Uncovering the measure of time in cancer's wake

Time occupies my thoughts most often in the quiet solitude of early morning as I gear up for the day ahead. During my work week as a lawyer, I operate in a world that is measured in units of time for which I am accountable to clients and co-workers alike. Every moment is documented so that my contributions might be quantified. At the end of the fiscal year, I review spread- sheets measuring revenues as well as hours invested in mentoring and training. But the burden of this time-keeping is perhaps different for me than for many of my colleagues. I send emails and draft documents from the waiting room at the oncologist’s office as I await news as to whether my cancer has returned or whether I’ll need another surgery. Time is not simply revenue and investment for me; it is life. It is also loss.

When I was first diagnosed with cancer, time stood still as I was told what the treatment plan would involve. I was afraid, and I wanted to know how long I had. Given the mortality rates for my particular cancer, I was told that the likelihood of my living two years was not great. The likelihood of my living five years was verging on the odds of winning the lottery. Nevertheless, seven years after my initial diagnosis, I am alive and living in cancer’s wake. I am seeing time as a gift but also a reminder of things that have been taken from me, such as time with my dad as he was passing away from complications from his own cancer treatment, or my body, which has been changed by cancer treatment. I am alive and yet not the same.

Even with the gift of more time, I face strange and unexpected losses that cause me to worry, both professionally and personally, about time passing me by. In that place of worry, I realize that the answer is not simply squeezing all I can out of today or even fixating on the brevity of life. Instead, I need God’s help to better understand time so that I might learn how to measure my days, know that life is fleeting, and see time as a gift from God for his will and purposes, and not for my own. Slowly, I am coming to know God as the Keeper of Time and realizing that he is the one who redeems yesterday, gives strength for today, and promises bright hope for tomorrow.

REDEEMING YESTERDAY

Yesterdays are all the days that have been before. They are comprised of the experiences that have made us who we are, each one bending and shaping us, sometimes breaking us. Aristotle’s philosophical perspective on time rings true, that time is essentially a record of change in respect of before and after. When I look back at my yesterdays, my before—before cancer, before I became a Christian—I see the presumptuous confidence of youth, so assured of my control over my future. But my after has been irrevocably changed both by the lessons of my Christian faith and by my life experiences.

For many of us, our yesterdays are painful because we have met obstacles that we could neither foresee nor avoid. Further, despite the cheery insistence some offer, time does not heal all of yesterday’s wounds. The reality is that some experiences, like sickness or injury, leave us physically weakened, slightly less than we were, with the pull of inflexible scar tissue reminding us of the limitations of our new normal. Trite words, designed to hurry along grief and silence suffering, have failed to comfort my broken heart when remembering has brought me face-to- face with the memories and decisions of yesterdays that I replay over and over. I know the fresh grief brought about by birthdays, anniversaries and holidays —the festivals of ordinary living. In this way, the pain of yesterday is both past and ever-present.

Instead of denying the reality of a broken world and broken bodies, the Bible confronts it. It acknowledges that sometimes our wounds are as deep as the sea and that sometimes our yesterdays leave us crippled and wounded—a bit like Jacob after his wrestle with God. The Bible, as it tells the story of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, offers us hope that God had his own yesterday of grief and pain every day that he walked the earth and then on the cross as he shared in humanity’s suffering. But the Christian faith doesn’t stop there. It weaves a redemption story through all human history and I have seen this in my own life.

My faith tells me that the pain of my yesterdays, while not being itself good or something to be desired, can be used for good today. It can be redeemed. My painful yesterdays have helped me to develop a deeper empathy for others and a desire to comfort the broken- hearted as I have been comforted by friends and family. My painful yesterdays can encourage others when I bear witness to say that my faith has carried me through the darkest of times.

My redeemed yesterdays have taught me that pain is not meaning- less or the result of a chaotic universe. Rather, I have seen that the sovereign God, the great I Am, can put my pain to work if I let him help me to keep the bitterness at bay. Because he is not constrained by time, because he exists in the ever-present now, he transforms the past grief of yesterday into the good work meant for today.

