Yesterday afternoon, a good friend of mine lost her struggle with cancer at the age of 32.  It was a long and temulteous battle with remissions and then reacurrances that eventually ended in a brain tumor that took her life.  She was a fighter; a gorgeous person inside and out.  She was someone that I really looked up to.  Many times I found myself thinking: why her?  How does she hold on?

Cancer is a horrible disease.  It ravishes beautiful bodies.  It is one of the clearest pictures of the reality that we live in a broken world.  It is a broken world.  Yes we find beauty in it often, but there is no hiding that things are happening all the time that are not right.  war; hunger; loss of innocence; Leslie dying.  None of this should be this way.  How do we find hope?

Well, for Leslie, she had a hero in Jesus Christ.  She had a real relationship with her creator.  She claimed that Jesus is the reason that she could fight so hard.

And there, I said it.  It was Jesus.  The only one that could heal Leslie/ the only one that had ultimate control of the Universe, thus allowing this struggle to become Leslie’s reality.  He could take the cancer away without even breaking a sweat.  Now, I don’t really want to argue that Jesus was Leslie’s anchor and that some people use alah or budah, or some other “faith method”.  No!  There comes a time when the truth needs to be said, and If you are counting on any other “faith method” other than the one Leslie used, you are Lost.  Christ Jesus, the creator of the universe, is the only truth, and He is also the only one responsible and capable to help Leslie.  When someone close to you dies there is no more time to be splitting hairs.  It’s Jesus, so repent soon.

But Jesus was the only one that could help Leslie.  We prayed for him to heal her…a lot.  We wanted her to stay here in the broken place with us.  If she went away we knew how bad we would miss her.  We do miss her.  It hurts really bad when you lose people.  It’s unnatural for humans to die.  But God (Jesus) had other plans.

Towards the end, as we all started to face the reality that cancer would ultimately take Leslie’s life, it started to hit me that Leslie’s healing was coming soon.  I realize that this sounds like a fanciful way of saying that Leslie has gone to a better place.  But it’s not.  Today Leslie truly is healed.  She has actually won her battle with cancer.  We will miss her, but she has won.  Christ has conquered the brokeness of Leslie’s world.  One day he will put it all right.   He will make the pain go away.  It will be morning.  But slowly there are broken things that he is fixing one by one and Leslie is fixed.  She is all better.  I am still broken, but I know that one day I will be all better.

We had been praying for a long time that Leslie would be healed.  We truly believed what we prayed with all our hearts.  God, (Jesus) the only one who could help Leslie, did.  He rescued her and healed her body and soul once and for all.  Today, at this very moment, Leslie has been healed.

But we, the still broken, will love, miss, and never forget her.