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I'm sitting in a hot window at Saxby's waiting for my car. They're replacing the windshield because a rock split it in two. Then the tinting place is going to tint the side windows and block out 99.7 per cent of UV rays. Why? Because I need UV rays blocked more than ever. UV rays cause skin cancer. What to say about that, now, two months after the diagnosis.

It was a nodule, high on my chest, so that I barely saw it. I usually put my shirt on right after I shower, before the fog clears off the mirror. I cover up, then comb my hair and shave, or whatever, with my shirt on. Stupid, I know, but that's just how I learned. I saw the nodule and called a dermatoligist out of the phone book and had an appointment within a week.

Four years ago I found two bumps on my back. In your thirties, you get these, and they take them off and say "they're nothing." Infected sweat glands, benign cysts, "bumps." I had a lipoma and a cyst. Basically, a fat deposit and a big zit. They said check yourself every month, which I did, for a few months, then lost interest. Now, there was a small, eraser head-like thing, nasty looking, like it should be on an alien's face. The doctor said it was a... "(insert long word here)" which I didn't understand, but he did a punch biopsy, which is like coring an apple, and sent it off.

Two weeks later, a call at 8AM: "Hi, this is Dr. Feuston. We couldn't determine what it was, Steve, so we're sending it off to University Hospital for stains. I'll refund your pathology fee. Goodbye, click." And a check came in the mail. Interesting. What about the "(insert long word here)"? I was a little worried, but had no idea what was to come. Life caught up and took over my attention. Then, on February 15, another call: "It's serious. It's melanoma. You need to see an oncologist." I wrote it down on the back of an envelope by my bed, like I was taking a message for someone else. I said, "anything else you can tell me?" He told me a couple of things and I wrote them down, "skin-cancer-spindle-cell, got it," then hung up. I stared at the envelope for a minute, then my mind started up.

This is because of sin. This is because you haven't followed the Lord. This is because you never finished seminary. This is because you looked at internet porn. This is because you never got married - a woman would have taken care of you better than you took care of yourself. This is because you didn't take care of yourself. This is because you left the church and started going to house churches. The devil flooded my mind with anger, guilt, confusion, terror, and all the things that are not characteristics of God.

I called my brother and told him to get Dad on three-way. He knew I had a "thing" and it was getting looked at, so he worried. I told them what it was. My brother cried, he wanted to get to the prayer part. Dad began speaking like an old Indian chief by the fire, "Well. Your aunt had that and she died." I knew he wasn't trying to screw with me, he was just reading the Google results in his head. He was just as scared as I was. We turned to the only thing we knew. Prayer. That short call was the most I had said to my dad in three years--God's first result in a long list.

They say not to surf the internet. The information you get is unrealiable. Statistics were all over the place. Everything that came to mind, I'd search. I was 37, so maybe I'm on the younger side. The average male age is 40. Scratch that. I'm dark-skinned. Didn't matter. I have good genes. Didn't matter. Nothing mattered, except that I got a lot of sunburns as a kid. Period. I can't even blame God. As much supernatural meaning I looked for, it still was just as real as to anyone. Science says wear sunscreen, I didn't. My chances were about 5 out of 6, which isn't bad, but yesterday they were 100%.

My diet was an issue. I read that you can actually prevent cancer with food. That was an easy decision. I went vegan. Dad, who I now spoke to twice a day, sent my step-mom's old cancer books from the 70s. She had Hodgkin's in the lung, on the heart side. She had to have chemo and radiation right over her heart. Fortunately, her doctor was the guy who found the cure for Hodgkin's, and she's still here after 25 years. He also sent another book. The Life Teachings of John G. Lake. John G. Lake was a country preacher who layed hands on people and healed them in the Name of Jesus. He's said to have healed over 200,000 people in a ten year period in his healing rooms in Tacoma. I read. Then I found a healing room in Boulder, Sunday's from 2-4.

I went to my brother's church that week. I hadn't gone to a mainstream church in years. My heart was filled with so much criticism for the church system because of so many things, but that day, I just cried. Worship filled the air, and the people looked like me, hurting, weak, totally reliant on Jesus. I walked in and embraced it with every cell on my body. My brother usually sat in back with his family, but he moved up with me to the third row, and his family has been there since. He and I began attending prayer before the service. We all took the beginning believers courses, 101 and 102, and I soaked it up like a beginning believer.

