Think You've Lost Your Way? Think Again

A man's goings are of Jehovah; How then can man understand his way? Prov. 20:24

White House Press Secretary Tony Snow, who has been diagnosed with a recurrence of cancer with metastasis to the liver, recently said the cancer has brought him closer to God and his family.

Here at Cancer Treatment Centers of America (CTCA), I talk to many cancer patients who say the same thing; in fact, they say cancer is a blessing in disguise for that very reason. It has made them reorder their priorities and think through what’s really important in life and what’s not. And, it’s made them realize this is something they can’t do on their own … they need God to walk them through it and give them the strength and resources for the journey.

God often allows us to travel paths that seem hard, horrible and hideously different from the ones we’d choose for ourselves in making a roadmap for our lives. The first time we hear the word cancer or cancerous, it often leaves us stunned, confused, reeling, feeling like this can’t be true or that somehow we’ve lost our way along the course we’d envisioned for ourselves in life. This just wasn’t part of our plans.

But, the truth is, that diagnosis and the resultant journey are what actually draw people back to the true path in life, the one we were meant to follow until we became sidetracked by all the other things that crowd into our lives and vie for our attention and affection. It’s those “other” paths – the ones that seem so enticing and blessed -- that actually and often lead to woundings, sickness of the soul, poverty of spirit and to becoming devoured by the trivial, the worthless, the things that tickle our fancies but do nothing to nourish us as people created in God’s image. I

n one of his sermons, 19th-century preacher C. H. Spurgeon spoke on I Peter 1:6 and the heaviness many people feel when faced with harsh circumstances. He said God often allows not just the harsh circumstances, but also the heaviness, sadness or depression that accompanies them, to bring us to the point where we realize our own resources are completed exhausted and we need Him, want Him, have to have Him simply to go on. Jesus Himself, in the Garden of Gethsemane, was permitted to experience this heaviness of heart and spirit, in part, so He could identify with our own weaknesses. Grace to endure was withheld for a moment, so He’d experience the fullness of what those feel like who are completely at the end of themselves. Referring to the chamber of affliction, Spurgeon says, “There are none so tender as those who have been skinned themselves.”

Echoing that thought, well-known Christian author and philosopher C.S. Lewis often said, “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts in our pain; it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”

So, if you simply don’t understand how this could be happening to you. If you’re feeling like you must have lost your way, like this can’t be happening, like God must have abandoned you on this rabbit trail leading to places you never wanted to go, think again. He’s never so close as when we’ve quit pushing Him away. He’s never so close as when we begin to discover once again that we can’t do this by ourselves, that we actually live by His grace and not our own strength. He’s never so close as when we’ve reached the end of our rope and realize that He alone is sovereign in the affairs of men. He’s never so close as when we kneel at His feet in our darkness and lack of understanding, acknowledge Him as the One who rules and reigns in our life and ask Him to direct our steps on this journey and use it and ourselves to the praise of His glory and to the blessing of others.

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