STRENGTH FOR TODAY

In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera writes, “A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person.” I am often such a person, always wishing that time would move along at my desired pace, letting unspoken complaints steal my joy and gratitude for the life that I have today. I have to accept that time moves at God’s pace, and not my own, which would be more akin to the exhausting beat of a hummingbird’s wings.

Still, whenever I’m in the middle of one season, I find myself longing for another season to begin. The biting cold of a Canadian winter makes me impatient for the hopeful green shoots of spring. The spring rain leads me to imagine the summer sun. The humidity of summer, which curls my hair and dampens my brow, leaves me dreaming of the coolness of fall. If yesterday is often characterized by grief, today seems always to be characterized by yearning, by striving for a particular something.

Dissatisfied. Grumbling. Ungrateful. Just like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Growing up, I prayed countless prayers asking God for daily bread. Now I see that I never actually wanted daily bread but rather weekly bread with pre-scheduled deliveries and a back-up supplier. (Or, better still, I wanted the ingredients and means to bake my own bread.) I don’t like the itchiness of vulnerability, and I (like all humans) strain against surrendering to the knowledge that all things come from him in his wisdom and at his appointed time.

Yet God knows all this about me because no part of me is hidden from him. He sees me, straining against surrender, and invites me to trust him today. To trust in his faithfulness, timing and provision. Through his Word, he calls me to trust in the promise that his goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life—however long this life may be, and even when I do not understand.

And when I finally let go of trying to control everything, like every Christian, I have a taste of the peace that meets me today, even in the uncomfortable place where cancer might return and we bury loved ones still a long way from old age. It is a peace that is not predicated on everything going my way, but it is a peace that allows me to be still: not passive, but still, filled with the knowledge that God is everything that I need today and that he has always given me what I needed, which has often been the opposite of what I wanted.

And in that peace, I am able to rest today knowing that everything is not dependent on me. I am seen and known by him who binds up the broken- hearted and quiets me with his love. He who collects our tears in jars, even those we cry in the seeming anonymity of night, helps us to look forward to the eternal peace of tomorrow.

BRIGHT HOPE FOR TOMORROW

In the Marvel movie, Doctor Strange, The Ancient One (the problematic character played by Tilda Swinton) says, “Death is what gives life meaning. To know that your days are numbered. Your time is short.” This is partly true as the spectre of death gives an urgency to the lightness of today because the thought of death is really a thought of tomorrow—of after. All that has been is moving towards all that will be: time moving toward an end full of hope. As a follower of Jesus, I believe his death is what really gives life meaning because it has opened up a new tomorrow: an eternity with him.

Tomorrow is both a time and a destination, an end and a beginning. It is the time after all of this has ended, after we have come to the end of ourselves and to the very end of time itself. The Bible teaches that Christ has come and that Christ will come again, and that with that second coming, Jesus will usher us into our final destination—a time of shalom, which is to say a deep, abiding experience of unshakeable peace and rest. In this New Heaven and New Earth where tears will be no more, we will finally see what this present time, this present Earth, could have been. Mourning will be turned to dancing. Scars will serve as beautiful testimonies of his faithful love. Cancer will be defeated. Worries will cease and along with them, regret and shame. We will finally see God and know that, though he provided daily bread, he was always everything that we needed.

This passage from Paul’s second letter to the church in Corinth encourages me to look forward to that eternal tomorrow:

“So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light and momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.”

In learning how to measure our days, the Christian faith teaches us we are all destined for an eternity of tomorrows—this time that is not present or seen but is instead promised. (Theologically, we call this stretch of eternal time the “eschaton”). In this way, according to Christian faith, time is not only fleeting, it is enduring. To believe in the permanence of time, and not simply its brevity, is to imbue life today with meaning and purpose as well as to look forward.

Time-bound creatures that we are, ours is a hope deferred. Life itself is a gift from the Keeper of Time, and with confidence in his care, we can yield our need for control—even in the valley of the shadow of death.

Text: Patience Omokhodion
Photography: Wasim Hossain