Those of you who are not spiritual might find all this uncomfortable and think I’m crazy. Those of you who are some version of fundamentalist or orthodox might find it offensive. But here goes...

I had a kind of premonition early this year that I would have breast cancer.

If I’d been right on schedule, I’d have gone for a mammogram in February. But I chose not to do that because I had airplane tickets and plans for a great vacation in Europe. Something inside me felt that if I got that mammogram, EuroTrip 14 would be cancelled because I would get bad news.

I prayed a lot before getting the mammogram, asking for normal results. But that’s not how it went. In the first week after my cancer diagnosis, I had a very hard time praying. I wasn’t sure what to pray for, given that I had obviously been ignored. I told my priest, Rev. Susan, that I figured God had felt more in the mood to hit the “Smite” button than answer my prayer. I told my mother that perhaps I'd been a Nazi in my last life or something. I said a lot of things.

I was very angry. I was terrified. I was walking a path I’d never wanted to walk.

Some people told me that God never gives you more than you can handle, but I reject that outright. Despite what I said to my priest about the “Smite” button, I do not believe that God dispenses misery to humankind for kicks or as punishment. God did not give me breast cancer as a trial or test or to pay me back for years of using profanity. I take the story of poor Job as a parable about faith, about how bad times get better. The idea of God making bets with arch-enemy Satan while allowing innocent men and women to be killed and a good man to be tortured to within a breath of his endurance is deeply offensive to me.

That kind of God is not a God of love.

Also, I do believe lots of people endure situations that are, in fact, more than they can handle. Ask the soldier whose PTSD drives him to suicide. Or the incest victim who dies of anorexia. Or the alcoholic meth user whose abusive childhood deprives him of the very strength he needs to rise above addiction.

Saying that we are never given anything more than we can handle is a subtle way of blaming those who cannot rise above their tragedy and anguish. It’s also a way for well-intentioned, caring people to comfort themselves.

I had no real risk factors for breast cancer. There are no obvious reasons why I have it. But God is not the cause of it. And yet God didn’t intervene and prevent this from happening either.

What does that mean? I have no idea.

There are times I’ve been able to see God in my life. Was this the absence of God in my life?

I guess that’s the question I was dealing with in the midst of this terror.

I don’t pretend to have the answers. But I do know God is. How do I know? Ask a Catholic what being “slain in the spirit” means or a Protestant what it means to have a “conversion experience,” because that’s what happened to me one afternoon. It was like thunder inside my heart and mind, and it blew me away. My spiritual life since then has been a clumsy struggle to respond to that one event.

So God Is. And I am because God Is. That’s what I kept repeating in my mind these past couple of weeks when my heart was slamming so hard that I could hear it and my stomach was churning and full of butterflies and I could think or pray nothing else.

With the initial shock behind me and a treatment plan slowly taking shape, I’ve been able to reach out again for God’s loving kindness. And here are my random thoughts, which are, of course, subject to change at any time.

This life is a gift. Life doesn’t belong to me. I have a very short amount of time to walk this earth in this body, and I can control so little of what occurs around me. I can’t even control what happens inside my own body. I hardly have control of my thoughts and certainly not my emotions.

Many things happen in life that are unjust and unfair. They are not God’s doing. But when people rise above those things and treat each other and themselves with compassion, that is the spirit of Love inside them. And God is love.

I’m not saying that God takes them over and makes them behave a certain way like spiritual zombies. I’m saying that they choose to be their God-given higher self. They choose to serve the Spirit. They choose to be the higher human being they were created to be.



That doesn’t mean they’re not afraid. Even Jesus was afraid. As the story goes, he asked his apostles to stay awake with him in Garden of Gethsemane, and they failed him. He even felt despair at the end.

For any woman to be afraid when diagnosed with a terrible disease is to be expected. I am trying to be strong, but I am also going to let myself be human. I have moments where I feel fine, and then I have moments of raw panic, where I can do little more than curl up in bed and cry. But then I get back up again.

What I’m trying to do, what I’m hoping to do, is to lay my fear aside and trust that, even if this doesn’t go the way I want it to go, I will still be okay. This is God’s world, not mine. I didn’t bring myself into it, and I don’t get to decide how I leave it. But I can trust that there are still things for me to do here, still ways my life can count, no matter how things go for me.

And I can trust that God is.

I’ve been sharing my daily experience with this devastating diagnosis on Facebook, hoping to urge women to get mammograms and hoping to demystify breast cancer a bit. In turn, the support from my friends and readers helps me keep going — and I truly have no choice but to keep going.

I’ve had a lot of pretty rotten things happen in my life, and I’ve used them in my writing. I’m sure it will be the same with breast cancer. I’ve always known I came into this world to be a voice for women. And now I will include this experience in that voice.

My surgeon and oncologist assure me that missing that February mammogram has not made my situation worse. I have a slow-growing tumor, and there’s no obvious sign of any spread. And I’m so grateful I have those two months of travel to hold in my heart while I go through this. Those memories will sustain me — as will prayer, God’s love, and the love and support of my family and friends.