Faith and Cancer

Last week the family travelled up North to attend the funeral of a family member who has recently died of cancer. It was a different type of cancer to mine. He faced it bravely, but in the end it was just too aggressive and too far gone for medicine to have its effect. It seems that more and more as I live this life, cancer reaches out and gives me a slap on the face - it may be from close up or from further away, but it makes its presence felt. A number of things have been whirling through my mind as I was thinking about what to include in this blog post. Should I talk about how allowing children to attend funerals, such as they did at this one, is not only a good thing, but also a healthy way of helping them to navigate and deal with living? Should I speak about how cancer survival rates continue to improve, but yet there are still many that don't make it? Should I speak about the power of family and the gentle support that they can provide in difficult times of grief?

Last week I sent off a couple of submissions of my draft manuscript that recounts my journey with faith and cancer (Stage 4 non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma) from diagnosis through treatment to remission and beyond. I am part of a supportive Christian Writer's Group who has quite an active online community. So I just briefly posted in the Facebook Group that I had sent in submissions to publishers and asked for prayer. Someone then asked what the book was about - so as a very brief way of summarising something quite complex in just a few words I said: This led to someone private messaging me with a question, asking me why I had used the word 'battle' to describe my experience of living with cancer. I then got a private message from someone else who has sadly been diagnosed with cancer for a second time. She quite rightly questioned my use of the word 'battle'. This was a very good question! I replied and explained that in this instance, a quick p