Read a powerful message from a cancer survivor. In this episode Gina has a conversation with Christine Burke about her journey through a terminal diagnosis and the powerful ways Jesus has provided, spoken and brought much more than physical healing.
Christine’s Beat the Beast resource for anyone battling cancer.
Christine’s list of Healing Scriptures.
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Listen below starting at 32:24 to follow along.
The Tension of Surviving
Christine:
I still try to talk about it as much as I can wherever I can. I’m so thankful just for everything I’ve been through. It’s been a blessing I have to say. I started a cancer support group with my friend, Melissa Armstrong. She’s with the Lord now, but I’m continuing our group because I know it meant a lot to her and to me emotionally and practically.
A couple people have told me, they love the practicality of it. Just talking about little things like disability insurance, did you know that you can get social security disability? Six months after you’re disable. You can get Medicare if you’ve been disabled for two years. Just things like that have helped people, and I’m hoping it continues.
It’s hard of course. My old self is feeling like it’s not big enough and more people need to know about it. But every time we meet, even if there’s only a handful of people, I feel blessed and that person tells me they felt blessed. So I’m just trusting the Lord as He sees fit.
Gina:
Yeah, absolutely. That’s a big deal. In the American church, I think we can put pressure and expectation for something to be valid. It needs to look a certain way, but look at Jesus, one of my favorite stories is the woman at the well in John 12. He took time to have a conversation, and He knew that her encountering Him and being seen by Him and being known by Him and that conversation would spur her to then go and share.
And He could have bypassed that conversation and gone to that town himself. All these people would’ve come to Jesus and been healed, but he chose to talk to one woman and drink a cup of water, you know? And there’s something about being able to surrender. Each season of Sacred Space a theme pops up.
So I feel bad for my listeners because by the end of a season, I feel like I’m a broken record because these things keep coming up. But just in my life, so much of this is what God’s been teaching me – how do you have great expectations without imposing our design on that expectation?
So whether it’s hope for healing, or whether it’s ministry, or whether it’s even your job in your workplace – you have these dreams and these ideas and maybe even a word from the Lord – and you go, “I know God wants me to do this.” But we all construct our own picture of what that should look like on the road to get there. Dependence is surrendering all of that, but still holding onto that hope and great expectation. That’s when we see miraculous things.
Christine:
I fall off the wagon all the time. Even just two months ago when I was complaining to the Lord, “Why isn’t the cancer group growing?” Then he said to me, “You know, it’s okay. It doesn’t have to be big. Just be you. Share your journey. Encourage people. Whether it’s one person or a hundred or a thousand.” So I’m still learning to just continue to trust in that providence.
Gina:
So you mentioned Melissa. Dear sweet, Melissa.
Christine:
Yeah. Her younger son just got married last weekend. Her one son was already married and they had four kids, they had two kids and then his wife was pregnant with twins, and she got diagnosed like five months before the twins were born. They told her she probably wouldn’t make it five months, but she made it two years. She got to see their second birthday, and she loved them. She just cherished her time with them.
Gina:
If you’re up for it. I would love to talk about the tension of that. So you have this group, you have some friends. Alice, I interviewed and that felt like holy ground when I was in this room talking to her.
There’s this tension that I can’t even try to presume to understand how it feels to be where you have been, and where they were in that, that tension between faith for healing, and trust and dependence on God, and surrender of whether that healing is in this life or the next, even our definitions of what we think healing is.
Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints, and to be absent for the body is to be present with the Lord. Alice had such faith and belief and hope that she would live longer here on earth. The reality is that all of her pain is gone now.
Christine:
She’s in the presence of the Lord.
Gina:
Yes, she’s in the presence of the Lord. And you’re living in the tension of those things.
Christine:
I had survivor’s guilt, and I struggle with guilt anyway from other stuff. I shared with my Bible study later that I was feeling guilty that Melissa was gone and Debbie was gone and then Alice was gone. Why am I here? My cancer was supposedly worse than any of theirs, but she helped me through that. I prayed a lot about it and the Lord helped me, and it’s hard. That’s really hard.
