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Talking To Your Kids About Your Cancer

Truth in Love 37

Help children to learn the news about cancer alongside God’s love, wisdom, and sovereignty.

Apr 4, 2017

Heath Lambert: A painfully common problem that we experience in a fallen world is the diagnosis of cancer. And that diagnosis can become even more painful when the diagnosis comes to a parent who needs to talk to their children, particularly their young children, about the problem. On this edition of Truth in Love, we want to think through this issue with a special guest, Tim Keeter. Tim Keeter is a counselor who is certified with ACBC and he is an elder at Grace Community Church. He also is a cancer survivor who walked through this very dilemma; receiving the diagnosis and sharing that diagnosis with his children. And he spoke on this topic at one of ACBC’s regional counseling and discipleship training. In this edition, I want you to hear a portion of the testimony that he gave at that ACBC event in New York, where he explains his diagnosis of cancer and the way he explained it to his kids. Here is Tim Keeter.

Tim Keeter: Last September, I went to a physical, and the doctor was feeling around, and he goes, “This feels kind of weird on the side. I’m going to send you for an ultrasound.” I’ll admit, my initial response was I was agitated that I would have to take yet some more time off work to drive through the busiest portion of town and get an ultrasound. But I did, you know, and that happened a couple of days later; the results came back pretty quickly. And then, I went to an ear, nose, and throat specialist because it was in my thyroid. And the left side of my thyroid, it turns out there were two masses in my thyroid. The biopsy revealed that they indeed were cancerous and in particular one kind was a very rare form, a very rare form that if it gets loose is considered fairly untreatable. It’s called a Hurthle cell. The other kind is the papillary form. You learn these things, right? You don’t want to spend too much time on WebMD, but you have to learn some of the words they’re throwing around at you. And it’s fairly common, and they’re usually pretty good at dealing with that particular kind of cancer. Of all cancers to get, the thyroid is one of the more successfully treated ones out there in general. The Hurthle, again was a little bit scary to get and hear about that.

Those results came back, actually a little bit longer than that, right? The biopsy results came back on Wednesday, October 1st. That was a difficult time. We hadn’t really told the boys yet, and we have shared it with some of our elders to pray. Certainly, we just didn’t think it was much of anything, and we didn’t want to alarm a lot of people otherwise. But we also asked them to keep it off social media and other things like that, you know, because we don’t want our kids finding out like that either. The only thing I did do is I called Ella because Ella was in college, Ella was in school, and I didn’t want to have to share with her any difficult news over the telephone. Coupled by the fact that Ella is our niece. After the birth of our second child, the Lord closes the womb, my wife had to have a full hysterectomy. And then a few years later about three years later, he took Ella’s mom home to be with her, she was 41, and she had cancer. And that’s how the lord gave us a daughter; a sweet little eight-year-old, live-in counselee, she came to live with us, and it’s wonderful to hear her testimony and her walk with the Lord. So she was kind of, “oh no, not again, what are we doing here?” Type of response because it was four months after her mom’s diagnosis. A very different situation from mine. Very different. But nevertheless, still very real to her.

This was also particularly difficult for me to process because on the 5th I had plane tickets to go to Los Angeles to the ACBC conference, which I was so looking forward to, you know. It was my ministry, I’m ready to go. And then I was supposed to be in Jacksonville and possibly here somewhere else, I can’t remember. And so on pre-op, I really didn’t know when they were going to get me in for surgery, and then they called me and said we got you in. You know, it’s always like we’re going to see you in four months, you know, and then they call you back and they squeeze you in the following Monday.

