BLEUGH

It all feels a bit bleugh at the moment. Look at that word: bleugh. It’s the sound of vomit and helplessness. Sorry to have used it. Though it does convey a little about how everything just feels.

I hate cancer.

It’s got hold of a friend of mine. He beat it two and a half years ago, and now, unbelievably, after he got married and had a baby, it’s back, and it is spreading through his body. His last hope (this side of a miracle) is expensive treatment in the States. It’s horrid isn’t it? You wouldn’t wish it on anyone, but still it seems to grip the nicest, bravest, kindest people. Paul deserves a better future.

It’s a huge challenge to our faith. Why doesn’t God step in and do something? Why do prayers seem to fall so silent, unanswered like autumn leaves in spring? How can it be just and merciful to have the power to heal someone but then refuse to do it? I know. These are gigantic questions. Paul too, lost Heather to cancer in 2018, a year and a half before his own battle began. He had to face those questions then. He still has to face them, with his new family. I can’t imagine.

My wife understands this better. She went through it with her Mum. It’s a meteor crater in her history, a catastrophe too big to grasp through these starless skies. And now, there’s Paul and everyone who loves him, staring up, up and up, wondering those same gigantic things. Why? Why God? Why?

I guess there are a few responses we take. One is that we ignore the question and go on singing and praying like we always do. It is safe, faithful, familiar.

Another is that we steadily let the tinkling bell of atheism sound in our ears until we eventually find ourselves concluding that God must either be monstrous, or simply not there. Hideous, we know, chime the Dawkinses and the Gervaises and the Hitchenses - but inarguably true.

Both options seem like a shrug of the shoulders to me. Nothing we can do, old chap, get back to the jolly worship service; or, that cheery old nihilism at the bottom of the glass. It’s bitter dregs but boy the whisky was good while it lasted.

I hate cancer. No, specifically, I hate its shadow - the fear of it, the grief of it, the cost and the consequence. It just brings suffering.

But maybe that in itself is a bit of a key between the shoulder shrugs. Jesus, the one who left Heaven in favour of a smelly feeding trough, is described as the ‘man of sorrows’ in the New Testament. He knows this suffering. He knows the shadow and the grief. He’s with us.

I don’t know what will happen to my friend Paul. It is bleugh - all helplessness and vomit. I hope he makes it through, raises enough, gets the treatment. I also hope that God does a miracle so extraordinary that every newspaper in the land runs the story. But more than that, I think my hope is that the Man of Sorrows is with him, weeping and wiping tears, clutching white knuckles by hospital beds, asking the Father to rip open the sky and burst through. And while we wait for that glorious day, either the miracle or the end, my best prayer, the only one I have really, is for Jesus to be Immanuel - God with us.