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Cancer’s Unexpected Blessings: My Thoughts on Tony Snow’s Essay

by Karen Lynch on July 22nd, 2008

I received an email from my mother yesterday that included a copy of the essay written by former White House Press Secretary Tony Snow before he died (on July 12, 2008). The title of the essay was ‘Cancer’s Unexpected Blesings’.

My mom prefaced the essay with a note about how beautiful it was; she’s an ovarian cancer survivor so the two of us share a common point of view when it comes to life and living. So I read the essay and could relate instantly to what Mr. Snow was stating. And, I wanted to talk about it.

(For legal reasons, I can’t include the essay in its entirety here. You can certainly read it at Christianity Today | A Magazine of Evangelical Conviction) but I’ll give yo a few meaningful snippets so you get the gist over here if you’d prefer to stay put.

When I read the essay, this was the first line that struck me:

“We don’t know how the narrative of our lives will end, but we get to choose how to use the interval between now and the moment we meet our Creator face-to-face.”

Seriously … we do get to choose. No matter how short or long that interval is, we can decide how we want to live those days. Before cancer, I’m not sure I lived my life with the acute awareness of how I was living that I have now. Each day I make deliberate choices as to how I spend my time, where I spend my time, and who I spend my time with. As a survivor, those choices are of the utmost importance.

Here are the words that resonated next:

“We want lives of simple, predictable ease, - smooth, even trails as far as the eye can see, - but God likes to go off-road. He provokes us with twists and turns. He places us in predicaments that seem to defy our endurance and comprehension - and yet don’t. By His love and grace, we persevere. The challenges that make our hearts leap and stomachs churn invariably strengthen our faith and grant measures of wisdom and joy we would not experience otherwise.”

I feel so blessed to have such a strong faith. I feel so blessed to have had the lightbulb go off on how to prioritize my days. I feel so blessed to have been able to recognize the joy in humility, in receiving loving care from others, in the mere act of surviving something that was beyond my control.

And this one:

“Your quandary has drawn you closer to God, closer to those you love, closer to the issues that matter, - and has dragged into insignificance the banal concerns that occupy our ‘normal time.’”

For me the issues that matter are matters of love, marriage, family, motherhood and friendship. In fact, I often wonder if anything else matters in life at all?

Finally:

“Through such trials, God bids us to choose: Do we believe, or do we not? Will we be bold enough to love, daring enough to serve, humble enough to submit, and strong enough to acknowledge our limitations? Can we surrender our concern in things that don’t matter so that we might devote our remaining days to things that do?”

Do you believe? Will you be bold enough, daring enough, humble enough and strong enough? Can you surrender?

(Image: Newscom)

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