Living With Cancer

There is nothing easy about following Jesus. Any person Jesus calls He calls to death, as He died - death to self. No believer ever completely dies though, because there is that thing residing in every human that fights submission in all forms. It is the right to life as we please and choose, the right, as the Addams' Family Remix goes, to:

Do what we wanna do
Say what we wanna say
Live how we wanna live
Play how we wanna play
Dance how we wanna dance
Kick and we slap a friend...

Admittedly, it is easier to talk about the arrogant lowlife you just can't stand behind her back and wallow in feelings of schadenfreude when she breaks out in a rash that makes her face blow-up, or loses her job or gets dumped by her lower-life boyfriend instead of compliment her for what's good about her; It's easier to push the "instantly to voicemail" button on your phone when that annoying, needy, talkative friend that insists on telling you every detail of his mundane existence calls to tell you about the variety of vegetables he purchased at the supermarket last week; It's easier to pretend you don't notice the dishes in the sink and let your roommate wash them...again; It's easier to tell your family that unfortunately there is absolutely no cake left and then gorge on the gigantic piece you hid for yourself in the back of the fridge when they all go to bed; It's easier to yell and scream and throw a tantrum when someone offends you than to patiently hear the opposing perspective; It's easier to give an incompetent driver the bird instead of a friendly wave; It's easier to give the homeless person on the corner the number to a Job Hotline than lunch; It's easier to read books about imaginary people rather than deal with real ones; It's easier to cut ties with an insensitive loser you mistook for a friend than fight for a worthwhile relationship; It's easier to say "shut the fuck up" to a culturally illiterate ignoramus who tells you that you are unusually smart for a black person rather than just smile and walk away; It's easier to pretend you didn't notice that the cashier didn't charge you for the Snickers you added to the conveyor belt last minute; It's easier to drive just fast enough so that that car that's had its blinker on for a quarter mile can't merge into your lane; It's easier to resent than to love; It's easier to step on weak someones in pursuit of your own happiness than help them in the direction of theirs; It's easier to be selfish than selfless; It's easier to give in to what we naturally are, however dysfunctional, than to conform to a higher standard.

I cannot help but wonder what makes me so inclined to be wicked...

Living as a follower of Jesus is to have help living. It's me understanding that I have many problems that have origins in a part of me that I can neither reach, nor fix. As I am, I am ruled by what I feel; what I feel, however, often distorts reality.

Thanks to sin, humanity as it involves desire, appetite and feeling is now like a cancer. There is nothing wrong with desire, appetite and feeling by themselves, because they make us human beings. Cancer cells, in like manner, are by themselves good, life-sustaining elements of our existence.

The problem is when good things malfunction.

Cells begin to proliferate out of character and out of control, against imperatives issued by the brain. They operate at a high level of dysfunction and then take over the human body, eventually killing the host. Likewise, Love becomes lust, self-love becomes hatred, pride becomes arrogance, anger becomes abuse, hunger becomes ravishing greed, pain becomes malice, etc. These things, left unchecked and unregulated, damage people, causing them to distort, corrupt and self-annihilate. And so, now, we live in a world with third world countries and urban ghettos, drought and famine, gun possession, slavery and starvation, war and bloodshed, extravagance and poverty and 10,000% profit, prostitution and exploitation, gluttony and incarceration, racism and genocide, drug overdoses and husbands beating their wives, failed marriages, broken homes and boys and girls living without fathers. This is the world cancer has created.

Jesus (represented in the presence of the Holy Spirit), therefore, is the treatment for the human cancer, sort of like an antidote that overrides abnormal cell proliferation. The Jesus vaccine does not completely eliminate the cancer cells, though, at least not in this lifetime. Instead, he gradually carries a person through a healing process that begins with regulation and moves towards wholeness.

So, believers in Jesus are nothing more than sinners just like everybody else, who have chosen to accept the free "vaccine" offered by God, a treatment powerful enough to control abnormal expressions of what He created to be good in the first place. The Holy Spirit living in each patient, guiding and convicting each patient, is disease regulation.

Thank Heavens! :)

The problem, though, is that most people don't know that they're sick...