image that keeps coming to my mind is – the narrow path or the narrow way based on Matthew 7:14 – “But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.” A different translation says, “Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.”
Many have heard this scripture and think that the broad way is the way of the godless or those that choose to not live for Christ, and narrow is the way that Christians take. But the word strait actually means difficult. Jesus told us three things about the “strait” gate. 1. It’s the gate that leads to heaven. 2. It’s difficult to enter. and 3. There will not be many people who go in the strait gate.
I think of this narrow way as the road of suffering. It never became as clear to me until I walked it. The thing with suffering is, while you are in the middle of it, you encounter other people in the middle of suffering. I’ve journeyed with those whose loved ones have recently committed suicide, those whose spouses are suffering with addiction, those whose spouses have been unfaithful to them, the sudden death of a loved one, those stricken with cancer and have not survived – tragedies, suffering, pain.
To be able to take something so painful and to walk this path and seek out God while you are in the middle of it….that’s walking the strait, narrow way. It’s hard. It’s difficult. We don’t want to do it.
Do I think that suffering is God’s plan? No. Do I think that it’s ever His plan to bring tragedy, sickness, and pain to His children? No. But His word tells us there will be pain in this life. And He promises to walk with us through it and can use our pain and suffering as He writes our story.
I heard someone call suffering a gift. I’m not so sure at points along my own journey I could say that. But I think that God can gift us IN our suffering and through the process He can change us. He can bring other people alongside us to walk with us.
I used to become obsessed with discovering God’s plan for my life. I used to pray all the time that He would reveal what it is that I am to do and always thought that one day I would arrive at my destination of discovery and it just would all make sense. I am learning, that is not how God works. The plan is now, it’s in the every day opportunities and choices that I make – even the small ones.
One thing I learned in the middle of my pain and suffering is trying to stay in the moment – staying just in today because it was all I could handle. Sometimes it was just staying in the hour I was in. I learned something through that. So I pray a new prayer when I start my day – “God, what would you have me do today?” Just that prayer of surrender has made me a changed person.
So as I transition to this new blog here shortly, I want to expand on this thought of the narrow way and begin to include stories of others who are walking this narrow path of suffering. We may walk a difficult path, but we don’t have to walk it alone.
Can I Be Honest With You? 