Today, I’m struggling with what to write on a sympathy card to Janet, an old friend of the family.

Last week, as her father was breathing his last, she got a phone call from her doctor’s office, urging her to set up surgery and an appointment with a nuclear oncologist right away. That’s how she was told she has a nasty form of breast cancer. It’s early enough, the nurse said, but she’ll lose a lot of tissue and some lymph nodes in surgery, and the chemotherapy will be extensive. You have to act quickly, she was told.

She had to put it off because her dad was dying. His funeral was yesterday; her surgery will be this coming Monday.

It’s always difficult to find the right words to say when a person is facing such trials. But I’m finding it especially hard this time because of the change of my understanding about suffering.

I first met Janet when I was a new Christian, at the evangelical-charismatic church where I first learned about Jesus. I was roommates with her older daughter before she was married, and since Janet was also on staff at the church, we worked together for a while. My husband has known the family even longer – he was in a band with Janet’s younger daughter, and his parents are pretty good friends with Janet and her husband.

Janet is a woman of great faith, in the evangelical tradition. Her understanding of suffering is pretty much that it’s either a) an attack from Satan or b) the result of sin in her life. There is some lip-service given to "Refiner’s fire" in these evangelical circles (they sing a worship song about it once in a while) but that’s in the form of an abstract concept, or at best in reference to the responsibilities and pressures of leadership. Even Romans 8:28 is interpreted to mean that God will put an early end to suffering if you really, really believe in Him.

The idea of "needless physical suffering" being a gift from God, an opportunity to answer the call to share in Christ’s physical suffering, seems much more merciful to me now. But it is completely foreign to people like Janet.

So, I am having trouble coming up with appropriate words of encouragement. I have no doubt that as she proceeds through this painful journey, God will reveal His perfect will to her, and that will be that there is a purpose to her pain. But one can’t expect a person to entertain entirely "new" theology during their darkest hours of grief and fear. I guess I can only offer her my sincere prayers and sympathy at this point, miniscule as that sounds. Unless you have a suggestion for me, which I will be more than happy to accept at sparki777 (at) yahoo (dot) com.

I hope you will take a moment to pray for Janet and her family.

--Sparki