To Live and to Fight Under the Word
September 2018
As Connie, Gib, and I step into the hospital elevator and push the button for radiology, the display above the doors reveals that we are headed somewhere below the basement level. I’m not sure if it’s protocol for all hospitals, but it makes sense to me that best practice for machines that produce radiation would be to keep them underground.
As we step out of the elevator into the waiting room, I hear myself suck in a deep breath of air. I don’t remember ever releasing it.
Connie senses my inability to speak and checks me in at the desk. We grab three seats in what can only be described as a ghastly waiting area. I feel as if I’m looking at scenes from all my favorite postapocalyptic Hollywood movies: Riddick, Book of Eli, Godzilla (the original). There’s a man in a wheelchair to my left who has either passed out, fallen asleep, or worse. He has what appears to be a simple black tattoo on his neck, which resembles a target. The flesh on his legs, exposed beneath an oversized hospital gown, is hideous shades of gray and magenta. Connie has seen my expression and gives my leg a squeeze, offering reassurance. For the first time since we met twenty-eight years ago, her touch startles me and produces a terrible uneasiness. She squeezes again.
“Honey, please stop. I can’t . . . I’m sorry,” I say.
After two surgeries, chemotherapy, and ADT, the follow-up protocol up to this moment had been to travel from Los Angeles to MD Anderson in Houston every three months for scans. These always included a CAT scan and MRI of my pelvis and a bone scan (using a radioactive isotope). The first two trips were all clear. During the third, the doctors believed they saw one, maybe two, lymph nodes light up in my pelvis, signifying disease. This triggered yet another nuclear scan that, according to the radiologist, “confirmed” the two nodes as possible cancerous metastases.
The recommendation? Go back into my pelvis with another twelve-inch biopsy needle and try to pull out a sample of the nodes. I said no.
The next idea was to schedule a meeting with a top radiation oncologist back in Los Angeles and have him create a plan for treatment, and that’s what we did. We are now in his waiting room, which is filled to capacity with poor souls who look like survivors of some global disaster.
The radiation oncologist presents an aggressive treatment plan. He would “carpet-bomb” (my words) my pelvis with thirty-seven focused radiation treatments over a seven-week period. They would start with a 3-D scan of my pelvis, and then the machine would circle my pelvis and irradiate my entire pelvic region, destroying all of the lymph nodes in that area along with any healthy tissue within range.
When I ask about contraindications (collateral damage), I once again hear a doctor’s voice soaked in reverb as he goes through the list: nausea, diarrhea, possible incontinence, and possible permanent loss of sexual function; a chance of damage to the bowel and bladder and potential neuropathy. As usual, my subconscious mind offers me a metaphor courtesy of an epic movie. This time it’s a scene from the movie 300.
A Persian messenger has arrived in Sparta to tell the Spartan king, Leonidas, that the Persian god-king, Xerxes, wants an offering from the Spartans. Leonidas is resistant and the messenger can sense this. “Choose your next words wisely,” says the messenger, “for they may be your last.” As Leonidas ponders the certain annihilation of his people that will come with declining the messenger’s demands, he glances back at his queen for her counsel. Her nod is nearly imperceptible, but it’s enough for Leonidas. He and his queen are of one mind. Leonidas slays the messenger and sets in motion one of the greatest underdog battles in history, the Battle of Thermopylae.
The familiar scene is playing out once more, in real time, for Connie and me. Because what none of these doctors know is that while Connie and I agreed to undergo the tests upon which the aggressive treatment plan is based, we had actually begun a more effective way to cure the disease and were set to go down that path with full faith and total resolve. How could we not? We were sure in our hearts that I was healed.
In the exam room, Connie, Gib, and I listen intently to the doctor go over his plan one more time. We hear and catalog all the risks. Then I turn from the doctor and find Connie’s eyes. In an instant we measure the challenge brought by this messenger. With an eyebrow flash and a nod, we are done. The biggest decision of our lives passes between us in seconds and lands with a firm conviction. Connie and I had not only been mated for life, we are now equally yoked with our stand on the Scriptures’ promise for my healing.
Faith in God presents a fascinating conundrum. So many of us have faith, but when doubt and unbelief creep in, our faith is the first thing to be compromised. Protecting your heart from the sinister attacks of unbelief takes practice. Training. It’s a constant struggle during normal, daily challenges, but it can be a more desperate, pitched battle when the stakes are high. Life-and-death high.
That’s where I am in my mind. I’m in the bunker along the front lines with night-vision goggles, straining to spot the enemy. Like Captain Kirk, on the bridge of the USS Enterprise, barking out the command to divert all of his ship’s power to the shields. My faith is my shield. My scriptures are my phasers, set to more than stun.