I was to have surgery and that Friday, I called Sean, you know, I said, “Hey, I’m really thankful Sean that you’re the Director of a Conference that celebrates the Sovereignty of God. And so I’m going to give you a chance to practice that right now, brother!” And you know, it’s just during these things, it was just neat when people found out they just called and prayed. So I want to share with you this outline which I borrowed from Steve Vires. I want to intermingle with you during these different times of uncertainty and progression of dealing with this, what ministered to me in my family the most. Because we wonder, right? We know the biblical truth, and we don’t know, we don’t want to come across as sounding pat or trivial or just weird, and we don’t know what always works best unless we’ve been there and we’ve experienced it, and we don’t want to irritate people or any of the things. So I took note along the way when I had nothing left to cling on; what were we clinging to? What really helps the most? And again, for you to be impressed with our Lord and not us.

October 1st was hard. That’s when we went home to break the news to our boys, and I’ll share with you how that went. You know, we basically answered questions that came up; we had to keep my oldest son off the internet. He already found a trial for me the next day to sign up for. He’s going to be an engineer like his dad, poor guy. We talked to the teachers so they would know to be compassionate if the boys needed a moment during class and to look for evidence that they were handling things okay. I think the hardest thing for me is, you know, the surgery took the left out and found indeed that it was there and had spread to the lymph nodes, so that took me to stage 3 right away. So here we are, you know, boom, boom. As the evidence is coming out of what was the reality. So they took the other half out. Don’t know why they didn’t take it all out at once, that’s beyond me. And then they scheduled for me to heal from that. At the end of December went and swallowed three very radioactive pills and got locked in a room for three days. A guy would come in with a mask and a Geiger counter and go. Nope, not today, and then leave. And then, I went home for some more quarantine during that time. During that full body scan afterward, they found three more lymph nodes that had been infected. So, to continue to spread as we go through

Where do we begin during the initial news and where do we begin during… because the worst part about a lot of this upfront is just not knowing, it’s the uncertainty, you know. There’s some certainty in that certainty, but there’s sometimes we hold onto other things that we shouldn’t hold onto either. And well-meaning, we try to tell them, “Well, you know, it’s not a bad cancer to have, they do really good.” All along, it’s like 95% of these things are nothing. You know, well, I ended up being that 5%. Well, you know, 97% of these things are very treatable, great. I got to be the other three percent. You got to stop quoting statistics to me. I’m an engineer. I hate statistics! They are simply an indication of the way God normally works through this particular disease. They’re only a statistic. The one that really matters is the one that’s one hundred percent, and that’s His providence, right? It will be what it will be.

So what do we do? How do we process that, and how do we work through that with people? I think we begin by encouraging biblical honesty. Asaph in Psalm 73, is a good example that the Psalms just cry out all the emotions for us, and they teach us things like this. And you see Asaph being honest about how he’s feeling about things in an inspired text. He’s saying, “But as for me, my feet came close to stumbling.” He’s talking about the wicked and how they’re doing things. “My steps had almost slipped, for I was envious of the arrogant as I saw the prosperity of the wicked.” And down later, after he goes through explaining all that he’s going through and how they are continuing to prosper and yet they’re doing terrible things. He says this, “When I pondered to understand this, it was troublesome in my sight.” It was troublesome for me. We want to encourage those who suffer to acknowledge the confusion and hurt. We don’t want to encourage them to give glib answers and put on plastic smiles. We don’t want them to wallow in it, but we want them to be biblically honest. And so, the question is this, are we comfortable allowing our counselors to talk like Asaph? Are we stepping in, “Oh no. You need to trust God; the Christian does not have a reason to be depressed, or down, or worried. Let me pull my notes out from you from session four.” So we create a safe place for them to express their suffering honestly? And of course, we don’t stop there, but we enter into that with them. And by the way, we are the church, we suffer with them. We suffer with them. We want them to cry out to God just like Asaph. So we’re not questioning God’s character; when we do this, we don’t cry out to question His character. But simply to acknowledge our weakness, to acknowledge our unbelief, very similar to saying, “I don’t get it, I don’t get this. I really can’t put two and two together and what’s going on right now and where this is headed.” And just letting the Lord know I’m struggling with this. “I want to know, and I’m scared.” And this is hard, and we can do that with confidence. Hebrews 4:16 says we can do it with confidence “because of our savior, drawing near to the throne of grace that you may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.” That’s our time of need to draw near, to express that to Him, to cry out to Him, and it’s through the process of our pain, of our counselee’s pain, that we understand more of God’s mercy and grace. It’s those times when our hearts are ripe for learning. It’s the milieu of life in which we really, really learn. It’s the Scripture that teaches us, but it’s the milieu of life where it really becomes personal to us, more so than not. It’s when we get a chance to exercise wisdom and learn where we need to repent. We come to love it more when we see it for what it is, and we come to depend upon it more. Praise the Lord for that. Praise the Lord for that in our family.

