The nurse said to me: ‘How are you feeling? Rubbish?’ That’s how many people describe the chemotherapy experience. Rubbish. Something you don’t want, something to be discarded, something you want to be distant from. Most of what I am experiencing I thought I was prepared for but it’s one thing to hold it in your head and quite another to actually live it. I long ago came to the realisation that the Christian response is not just to grit your teeth and get on with it which is just as well because there are days when I feel I don’t have the strength to grit my teeth. But that is not a bad thing because it’s then that I am driven to follow the example of the Psalmist in one of his darkest days when he prays:
‘Let your face shine on your servant;
save me in your unfailing love.‘ (Psalm 31: 16)
He wasn’t just winding up all his natural resources but turning to the God he knows for his strength and his sense of purpose. David was a strong man but there were times when he was brought to the end of himself and realised that the strength he needed could only be found in the God he knew. That has to be the direction all believers must take. If God has come to us in Jesus, lived our life, dealt with our sin, defeated the power of death and promised His Spirit in every circumstance - then the way forward is to keep our lives firmly oriented towards this God. To make David’s prayer our own:
‘Let your face shine on your servant;
save me in your unfailing love.‘
It may not always work in the sense that power and peace surges in but while I am being still, meditating on the Word, enjoying the fellowship of friends I am reminded of the unfailing love that surrounds me however rubbish I may be feeling.
