How do we navigate terminal illness?
Two devastating words, spoken to me by different people in the same week of December 2011, left me feeling hopeless and lost. Tumour and incurable. These cruel words took my breath away and ushered in the darkest period of my life. They introduced me to all manner of fears and doubts, shattered my plans and dreams, devastated my family, and challenged my faith in God. These two words changed everything.
So begins David McDonald’s raw, honest, yet hope-filled book. A pastor in Australia on the verge of leaving to plant a church, his cancer diagnosis turned his world upside down and deeply challenged the reality and depth of his own faith in Christ. He found it was one thing to minister to those facing a terminal diagnosis, and another thing to live it, himself. The spectre of his own death led to deep questions he thought he knew the answers to.
This is a brief and helpful book that wrestles honestly with our mortality, the hope of the resurrection, and the ups and downs of terminal illness and its treatment. Through his own journey McDonald was reminded that, because death is inescapable, he needed something better than a cure in which to place his hope. Surviving cancer does not grant immortality. He, and others like him, need hope beyond a cure.
This book is written with both patients and family members in mind. A brief and easy read, with engaging prose and honest dialogue, make this an inviting book to those who are struggling with a terminal diagnosis and to those who surround them. We all need a hope that extends beyond the end of present suffering to a world where all things are made new; McDonald helps point the way. This book is warmly commend to any who find themselves facing looming death and loss. I will leave you with another paragraph from the last pages:
You might be thinking that I’m somehow different from you—that I have faith and you don’t. Perhaps you even wish you had my faith. But it’s not my faith that matters—it’s who and what I’ve put my faith in. There’s nothing remarkable about my faith. Sometimes it’s weak and sometimes it wavers. But Jesus is not weak and Jesus never wavers. He can be trusted.
McDonald’s book is published by an Australian publisher, Matthias Media, but is available in the US through the Gospel Coalition store here as well as on Amazon in Kindle format.