This was a very important thing to me and my family, to encourage and teach especially the boys that night, especially in the beginning, when there were so many unknowns. It was a big theme that first night with them, to be biblically honest—to be honest to the Lord, to suffer honestly, and to cry to express those things in a way that called out to God for strength, not in a way, of course, that charged Him with wrongdoing. And I think it was during that stage three revelation that hit me the hardest, right? Because if you are watching statistics, it’s kind of like stage 1, stage 2, stage 3, stage 4. You just don’t want to get there if you can help it. Now, I do remember in my own bed, many nights with tears, praying to God to let me just raise my boys and to do great things. You know, in churches, it’s good to preach, teach, and learn about God’s sovereignty, but we don’t want to let that scare us from asking God to do great things and to heal. That does not go against recognizing that these are my desires, Lord. Christ did that in the garden, and yet he gives us a great example of how we say, “Not my will, certainly but yours, but I’m asking you to do great things. I’m asking you for healing; I’m asking you to at least hold on for me long enough to raise my boys. I want to finish that work. I want to do that.” And for certain, if he did choose to take me home for my children, not to become embittered. I’d say that’s a great fear of mine that I struggle with; to not become embittered against the Lord for that.

Of course, we had great encouragement from Ella being with us and having seen her Redeemer’s work in her life through that time. But we want to encourage biblical honesty. We want to encourage hope in God. Again, I don’t want that to sound pat and trivial to you. We can tend to try to grab on and hope in a lot of things. We can tend to want to hope in statistics, in things we read, and in things other people tell us. “Well, you know, my aunt had it, and she’s doing great now.” Those are wonderful things to hear, and those are wonderful testimonials, but our hope is not in those things. Our hope is in God. Psalm 149:4, “For the Lord takes pleasure in his people and he will beautify the afflicted ones with salvation.” We want to rejoice because God offers us something infinitely better than raw fairness. He offers what us? Grace. He offers us himself. I’m glad God’s not fair. I don’t need fair; I need benevolent sovereignty. I need benevolent sovereignty.

Psalm 149:4 teaches us that we need to allow suffering, and we want to encourage those who suffer to take this time to deepen their walk with God, to allow their suffering to deepen their walk with God. That’s what it means to rejoice in the Lord always. And it’s wonderful. It’s wonderful when we have no other choice because I’m pretty hard-headed sometimes. Sometimes I need God to just strip it all away and say, “Here you go. This is the only thing you got to grab onto.”

2 Corinthians 1, we read this all the time where it talks about, you know, the God of all mercy, the father of mercies, and God of all comfort who comforts us in our afflictions so that we can comfort others. And we look ahead and look for opportunities to say, “Yes, the Lord will help me minister to those.” But look at the beginning, don’t neglect what we see at the beginning, “He is the father of mercies and God of all comfort.” We hope in God because there is no real comfort apart from Him. Testimonials are great, statistics are cool sometimes, reading about medical advances is okay, and other things, but if it’s real comfort, it comes from God. He is the God of all your comfort. So, even if the statistics are not good, even if the testimonials are not good, your Redeemer stands ready to comfort you. Yeah, sure, it’d be great to be able to comfort somebody else down the road. But as my Redeemer, He’s my comfort.

