The Evil That is Cancer
Writtten Wednesday, Dec. 28
I have returned from a two-day trek to Palo Alto where my niece Donna receives apheresis treatments at Stanford Cancer Treatment Center every other week. She must undergo two treatments per visit, the second not more than 36 hours after the first.
Every time I go, I am reminded of the dreadful toll cancer takes and the vast number of lives it touches in one way or another. The very nature of this disease which in all its variety of forms retains this similarity, healthy cells go astray, growing and behaving in aberrant ways, reproducing inappropriately, transforming wholesome tissue into something foul.
Now, isn't that just like sin? Unchecked, one sin leads to another, and another, ad infinitum... It will suck the freshness from your life and ultimately, like a sore that never heals, rob you of sensation. You become numb to it, calloused.
When I was in college, I worked as an O.R. scrub tech at LeBonheur Children's Hospital in Memphis. One teen we operated on was a strapping high school football hero who had a sore on his hip. The lesion didn't heal but wasn't particularly painful... so it was semi-ignored. Before long, the young man had an oozing hole in his hip. He kept it covered with a bandage and, being the busy and popular quarterback he was, decided to wait till after football season to have it checked. By then it had metastasized and when we opened him up, we found this beautiful specimen of young manhood was just full of cancer. He was dead within months.
Part of the evil of cancer is its insidiousness, and the same is true of sin. The more we expose ourselves to or participate in sinful thoughts, questionable activities, unwholesome entertainment or companions... the more we assault our sensitivities, the less we will "feel" the wrong. We become numb to those twinges of conscience and those "little white lies" become OK... before long, we don't give a second thought to things we might have thought we'd never do, think or say. Satan is quite adept as he sneaks sin into our lives...
BUT believers have an early warning system on board... the Holy Spirit! He will warn us in "that still small voice," but it is our responsibility to listen! Sometimes I am hard of hearing, how about you? Bible reading and prayer are a couple of good "hearing aids."
NOTE: I have received several comments lately and have yet to address them. I shall do that tomorrow morning.
I have returned from a two-day trek to Palo Alto where my niece Donna receives apheresis treatments at Stanford Cancer Treatment Center every other week. She must undergo two treatments per visit, the second not more than 36 hours after the first.
Every time I go, I am reminded of the dreadful toll cancer takes and the vast number of lives it touches in one way or another. The very nature of this disease which in all its variety of forms retains this similarity, healthy cells go astray, growing and behaving in aberrant ways, reproducing inappropriately, transforming wholesome tissue into something foul.
Now, isn't that just like sin? Unchecked, one sin leads to another, and another, ad infinitum... It will suck the freshness from your life and ultimately, like a sore that never heals, rob you of sensation. You become numb to it, calloused.
When I was in college, I worked as an O.R. scrub tech at LeBonheur Children's Hospital in Memphis. One teen we operated on was a strapping high school football hero who had a sore on his hip. The lesion didn't heal but wasn't particularly painful... so it was semi-ignored. Before long, the young man had an oozing hole in his hip. He kept it covered with a bandage and, being the busy and popular quarterback he was, decided to wait till after football season to have it checked. By then it had metastasized and when we opened him up, we found this beautiful specimen of young manhood was just full of cancer. He was dead within months.
Part of the evil of cancer is its insidiousness, and the same is true of sin. The more we expose ourselves to or participate in sinful thoughts, questionable activities, unwholesome entertainment or companions... the more we assault our sensitivities, the less we will "feel" the wrong. We become numb to those twinges of conscience and those "little white lies" become OK... before long, we don't give a second thought to things we might have thought we'd never do, think or say. Satan is quite adept as he sneaks sin into our lives...
BUT believers have an early warning system on board... the Holy Spirit! He will warn us in "that still small voice," but it is our responsibility to listen! Sometimes I am hard of hearing, how about you? Bible reading and prayer are a couple of good "hearing aids."
NOTE: I have received several comments lately and have yet to address them. I shall do that tomorrow morning.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home