Testimony Time

I was asked to give my testimony at church. Yesterday I stood in front of my Wheatland family and shared with them this life in cancer-land and how God has cared for me in it. It was a sweet way to also say thank you to them for their care - especially since it was during Thanksgiving weekend and the first Sunday in Advent. I share it here so that I can also say thank you to the people in my extended family, Lancaster community, Cultivating community, and Rabbit Room community (plus all the other folks that also know about these past two years and have prayed and been so kind).

Yesterday, during the sermon on Abram waiting on God, my pastor spoke on being disciplined by hope and said that that was what he saw in me… I was grateful for that idea. Today I read these words by T.S. Eliot and was again taken in by the idea that faith, love, and hope are all in the waiting. But how to wait… what does waiting looking like as I seek to be rooted in faith (eyes on Jesus) and seeking to live out loving the people and places God has given me.

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

Here is my testimony:

My name is Leslie Anne Bustard. My husband Ned and I have been members of Wheatland since it started. We raised our three daughters, Carey, Maggie, and Elspeth, here in Lancaster City.

If I had been writing this testimony a few years ago, I would have shared my lifelong struggle believing I was a beloved child of God and how places of inadequacy and insecurity in my heart led to much striving to feel secure in myself, with God, and with others. And I would share how God continues to be kind to me, and how I can see God keeping his promise to me that my life is hid in Christ. Because of this, he has never let me wander away from him. He who began a good work in my continues to do that good work.

But my present story has a newfound richness about God in my life that I would like to share.

For almost two years I have been living in cancer-land. I have stage 2 breast cancer and stage 4 melanoma. There won’t be a time that I can say I’ve been cancer free for 5 years. It’s more like managing a chronic disease. There is a sharp shadow—even on good days or long stretches of “normal”—that hangs around. When I found out about this cancer, a friend, who had just finished her first year in remission from breast cancer said that those who would be praying for me would be like the friends of the paralytic who took their friend to Jesus by opening a hole in the roof of the place Jesus was speaking and lowered him down to Jesus. I would not always be able to pray and sometimes my faith would burn low, but my family and friends would carry me and take me to Jesus.

I don’t know how God’s sovereignty and my cancer go together. That is a mystery to me. But I do know he has called me and my family to walk this path with cancer in it. This suffering has broken my heart and my family’s heart; but I believe God is close to the brokenhearted. I also know that he doesn’t promise that those who put their faith in Jesus are exempt from hard trials and suffering. I know that God is good whether I am healed on this side of heaven or when I see him face to face.

At the beginning of this battle with cancer, when I was realizing how much people were blessing me with prayers, cards, gifts, food, and help, I felt so undeserving— there was no way I should receive this much love, and I knew that I could never, even a little, pay it forward enough. As I was struggling with these thoughts God reminded me that this is what grace is… this is the grace God gives us in Jesus. We never deserve how abundant God’s love and kindness is to us, but he delights to give it to us. I see now that I have, in a way, been a walking parable of his love to his people.

This fall friends who are connected with an artist and writers’ group in Tennessee planned a trip for us to Northern Ireland. They also enlisted others from that community to help pay for the trip. Ned and I were given a trip of a lifetime, and we enjoyed every day.

Because I love poetry so much, on the first Thursday of our trip, when we were sitting on a ruined castle wall, I randomly was picking short poems to read out loud to Ned, and stumbled on this one:

M I R A C L E

Not the one who takes up his bed and walks
But the ones who have known him all along
And carry him in—

Their shoulders numb, the ache and stoop deep-locked
In their backs, the stretcher handles
Slippery with sweat. And no let up

Until he’s strapped on tight, made tilt-able
and raised to the tiled roof, then lowered for healing.
Be mindful of them as they stand and wait

For the burn of the paid out ropes to cool,
Their slight lightheadedness and incredulity
To pass, those who had known him all along.

Reading this poem reminded me that this account in the Gospels had earlier been an important picture of God’s grace to me exhibited through my friends’ prayers. What a surprise to read it on this trip, yet one more picture of God’s abundant ways of caring for us in cancer-land.

Although I may have a propensity towards smiling and laughing here at church, that doesn’t mean these past two years have been easy. I have cried, been depressed, been worried, and have been sad. But I have also felt a peace that surpasses understanding. There has been a lot to smile about and good projects to be involved in.

But the biggest question I have been praying about, meditating on, talking to Ned about is this: How does one live between the Now of ordinary Life and the Then of Death? I don’t know when I’m going to die. It could be months or years. Maybe it will be longer than expected or maybe it won’t. Maybe I’m in a season of feeling almost normal and that will last for a sweet long time and maybe it won’t.

When did Jesus figure out he was walking towards his death? As he grew up and read the Scriptures and went to the Temple, when did it dawn on him that his life was moving towards a horrific, painful death? And how did he keep loving, living, laughing, and doing all the good work God had called him to before he went to the Cross?

I don’t know for sure, but the Gospels seem to show that Jesus kept his eyes on the Father and stayed focused on his calling. I think that is how I am to live too. Between the Now of Life and the Then of a Death that I’m walking towards, I can live well, fulfilling the good works that were planned for me to do before Time began: love my husband, my girls, my family, my Wheatland family, and my friends—as a beloved child of God, with my eyes on the Father and my life deeply hid in Christ.

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