Love Comes Back Around

I started this website simply to keep family and friends up to date regarding my current status and to relate my experiences. Before long, I started to receive emails that the website had provided some individuals with hope and inspiration. During this process, my efforts were rewarded when I met John Choate via an email. John is a most remarkable person. His attitude should serve as a benchmark for anyone facing cancer. He has provided me with great inspiration and hope and provides a testimony of God's grace.

In one email exchange I confessed I felt uncomfortable praying for myself. and compared my faith to St. Peter when he was walking on water to meet Jesus and became unsure. John's comments follow:

Morris, I don't think any of us start out feeling comfortable praying for
ourselves. People like us feel almost guilty because we know how imperfect
we are. In my case, I was only comfortable laying myself before the Lord and
repenting. Even at that, I felt really undeserving at first.

I finally realized the Lord had given me these extra days/months/years for a
reason and I would do my best to earn them by helping others. My
relationship with the Lord has changed mightily since then and I often find
myself having very long conversations with Him as I sit on a tractor, feed
cows, etc. Most of my "prayers", therefore, might not meet with the
approval of some denominations but have certainly brought me closer to the
Lord. I have finally reached that point where I truly view him as the best
"dad" in the world and there is no question that I cannot take to him for
help. That relationship makes it much easier to ask for help or guidance.

Just as Peter didn't drown, so will your faith stay fast and not fail you.
Now that my health is the center point of my life, the Lord's daily presence
is VERY strongly felt. There is no power on earth that can compete with that
power of having the Lord look over your shoulder and whisper instructions to
your subconscious.

In other words, quit worrying about whether or not your faith is strong
enough. The happenings in your life right now are making your faith even
stronger every day. The Lord has already chosen you to stay here and has
given you work to do. All you need to do is concentrate on that work and let
Him take care of the minor details---such as keeping you alive to do more.
And don't feel like you are unworthy. We are ALL unworthy but He has chosen
us to do his work for some reason. He knows all our personal flaws and chose
us anyway. We shouldn't question his tactics.

In a different email John relates a battle with chemo and how God intervened to kill two of his tumors:

I went and took the second dose of chemo yesterday. They had me hooked up on three very large bags. Now I get two weeks off to try to recover. And I'll need every minute of those two weeks. This stuff yesterday just stomped the heck out of me!! We stopped by and ate a nice lunch since I figured I wouldn't feel much like eating by yesterday evening. By 10PM my joints were all in misery. The best I could do for supper was a can of Boost. I never managed to sleep more than an hour at a time last night, and that was after taking all of the sleeping and pain pills. I feel a little better now, but not much.

I can't remember if I told y'all this so please bear with me. In all of these new tests and cat scans my Christian/duck hunter/bay fisherman lung specialist made a rather interesting discovery. The two primary tumors that I originally had (one in the top of each lung) are nothing but a scar tissue about the size of a silver dollar each now. These were the two that everyone expected to kill me in '98. The interesting part is that both tumors were still very dangerous long after they finished the radiation and chemotherapy in '98. About the best we could hope for is that they wouldn't grow any more. They were both rated as absolutely incurable and inoperable.

I think it is blatantly clear that the Lord killed those two tumors. I still have a lot of other ones in there, but these two were the "mean" ones back then. I have not taken any sort of cancer medications since late '98!!! Since I have so many tumors in there I'm not exactly "safe", but now I have great faith that this new "bad boy" in there will also get taken care of by the Lord.

Considering the situation both of you now find yourselves in, I didn't figure it would hurt your feelings any to hear that piece of news. My doctor just said, "Well, we both know it wasn't ME that killed 'em!"