The healing room was a Godsend. Before they prayed, they had to re-educate me. "Do you realize that Jesus healed everyone who asked for healing?" "I guess so." "Do you know that He's the same yesterday, today and forever?" "I guess so." "Okay, we can get started." They followed the Bible strictly. No one poured oil on me. I asked why. "Because there are no elders here. Only elders can annoint you." Okay. The biggest thing I had to get my head around was why do some people get healed, and others don't? The "healers" believed that healing was a priviledge, a right, of the believer, and I couldn't argue with them scripturally. It was tough, but I was on the pallet, and if my friends had that kind of faith, they'd surely tear a roof off.

Sunday was now my favorite day. It was like a bouy in a terrific storm. I thought of Peter when he saw the waves. There were nothing but waves around me. I got into my old emails one night. A brother of a close friend of mine battled cancer for two years and then died. I tried to see what he had, so I searched for the first email. Melanoma. I slammed my laptop shut and threw it on the floor. My heart went cold and my face was numb. I dove onto my couch and prayed out loud.

Joy cometh in the morning. I don't know how many nights I went to sleep crying and woke up joyful. Those who sow in tears reap in joy. The sowing, I found out, is the prayer. Prayer, when you have to make yourself pray, is work. And joy always comes. It comes full of the character and love of Jesus Christ, pure joy in the heart, every morning.

I used to pray in tongues. For years, I did, but now it had dried up. Do your own research on gifts. I began praying in tongues again, except this time it was the only language I could pray in. I didn't know what to ask for in my mind, so I prayed in tongues, and the Holy Spirit prayed for me. Again, do your own research, but that's how it was. I thought about things while praying and blurted them out, "Jesus, bind fear from me!" All fear is a lie, said a girl at the healing room. Pretty much true, except the fear of the Lord of course. All fear is a lie. All fear is a tool of Satan to make you lose faith in Christ.

By March, I had a surgery date. They were going to do a wide-area excision and a sentinal node biopsy. The excision is like an ice cream scoop of skin, two inches wide and all the way down to the muscle. The biopsy is where they inject a nuclear dye around where the "thing" was and then watch it on a scope. The first lymph node it gets to, they take out and test. I had to go to the Cancer Center - have you seen those before? They're everywhere. It's the little building, by the big building, that you never want to go to. Mine had free valet parking and a piano player. Might as well treat these people good, I thought. Soon, I began to realize it wasn't so bad. Everyone there had cancer, and most of them were going to do just fine. Most people survive cancer. All fear is a lie. Satan began to lose footing with me everyday.

The blessings of God make rich, and he adds no trouble to them. Having written fiction for years, I thought in terms of dramatic convention, which says whenever you show hope, it's a set up for bad things to come. It's the only way to make a story interesting. I had to forget that. God is not dramatic. He doesn't imply he's going to save you only to leave you - to make the story interesting. He isn't fickle. He heals. He saves, He blesses, and adds no trouble to it. The night before my first visit to the cancer center, I had a dream. I was in a doctor's office and a young guy came in and started putting on makeup. He said he was going to a costume party. I worried. "Are you my doctor?" I said. He said, "No, I'm an intern." Then the door opened and seven old men came in, guys with beards, stethascopes, white coates, glasses, old, experienced-looking guys who wrote books. I said, "are you my doctors?" One of them said, "Shhhh," and he took my hand and they all kneeled with me in prayer.

On March 19 I went in to see the oncologist and surgeon. I hated the oncologist. He told me how it was and gave me statistics. I didn't learn anything new. He said most people do just fine, but a small number don't. That was it. The surgeon was nicer. He was an old Jew. I thought of him as a circumcisionist, cutting away the evil flesh. He had been a cancer doctor for 41 years, and had done thousands of these surgeries. That was Monday, and Friday was my surgery. I worked hard that week, knowing I'd have to take a week off, and also it kept my mind clear. But God was present all week. By Friday I was calm, at peace. Jesus is our peace. He was with me. My surgery went well, except that they couldn't do the lymph node biopsy. By the time they got in, the dye had spread to all the lymph nodes in the area, and they couldn't tell which one was the sentinel node. He said it's rare, only about 25 cases he knows of. All my brother heard was "we couldn't find anything," and he told everyone.

