An Open Letter to Cancer

You have come in like a vengeance and stolen our lives. I see you, snaking you way through  our friends and family, like the serpent in the garden, tricking Eve just when she was most vulnerable and alone. I see you taking the spark from the eyes of those I love, holding us all hostage until the pain is so great and the body is so weak we just give in to your twisted way of life. I see you making him hurt, cry and vomit, setting us up for ultimate failure because no one on this earth can cure us of you.  I know you laugh at our attempts at normal, our defeats and our losses. I hear you mocking us in the night, when I sit on the edge of the bed and sob, at a loss and unable to cope.

I understand you think you have a job to do, but your boss is from the pit of hell, and he has no hope of overcoming this entire world as he plans. He lies to you, and he uses you to cause a divide among us. He manipulates your existence to try and drive us from our Father in heaven, the one true God. You see, your boss has promised you things he cannot deliver. He has promised you forever and he has promised you free reign. Neither of those things is his to promise, and he has lied to you once again.

I blame you, cancer, for uprooting our lives and making this earth seem like it is truly unbearable some days. I hold you fully accountable for being vengeful and merciless, infecting the best of men and turning them into all the weaknesses the flesh can imagine. I throw all the feelings of unfairness, grief and heartache right back onto your shoulders because you are the root of this evil that has spread among us. There is no amount of anger that can compare to what I am feeling right now about your existence. There is no amount of fear, frustration or brokenness that can compare to watching you work so quickly to ruin our lives on a such a grand scale.

I see the fight against you losing. I see people not surviving your trickery, not surviving our treatments of you, the poisons we must use because you are so vile. I see families using up all of their resources, being left with nothing in your wake, but loss and grief and brokenness. I see through your plan. I see through you. I can see your merciless game gaining speed and momentum. I see it in the eyes of those who suffer the consequences of your wrath. For just a moment, I want to tell you what else I see.

I see a future when Jesus casts you aside like the scum you are. I see a moment in time when those I love are made whole again because they are vindicated through a God who loves them. I see faithful servants smiling and laughing and living forever, without you in the picture. You will be so eradicated you won’t even be a distant memory. You will suffer all you have made us suffer and more. You will spend eternity suffering for the damage you caused us. I see my family, reunited and whole, without the pained looks on their faces, or the worry or the heartache. You will have to answer to every single fragment of pain you ever caused from the moment your existence began. Your boss will be angry with you for not completing his orders, and he will punish you as well. But nothing you do will matter because, in that moment, you will have the eternal, incurable fire that you so frequently dished out. You will feel the burn and hurt much more than you were ever able to inflict on us. We will be forever free from you.

That will be the best day of all.