Recently, I accompanied my neighbor to her doctor’s appointment. The experience inspired me to offer a seminary course suggestion: the seminary student should spend three afternoons a week for a semester in a cancer clinic waiting room with his mouth shut—witnessing the emotions of despair and bitterness—watching body language—listening to the expressions and reactions.

Some patients talk a lot, perhaps in nervous anticipation, but mostly they are quiet, seemingly lost in focused thought. People feel the weight of why they are there; common conversation often yields to silence. Cancer clinics have a way of making you measure your words.

Cancer clinics keep us grounded in a great reality—but the waiting room may have the added benefit of helping train pastors to ensure that his doctrine is always directed at people’s lifestyle—woe to the church that has a pastor with mere book knowledge. And yet all Christians have the wonderful and fearful privilege and responsibility of pointing others to Jesus Christ everyday.

If we genuinely have ‘eyes to see and ears to hear’, the cancer-clinic waiting room demonstrates that our lives are in fact, a vapor; that our days are all numbered; that God gives us life and breath and all things, and therefore, we are utterly dependent creatures.

The clinic waiting room reveals that sin is real and has a million tragic consequences; that pride is ugly and meekness is beautiful; that we are called to rejoice with those who rejoice, and weep with those who weep; that people are either saved or destroyed; that our sufficiency is
from Someone outside of ourselves; that God's grace is real —and that only through our Savior’s cross and resurrection, will cancer one day, be no more.

Our default instinct is to avoid pain, grief and sorrow by covering up with levity and leisure and all manner of distraction. Yet cancer clinics, adapting CS Lewis' phrase, can be God's megaphone to a chronically self-possessed people. The clinic waiting room can capture and prepare
the heart and mind, and allow the significance of God’s work in Christ Jesus to move an individual away from the numbing effects of the world—to pull him or her from cancer and death—and to look to the Source of life forever.

Upon hearing of the death of someone we know, we routinely ask: ‘how old was he’ or ‘how did she die’—in an effort to judge how we measure up in age or fitness. Someday we will die—but in only one of two ways—either in our sin, or in our faith. Cancer clinic waiting rooms can be a wake-up call to faith, yet so often our friends or relatives hit the snooze button and go back to sleep. Our Lord provides you and me with resource and opportunity to remind those near us to trust in the work and Person of Christ Jesus in every circumstance—including cancer clinic waiting rooms.

Mark Gade,
Chairman, the Board of Elders