By now, Dad and I were speaking daily. I repented of everything I could think of, out loud, to other people. I wrote letters, called old friends, joined my church, signed up for everything. I wanted God. I wanted to be close again. I dug up my old CDs. Kirk Franklin was covered with dust. I put on "Something About the Name Jesus" and just sobbed. I stood in my little apartment and worshipped. God seemed so close, suddenly so close that I couldn't bear Him without tears. I imagined heaven. I'd heard pastors say you'll finally be able to worship for eternity. That's limiting. No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for us. Worship is a part of it, but we can worship here, now.

My body began to ache. About a week after going vegan, I had pains all around the area where the "thing" was. I also had pain inside my legs, under my arms, all over my chest. I got online and searched for pictures of anatomy. There were lymph nodes everywhere that I had pain. Now my fear became shock and paralysis. I had such a bad night that I moved out of bed and began sleeping on my couch, where I could listen to worship music all night on my stereo. I went to the gym, ate fruit and vegetables all day, and prayed in tongues with abandon. I had two speeds, fast and stop, and had to stay in fast.

A pain developed in my liver area. It was deep, around the breastbone, then referred down to below the ribcage. It was terrifying. Melanoma is usually treated with skin surgery, but it is malignant, and can spread to other organs, like the brain, the lungs and the liver, at which point it's "not curable, but treatable." I got a message on my phone: "Steve, your x-ray was normal, and we found one elevated liver enzyme in your blood. Doctor will talk to you about that when you come in." The pain doubled, tripled. The only way to allay it was to eat strictly fruit and organic foods. Prayer seemed to treat the pain as well.

God spoke to me. I was on a fence, on one side was faith and on the other side, cancer. It was like one of those fences in a Philipino duck farm. As the tide rises, these ducks stay in their herds, even if the fence disappears underwater. It's funny, but true about me. The Holy Spirit rises and you don't even have to jump, just float over to grace. The more I stared at the waves, the more I sank. I had to look God squarely in the face, through the veil of Christ, and believe. Where sin increased, grace increased all the more.

A week after surgery, I was at the cancer center. The surgeon came in. "We got the path back this morning and there is no sign of tumor." I cheered, then said, "is that good?" He said "very good." I cheered again. I went in a week later to get the stitches out and asked more questions. He said "we'll watch you closely, but there's a 95% chance that we're done with this thing." I couldn't contain my happiness. I had faith in God's report, but He can speak through doctors too. It was the day before my birthday. I had lost 24 pounds from the vegan diet, and had a new outlook on life. It sounds like cliche, but every minute is a gift.

I speak to people about healing now. "God heals the whole man today," I say. There's a young guy at church with "terminal" cancer. I tell him, "God heals cancer today." Cancer is a lie, Jesus is the truth. When Elisha prayed, God showed his servant the truth, horses and chariots of fire all around. Some people pray like a pallbearers, "God, prepare us for the bad news, oh God, receive his spirit." Wait, he's not dead yet. Oh. "Recieve his spirit when he dies, because he will most surely die because the doctors said so." How do we know? Because of doctors? Too many pray to prove the doctors right. (Pray for Trent, by the way, I believe he will be healed.) You can pray for doctors, for the hospital, for pathology reports, and you can pray that your flesh will obey the Spirit of God, and bring it into submission. Wierd? Sorry. I've been on the pallet now, and I'm permanently wierdified by God's Word. I've been Wordified.

If you show me from scripture that death from disease is God's will, then I'll believe you. Those who asked Jesus for healing were healed. It's not bossing God around, it's faith. Paul healed a whole island. Peter's shadow healed more than most churches today. Were they gods? No, men just like us (James 5:17). Some don't get healed, and I'll never know why, but I'd rather take the Bible at face value and wonder, than justify it in light of human experience, which is untrustworthy. My faith wasn't even that strong, mind you, but those around me believed. I had four pallet-bearers who were willing to tear off a roof for me. Jesus, seeing THEIR faith, told the paralytic to pick up his bed and go home.

Enough preaching. Thanks for reading if you made it this far. Steve