"Can you imagine a life with without fear? What if faith, not fear, was your default reaction to threats?" - Max LucadoReceived this quote today in an e-mail from PrayFit, which was conceived of by my friend Jimmy Pena, to meet spiritual nourishment and physical development needs. Isn't what Max Lucado said so right? Without a doubt, Mr. Lucado, as his website says, 'loves words – written, spoken – it does not matter. He loves to craft sentences that are memorable, inspiring and hopefully life-changing' and these particular ones are powerful. Powerful because it really reflects what Dare to Live On is about in that it defines the combination of perspective and attitude needed to face adversity and not let it consume you.
I have had many talks since facing my biggest challenge in life thus far with all sorts of people about how does a person face a thing which is capable of causing crippling fear, or that is on its face absolutely hopeless, or impossibly bleak and/or terrifying. Can the simple answer of faith be it? What does that mean - to have 'faith' as the default reaction to threats?
Does it mean religious faith? Does it mean simply faith that the order of things work themselves out? Is it, in the case of a medical issue, faith that the progress in science is going to prevail? Nobody can point to a thing that says that it is THE ANSWER. Everybody, however, that faces the type of adversity I'm talking about - got consciously through that thing because they had faith as their default reaction.
At one critical point, as much in a sudden event like an unfolding life threatening accident as in a life-long battle against a fatal disease, the survivor decided that they would not let that circumstance become anything more than it was. The broken body, the psychological scars, the loss, the treatment, the rebuilding and rehabilitation - none of that can be changed. But the person that comes out of the other end of that process, that all depends on that simple faith.
Reacting with faith does not mean the fear is replaced however. One of the most important lessons learned of my own journey that is a daily war against an ultimate evil has been to realize that fear is just fear. My world, as a law-enforcement officer and as a survivor of an incurable cancer, has given me unique opportunities to talk to people who have faced life-threatening events about this concept that fear is just fear.
This is in no way meant to downplay the reality of any person's fears. In fact, fear may just be fear, but I have been a witness to its ability to destroy and even kill. And that is what prompted this blog entry - because, near as I can tell from my own experience and the experiences of those I've talked to, it is that faith that made us survivors.
A poignant example from my own experience comes out of the death of a younger man who literally entered the world of my particular cancer at the same time and same stage of disease as me. We, naturally, talked quite a bit. One of the exciting parts of having an incurable disease or irreversible degree of damage is that you find yourself in uncharted territory - much like the explorers of old - and therefore you are bombarded with options because nobody has yet come up with the answer and there are as many theories as there are people thinking about your predicament.
So here we were, this young man in his late 20's and me in my late 30's, faced with exactly the same diagnosis and options. Both of us HAD to do chemotherapy. But, for as bad as the disclaimers you hear for drugs on advertisements are, this chemotherapy regimen is unique. Unique, I would come to find out, in that it is one of the few times a doctor in any field finds himself in a position of prescribing something that is statistically more likely to cause death than prolong life. As I said, for the variety of cancer and stage that this young man and I presented with, chemotherapy was a given in the way that jumping over Niagara Falls to flee fire is.
Fear becomes a part of life when you go down certain paths, and this was one of those paths. My friend and I had no idea that the pain of things like bone marrow biopsies would be the "easy" part. We began our chemotherapy on literally the same day. And here is where the faith part comes in and the reason I say that fear is just fear and fear can kill. The chemotherapy regimen we embarked on was unpleasant. It is actually designed to all but kill you down past the mapping that occurs in your DNA in order to, the theory goes, erase the body's memory of the chromosomal hiccup that results in this particular cancer. And, for probably the first time I've ever said this, you feel like you are being killed from the inside by something that you cannot get away from. Hard to describe beyond that.
This regimen comes to a decision point after four of the basically month-long rounds. At four rounds there are two predominate schools of thought on treatment for our cancer. On the one hand, you can stop the chemotherapy and opt to undergo a bone marrow transplant using your own cells. The other choice is to try to complete as many more rounds of the chemotherapy as you can up to the theorized maximum of eight rounds. For those of you with mantle cell lymphoma reading this, I have to put in here that there is no agreed upon answer or proof yet on whether one way or another is better.
In the case of my friend and I it is here that I think the matter of faith became the difference of life and death. And it is here where fear killed my friend. As we approached four weeks two things happened for my friend. First, he became dominated by the fear of continuing the chemotherapy rounds. He absolutely convinced himself that he would not survive another chemotherapy round. And, before I go on, I can't pretend to know that he would have. Going into this chemotherapy you know the risks and, even as you begin the rounds, you are plugged into a community and resources where you have already learned and watch as others die even as they begin these particular chemotherapy rounds.
This first thing, being dominated by the fear, led to the second thing for my friend - he decided to make a decision not because of what he believed would be better for him but because of what he feared he could not face.
That said, I am thoroughly convinced and as my friend died he told me, it was his fear of continuing the chemotherapy that killed him. And I knew then, and more so now, that the only thing that can replace the reaction of fear is a reaction of faith.
Dare to live on.
I encourage everyone to check out PrayFit.