I don’t really know what else to say. I know for me, I’m not afraid to die, and I know none of them were either. They were all looking forward to being with God, especially because all of them were in a lot of pain at the end.
I was happy that they were with the Lord, and not in pain, and just in his presence, I know what joy that brought all of them, but it’s hard for us here. It’s hard for their families and their spouses or their kids. But you know, I’ve seen God do great things with Debbie’s girls and with Melissa’s family, and I don’t know Alice’s husband well enough to get updates on how her kids are doing, but I’m sure that God’s doing things there too.
A Message to the Fighters
Gina:
So if there’s somebody who’s listening that just got some test results or just got a phone call that they never wanted to get, or even as a family member, what would you say to them?
Christine:
If you know the Lord, then first of all, I would remind you that you’re healed. It says in 1 Peter 2:24, “By His wounds, we are healed. It’s present, we’re healed. If you believe you’re healed, and I always believe that I would tell my doctors all the time I’m healed in Jesus name and they’re like, “Well, it is good to have a positive attitude.” I’m like, “No, it’s a lot more than a positive attitude, It’s a relationship.” I really believe that.
There’s over 60 verses in the Bible about how we are healed. I would read those all the time just to remind myself of them.I’ve been married for 25 years, and I became a believer when I was 25. I did Bible studies from the second I became a believer. Even though, you know, they had ups and downs, I stuck with it for whatever reason.
When I got diagnosed, even though I’m not a big memorizer of the word, it came back to me. God brought it back to me. All that knowledge and things that I had been studying and those things encouraged me. So I would just encourage you to reach – reach deeper to the Lord. Just ask him to help you, to encourage you, and believe that He will.
You’ve got to believe that you’re healed and you’ve got to believe that God is there with you. He is there to comfort you and to care for you. Surrender it. I tell people that literally from the moment the doctor told me, a large mass on your brain, how are you alive? I immediately surrendered it.
I just said, “There’s nothing I can do.” I feel like I’m along for the ride, like I’m on Jesus’s back. He’s just been taking care of things and I’m just so thankful that He gave me the Spirit of peace about it. That I can’t really explain. I’ve met other cancer patients that feel the same way, but then their partners or spouses or kids are the ones that are all stressed out and freaking out about it.
I feel bad saying that because I know it was hard for my kids and my husband and my close friends. But I would just tell them to believe I’m healed, focus on the words that God says about healing. And for me, like I’ve said a million times, I focused on John 8:12, which says, “No matter what happens, I’ll never be in the dark.”
I could die tomorrow and I won’t be in the darkness. I’ll always have the light of life because I believe in Jesus. It’s a promise, and so I just focused on that. The hard part is if your family member or yourself don’t know God. If it’s yourself, I encourage you to read a little bit in the Bible, read the book of John.
And for whatever reason, if you don’t believe it, or you’re struggling with it, reach out to someone, you can call me. I would love to talk to you about it. You can read books about it, there’s a million books out there – if it’s for scientific reasons. And then if it’s a family member that’s even harder.
If it’s someone you know that doesn’t know the Lord, all you can do with that person is tell them that you’re praying for them. Tell them you love them. Don’t say, “What can I do for you?” Just do it. If you’re noticing the person’s feeling bad, then just showing up at their door, leaving a card on the doorstep or a verse, and just saying, “I’m praying for you.”
I say, “I’m praying for you” all the time to people that don’t know the Lord, and no one has once asked me to not pray for them, really, they’ve always thanked me. Yeah. And so that’s what I would suggest for that.
Gina:
That’s good. I like too, that you said you’re not a big memorizer of scripture, but all of those things started coming back. when I teach classes, one of the things that I talk about is we can read the Word to read it, we can memorize it just for the head knowledge, but then there’s a part of it there’s that when it becomes kind of a part of your DNA, and that’s when you’re in the darkness or when you’re facing something, that’s when the Holy Spirit can access all of that and bring all of these things to remembrance.
Christine:
I was surprised how much the holy spirit was accessing. There’s so much that the Lord will use to minister back to you, the things that you’ve sewn to seek Him out. Even through music, I listen to worship music all day, every day. It lifts my spirits. It reminds me of God’s Word and of His promises. Especially when I was sick and I couldn’t read His Word, it was too hard to read. I would just listen to those songs that had Christian lyrics that, and I felt really uplifted from that.
