Death, Where Is Your Sting?

This week, three years ago, my oncologist confirmed what we had seen on my scans a few weeks prior - my cancer had returned and was now in my spine. As soon as I had read the radiologist's report, I looked up the unfamiliar words online - "osseous metastasis," "pathologic fracture" - and realized I now had stage four breast cancer, metastatic breast cancer, incurable breast cancer, terminal breast cancer.

I'd never known anyone with stage four breast cancer, but I knew that some cancers kill within months. Google had the stat I was looking for: average life expectancy = three years. Not months, but not many years for a 35-year-old, either. I wasn't even going to make it to my 40th birthday.

That is what I thought then. I didn't think I'd live to see today. Because today is more than three years from my diagnosis. I beat the statistic! (If you've studied the enneagram, you understand how happy this makes a Three like me. LOL.) And, praise God, I'm still on my first treatment.

As a refresher, metastatic breast cancer is treated differently than early stage breast cancer. Early stage gets the big guns - usually a cocktail of different IV chemos that take you to the brink of death, but ultimately let you live. End stage approaches treatment differently. It's a given that you're going to die; they just want to keep the cancer from growing and spreading further for as long as possible. They also want to maintain a good quality of life, so you don't get the miserable IV chemo until there is nothing else to offer you. They start you on a treatment course and pray your body takes a long time to figure out how to become immune to it. Eventually, though, it will stop working and then they switch you to another drug that targets the cancer in a different way. You keep doing this until there are no more drugs to try. And then you die. So to still be on my very first treatment, three years in, is amazing! Every day beyond the three-year prognosis seems like bonus time to me.

I plan to celebrate this in a huge way. Why should all my friends and family come to my funeral when they could come see me while I'm alive? So I'm throwing myself a party. A time to celebrate life and friendship and God's goodness. I read this verse a week ago and have claimed it for this time: "I will not die, but I will live and proclaim what the Lord has done" (Ps. 118:17).

Every day we are given is a gift from God. He knows all the days ordained for us and has planned each one. For now, He has seen fit to grant me more time on earth and we are thankful. I still may not make it to my 40th birthday; it's over a year away. If I don't, that will be a gift, too; one that is harder to acknowledge as good, but a gift nonetheless.

How can I say that? How can dying young be a gift? How can God be good when there's cancer and suffering and death? Because those things don't win. Death doesn't get the final say. Sure, it will seem for a while like death wins. Even Jesus died and was buried. But He didn't stay in the tomb. He came back to life! We have a God who beat death! And now that death has been beaten, it is permanently defeated. It will not hold me forever; I will be raised to new life, just as you can be.

We've been singing this song at church the past few weeks and it feels like an anthem for this time:

Praise the King (song info)
There's a reason why the curse of sin is broken
There's a reason why the darkness runs from light
There's a reason why we stand here now forgiven
Jesus is alive
There's a reason why we are not overtaken
There's a reason why we sing on through the night
There's a reason why our hope remains eternal
Jesus is alive
Praise the King, He is risen
Praise the King, He's alive
Praise the King, death's defeated
Hallelujah, He's alive
Hallelujah, He's alive
There's a reason why our hearts can be courageous
There's a reason why the dead are made alive
There's a reason why we share His resurrection
Jesus is alive, oh, He's alive
The grave could not ignore it when all of heaven's roaring
Hell, where is your victory? Death, where is your sting?
The world cannot ignore it when all the saints are roaring
Hell, where is your victory? Death, where is your sting?
Praise the King, He is risen
Praise the King, He's alive
Praise the King, death's defeated
Hallelujah, He's alive
Hallelujah, He's alive

Of course, I cry when I sing this. It isn't easy thinking about impending death. But I do not grieve without hope. I thumb my nose at death. It doesn't get the final say. So please, come celebrate with me! Everyone is invited, even if we've never met and you're just a lurker on my blog. Let's get together and celebrate the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. Let's make more memories! Just contact me using the form on the right and I will send you all the details.