I sat in a cushioned chair beside my wife’s hospital bed reading C. S. Lewis’s The Problem of Pain on the morning of August 15, 2002. Honestly, the pain was mine but it was more for my wife’s as she lay with bandages, tubes, and a morphine pump to ease the agony of the nine-hour surgery she had the day before.

C.S. Lewis says, “Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and existence of free wills involve, and you will find that you have excluded life itself.” Suffering invaded our lives so that the problem of pain had become personal. Life hurt.

The events leading up to my wife’s surgery shocked and stunned our family. My wife mentioned to me in passing one morning about a “lump” on her breast. “Go to the doctor. Get it checked,” I advised, thinking nothing of it. What surprised me was that the said she would get an appointment. A visit to the doctor does not rate high on her list of favorite things to do so I knew that she must be concerned about the lump.

On that June day when she told me about the lump, we were riding high on the crest of an exciting wave. I had been in England earlier in the year, we had walked through 16 years of ministry in the same church, our church was near the end of its invigorating relocation project, and family plans came together for our annual July trip for fun in the sun in Florida. After twenty years of marriage and a time of blessing from God’s hand we prepared in days to return from our vacation and move into our new building at church. God’s goodness overwhelmed. 

We went on vacation and returned with doctor’s appointments. Doctors confirmed what only we had whispered: my wife had breast cancer. One doctor told us it was the aggressive kind of cancer and needed to come out as soon as possible. My wife researched the Internet and to my surprise asked the surgeon about a double mastectomy and reconstruction.

“Judy, let’s talk about this,” I responded to her, not giving the doctor time to respond. He waited patiently and responded, “I think it’s a good idea.”

I am a pastor and I have read the Nouwen’s Wounded Healer, Swindoll’s For Those Who Hurt, Claypool’s Tracks of a Fellow Struggler, Westerberg’s Good Grief, and Dr. Seuss’s Oh! The Places You will Go! Still, not much prepared me for the place into which suffering pushes you. I am a pastor and I had ministered effectively to cancer patients, but now my wife was both a patient and a parishioner, albeit my flesh and blood, as well as God’s family.

The night before was intense: a nine-hour surgery, church members whom I will never forget in the darkness of that day, and the ride home full of tears, questions, and an attempt at explaining to my three teenage daughters that everything was going to be alright. Would everything be all right? Where will this pain lead us? Whose problem is the problem of pain, mine or God’s? “Is she going to die?” my youngest daughter asked.

C.S. Lewis says, “Our design is a less formidable one: it is only to discover how, perceiving a suffering world, and being assured, on quite different grounds, that God is good, we are to conceive that goodness and that suffering without contradiction.” As I looked over at my wife who on that August morning was pained, I found myself thinking about God. I cried.

Now almost two years later here’s what God taught me through cancer.

Darkness comes.