Gina:
So I would say in some ways, just in terms of who you are, I do think one of your spiritual gifts is faith. I think you have the gift of faith and evangelism. So, were you ever scared? And when you were, how did you process that?
Christine:
I was definitely scared a lot, but again, I was more scared about not being provided for than I was about dying. I’m not scared about dying. A couple times I did have a pity party for myself where I went upstairs and cried, but I also did a Bible study of the book of Nehemiah.
I remember Nehemiah was there to rebuild the wall and he was telling everybody how horrible they are that they’ve been ignoring the wall and not rebuilding it. Everyone started grieving and wailing and they went into this morning. Then the next day, he’s like, “All right, you’re done. We’re not mourning anymore, people. We’ve got a job to do!”
There’s a time for mourning, but now we’re going to focus and we’re going to rejoice that we can do this, and we’re going to eat choice foods, and we’re going to share them with our neighbor ,and we’re going to get this job done. And so I just kind of looked at it like that. I let myself cry it out, but not too long.
Then all these other things start, and next thing you know you have bitterness and shame. If you let it go too long they take root, and I didn’t want that to happen, but I did let myself cry it out a couple times, especially the second time around when I had to go into chemo again, that was really hard.
Gina:
So now you’re here on this side of all of all of it.
Christine:
I am learning to live at a slower pace, and that’s okay. I like it like that. I’m just going to trust that God’s going to use me where he wants to use me, and right now it’s in the cancer support group. I get calls a lot from people that know somebody or heard of somebody. I do have a little document that I have. It’s like seven pages long, and I call it “beat the beast”.
As I went through my journey, I would just type in a book I read or a podcast I listened to or a video I’d watch. And I kind of just kept it all in there, the disability stuff, and I have links to where I’ve given my testimony, so I send that out. I send out the verses on healing and I send out a picture of my tumor in my brain, it looks like it takes up half my brain in the picture.
So I send that to people all the time, and I’ve even had someone call me one time and say, I saw this document. It’s called “beat the beast”. It was on this brain tumor forum. So someone posted it somewhere else. The first thing I have in there is: read the Bible. That is the very first thing.
Gina:
That’s awesome.
Christine:
Someday, maybe I could have a blog or something. I wrote a lot on CaringBridge during the journey. I’d love to transfer all that onto a blog or a website or something, that’s just a thought. but right now I’m just praying and waiting for God to show me where He wants me next, and not sure where that will be, which is okay. I’m okay with that. Which the old Christine wouldn’t have been okay with.
Gina:
That’s a very big deal. More was healed than just your body.
Christine:
Yes. Amen. Thank you Lord. All glory to God.
Gina:
Rest is as important. So God bless you as you rest, and as you rebuild and restore.
Resources
Gina:
I hope you caught that moment towards the end where Christine said, “Even if I die tomorrow, I won’t be in the dark. I’m in the light.” What are you facing right now? Are you facing something difficult?
Maybe it’s not a terminal diagnosis, but there’s a lot of heartache and pain and trial and difficulty that many people are facing right now. Are you able to lift your eyes? Are you able to look up, lock eyes with Jesus and trust that He’s got you, that He’s with you, that He’s for you and He has everything you need to stand exactly where you are, and beat the beast, whatever that beast might be.
Speaking of beat the beast. I have a link to Christine’s beat the beast document in the episode notes. So click on that. If you or someone you know is walking this journey facing a diagnosis and needs support, and needs advice, click on that and use it as a resource. If you’d like to get in touch with Christine, you can email me.
The link is in the show notes and I will connect the two of you. If you would like to support the production of this podcast and other projects by Stockton ministries, you can click the link in the episode notes, or you can go to Gina stockton.com and click the donate button in the top right corner. Thank you so much for joining us. God bless you. We’ll see you next time in the sacred space.
Check out the rest of the conversation: Fighting Terminal & Overcoming Cancer
Check out a related blog on Alice Houtenville’s fight with Cancer: Healing in Chronic Sickness
Check out the Dwell Meditations
