Do Not Worry

The Bible tells us not to worry. Not about clothes or food or finances or your life or your body. Do not worry about anything. This week marked eight years since I finished treatment for breast cancer. In the immediate days following, I saw my surgeon for intense back pain. He nodded his head sadly and wrote me a prescription for morphine, so sure that the cancer was now in my bones that he wasn’t going to wait for the results of the bone scan he was ordering. Within days, I had my results. There was no cancer anywhere. The pain might have been caused by the radiation I’d just finished. I didn’t really get an answer to that. But I no longer had cancer.

I didn’t blame the doctor for thinking it had spread. I had been diagnosed by a very aggressive form of the disease and, as it turned out, I was also allergic to the only approved chemotherapy drug on the market made to target it. So allergic that within a few minutes of my first isolated dose I went into anaphylactic shock. I was told another dose would kill me. This reaction was so rare that the nurses with twenty years experience in our local hospital’s oncology ward had never seen it. Regardless, the cancer was gone and it has not returned.

In the eight years since my last treatment, I have married a wonderful man, become a step-mother to six children and have seen many grandchildren arrive to bless our family. I have had the opportunity to become a published author and see my books on store shelves. I have enjoyed Christmases with my new family in Manitoba and long kayak rides on Lake Superior and my first ever journey in a jeep over a very rocky trail near our home. God has not only healed me of cancer but He has given me a whole new life. He has continued to stay right by my side, teach me, guide me and lead me. I know I do not need to fear.

“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?

“And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these.  If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’  For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.” Matthew 6: 25-34 (NIV)