Going through a challenging health journey, such as fighting an incurable cancer, with God holding you by your right hand (Psalm 73:23) strengthens your faith and teaches you to put your trust in God. We learn from our experience that God can be trusted in all things. As we go through adversity, we become alert to seeing His hand at work to deliver us from peril.
Early in my time at University of Michigan’s Sarcoma Center in their Cancer Hospital, I learned to always pray that God would put the best people in my path to provide the treatment I needed. I always had to get a blood draw before seeing my oncologist, which required careful access to the port on my chest where the blood draw would be taken. Having a compromised immune system meant that the person drawing the blood would need to observe the protocol very carefully in getting the blood sample.
I would always pray before I was called back that the person of God’s choosing would take the sample. The person doing the blood draw would come out to the waiting room to call out the name of the person he/she had been assigned. I learned to thank God on the way back to the blood draw that I had the assigned the right person, having learned to trust His choice even before the draw was done. Once, when my wife and I were waiting for me to be called back, the person’s appearance who called my name caused my wife to think “Oh, no! Not this person!” But I was thinking, “Thank you Lord for once again putting the right person in my path.” It had taken me many months of experiencing God’s providence in this before I trusted Him completely, no matter what the evidence suggested on first sight.
When I returned to the waiting room after the blood draw, I told my wife the phlebotomist was by far the most careful and accomplished person I had ever had to get the blood sample. This experience reinforced my trust in God. I was moving up the learning curve of my trust in Him.