This was my prelude, by the way, to tell the boys to hope in God when we sat down with them. We talk a lot about some of these things, and I got a lot of this from Jerry Bridges, the very opening of his wonderful book Trusting in God. And so we sat down, we called a little family meeting, after my wife and I gathered ourselves over lunch and thanked the Lord for his goodness and asked for wisdom. It was kind of a rough situation too, because a friend that we hadn’t seen in years discovered us when we sat down. That is not the time for a reunion. Because you want to sit there and go, “My husband’s got cancer!” You know, that kind of stuff where you just shock him with that. They were just like, “hey, I haven’t seen you in a while. How are you doing?” And so it was the Lord’s doing there. But we came home, we decided how we were going to approach this, and we’d asked everybody to stay off social media until we had a chance to sit down with them, and we’d let them know. And we said, “Hey, listen guys…” We sat them down, and of course, they’re kind of like, “Okay, Dad, what?” You know, family meeting, what was going on. “Hey, we talk a lot about how God is perfect in His love for us, right? What does that mean?” “Well, that means that He always wants what’s best for us.” “That’s right. That’s right. Isn’t that wonderful? He always wants what’s best for us. Not just that, but not only does God always want what’s best for us, but not only is He perfect in love, He’s infinite in His wisdom. So boys, what does that mean? It means that not only does He want what is best for us, but what?” “Well, Dad, He knows what is best for us.” “That’s great, that’s exactly right. And we were so encouraged by that. And I got one more. You know how we also talked about how God is completely sovereign? So what does that mean?” My lawyer-engineer speaks up, “Well, Dad, it means that not only does God always want what is best for us, and not only does He always know what’s best for us, He will always bring it about.” “When?” “Always, Dad.” “No matter how severe the situation?” “Yes, Dad, always.” “Good, because I’m going to give you a chance to practice that right now.” That was a hard conversation, but we didn’t know what to do but just comfort them in honesty. And we wanted them to look to the Lord for their comfort. There’s a weird situation to be in dealing with this internally and with a wife who’s got that look on her face, and she’s dealing with the turmoil inside and trying to be a parent. But what a neat moment for our home, not enjoyable, but God was there.

So what really helped me the most early on was this, if I had to put a giant star in your notes for you, it would be this right here; I didn’t know a lot of things, and I didn’t know where this thing was headed. We didn’t know how long things were going, how far things had spread beyond that; we still don’t know. But the one thing we can grow in comfort in is that I know God. And that’s it. I don’t have to know how the statistics are going to work. By the way, it was really kind of a cruel twist—I’m 46 now. I was 45 when I got diagnosed—all the stats break at 45. So, in my little analytical mind, I’m like, “I’m a three sigma on both of those, and it just doesn’t help.” But knowing God… I think about 1 John, where it talks about children, young people, and fathers. It says all these things about the children, the young people, and then it says, “Fathers, you know him who is from the beginning.” That’s it. You know Him.

Especially when I didn’t know much, knowing God is what really makes His promises a comfort. We can look at Romans 8:28-29, and we could be reminded of that. We’ve taught it, and we quote it, but it means nothing to me without knowing the God who informs that promise and who backs that promise. That’s the real comfort. Not an empty or trite quote. It covers everything to rest on His character, everything. Even when everything else is unstable and turbulent, The Lord brought us to pray. I didn’t have anything else to hold on to. All I have is Christ above all things. And we cried to him, “Let that be enough, Lord. Let that be enough.” And it is, it is enough. Not only that, I know Him… J.I. Packer reminds us that the beauty of our relationship with the Lord is that He knows us. Listen to this, “I am graven on the palms of His hands. I’m never out of His mind. All my knowledge of Him depends on His sustained initiative in knowing me. I know Him because He first knew me and continues to know me. He knows me as a friend, one who loves me. And there is no moment when His eyes off me or His attention distracted from me, and no moment, therefore, when His care falters.” Amen!