So, what do I have faith for? Is it faith for what will come out of the doctor’s mouth, what the machines say? Or is it faith for what’s in Psalm 118:8: “It is better to trust in the LORD than to put confidence in man”? Or maybe 1 Peter 2:24: “By [his] stripes you were healed.” Or perhaps for what Jesus promised in Mark 11:23–24:
For assuredly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, “Be removed and be cast into the sea,” and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that those things he says will be done, he will have whatever he says. Therefore I say to you, whatever things you ask when you pray, believe that you receive them, and you will have them.
Connie, Gib, and I all have that scripture tattooed on our bodies. But do we wholeheartedly believe its promise? Yes, we do. When we got my first terminal prognosis three years earlier, we had faith for the plan the surgeons and oncologists had put together. We had faith that God trained brilliant physicians and that they had removed the cancerous tumors. But when the first biopsy came back from the lab at UCLA, I didn’t have enough faith or understand enough scriptures to conjure up a healing back then. At that point, my faith was in the doctors. That’s where most of us land in the natural world. But my cancer kept coming back. If we were to manifest God’s healing, Connie and I needed to fully understand the meaning and the scope of Mark 11:23, John 14:12, and even Psalm 118:17: “I shall not die, but live, and declare the works of the LORD.”
Once we did, we became different people.
Connie and I now pray differently. We do not beg God. We accept the healing and the authority already given to us. We do not plead our case. Rather, we express our gratitude for the gift that is promised in the new covenant. Understanding the nature of Jesus was a revelation. We are communicating daily with the Holy Spirit and meditating on the authority given to us in the scriptures specific to healing.
Connie and I had witnessed miraculous healings. We were encouraged. We became committed. Steadfast. We had renewed our minds and connected to the supernatural promise of healing. We know that God’s wish and desire is that we prosper and be in health (3 John v. 2). God wants us to be world overcomers (1 John 5:5).
As powerful as the healing power that resides within the Word is, equally powerful is our ability to neutralize the promise of health and wellness when we speak death over ourselves. Our words are powerful. With our words we can release life or we can release death. There is an awesome, positive power in our words. There is also the potential for negative power. When we whine and gripe and complain, we release the negative forces of unbelief into our bodies and out into the world. That’s why we believe and live by Mark 11:23: “Whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be removed and be cast into the sea . . .’”
The mountain is our problem. If you are sick, speak to your sickness. Command it out of your body in the name of Jesus. As Andrew Wommack has so brilliantly put it, “The Bible says to speak to your problem, yet most people speak to God about their problem.” Amen.
My process during the writing of this book has been to complete a rough draft of each chapter and then, rather than send it to the editor, have Connie read the chapter aloud to me while I take notes. It’s incredibly revealing and helpful to hear the words you’ve had in your head read by someone else. Someone you trust.
One evening, late in the writing process, Connie and I were enjoying dinner in New York City at one of our favorite Italian restaurants, Il Gattopardo. Connie was reading this very chapter to me at whisper-level from off my phone. At the very moment she spoke the words, “Whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be removed and be cast into the sea,’” an Italian waiter stopped in his tracks, smiled, and said in his thick accent, “Mark 11:23!” and then moved on. Our mouths fell to the floor.
“Wait! Hello? Come back?” Connie called after him.
Tazianno was his name. He returned to our table with a smile, and for the next forty-five minutes he erupted in conversation with his love for the healing scriptures. He prayed with us and agreed with our belief that I was healed. He told of his experiences speaking in tongues. Time stood still. It was a divine meeting. We had decided to come to this restaurant at the last minute on our way to our hotel. My phone had 2 percent of its battery remaining when Connie began reading. It shut down moments after she finished. And Tazianno was not even our waiter! He had to pass the table at the exact instant Connie whispered those life-affirming lines.
Tazianno told us, “My life changed forever when I unlocked these powerful scriptures: 1 Peter 2:24 and Mark 11:23.”
“Thank you for your time, Doctor,” I said as Connie, Gib, and I rose and headed toward the door of the radiation oncology exam room. “We truly appreciate your time and all the detail on the radiation protocol. We have plenty to think about.”
“Of course,” he said. “I’ll get with your oncologist on the phone and fill him in on our meeting. We will need to have you come in for a preliminary CAT scan prior to your first round of radiation. We want to be able to map your pelvis for the future treatments.” I nodded and let the door close between us. Moments later we were rising in silence together in the elevator, out of the sub-basement and into the hospital lobby.
Connie spoke only one line of scripture. It was 1 Peter 2:24: “By whose stripes you were healed.”
And in that moment faith was born, in earnest, from our hearts and our minds into our actual physical lives. Faith in divine healing.
I stepped out onto the street. The California sunshine poured mercifully down on my face. The only kind of radiation I would expose myself to ever again. Because I knew that I knew that I knew, with the deepest conviction, that I was healed.
I shall not die, but live,
And declare the works of the LORD.
—PSALM 118:17