This time might just be an opportunity to weed out books I don’t need. That will be difficult. As far as I am concerned every book is a prisoner. Marie Kondo says unless you get a flash of joy when you handle something then you should get rid of it. What if every book gives you that? Yes it’s that bad. I’m sure a psychologist would regard me as a suitable case for treatment. Now and again, however, you might call to mind something you haven’t thought of for a while tucked away in a seldom disturbed corner of the study. I don’t know when I last took out Champion’s Story but in its day it was a high profile cancer story with the best of endings.
Bob Champion was one of Britain’s top five jump jockey’s when, in July 1979, he discovered he had cancer in two parts of his body. A particularly demanding course of treatment began that placed considerable pressure on all his resources and led to days of weakness and despair. He came through and eventually rode Aldaniti to triumph in the 1981 Grand National. As the strap line on the book says, it is the story of ‘A Great Human Triumph’. It later became an inspiring movie with John Hurt in the lead role. I think maybe that was a groundbreaker. I can’t remember a mainstream movie prior to that which told a cancer story.
Looking at my copy of the book I see I’ve marked off some passages. One concerns the time when Bob was so debilitated and discouraged he wanted to stop the chemotherapy. He is allowed to wander around the hospital to think things through and finds himself in the children’s ward. He speaks to some of the patients, some as young as three years old, bald from the effects of chemotherapy:
‘It was a very important lesson in my life. There was I moaning and groaning at the nurses and everyone, thinking only of myself, and downstairs those poor little kids were going through the same thing without complaining. Seeing them was a turning point for me. If they could take the treatment then so could I.’
Another passage takes us forward to the successful end of the treatment. Bob returns to the ward where he went through his worst of times:
‘I realise why the others don’t want to go back and I don’t blame them at all. But I know how much it would have helped if I had seen an example to encourage me. When you are lying there being sick every five minutes, fearing the worst, it must be a tremendous tonic to see someone who had come through it all looking well and healthy again. I know it would have made a big difference to me especially at the times I was close to giving up.’
What we are dealing with here is the potential of lived experience to make a difference to others. I remember visiting a lady in hospital who was to undergo an MRI scan. She was very anxious about it since she had a tendency to claustrophobia. I told her about my mother who had recently gone through this and managed to cope. Later with the experience behind her the lady told me that everything had gone well. She said: ‘I just kept remembering your mother.’ Knowing that someone had been there before her and come through had made a difference.
I have to say that in the number of MRIs I have had in the last few years my mother is never far from my mind. But there is Someone else whose presence I can realise. Whoever wrote the Letter to the Hebrews was deep with the Spirit. When he says ‘We do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathise with our weaknesses’ he may not have had MRIs, cancer or chemotherapy in mind but he speaks of our ‘weaknesses’, the things that make us feel less ourselves, that threaten to bring us to the end of ourselves. For the High Priest has been there, completely exhausted, to the extinguishing of life itself. So at the throne of grace we can receive everything that is needed for our worst of times. (Hebrews 4: 15-16)
I am grateful for people like Bob Champion who stand as an example of what can be endured and overcome at a human level. But how much more encouraging to know that I have a God who is Emmanuel, ‘God With Us.‘
