Friday, August 17, 2012

Oh hey look, a trigger

(I know, I haven't been here in almost a year. This has never been a frequently posting place, but a place for me to put thoughts and rants as related to moms cancer. If you still have this in your reader, thank you.)

I was perusing my Facebook wall today and BAM! a trigger came out of nowhere. There's a post from an outlying family member about how she went to the doc today and she's been in remission and cancer free for 2 years, 7 months, 10 days. I find that exciting and was happy for her. No, the trigger showed up when one of my SILs said "God is good!"

Yes. God is good. He TOTALLY had everything to do with this. He magically made the cancer go away. It wasn't the chemo or the radiation or the surgeries. Nope, God decided that this woman was worth saving, came down off his high cloud and made it all better. Oh sure, she still WENT through that other stuff but maybe she shouldn't have. Maybe she just should have prayed hard enough, believed in her faith enough, gone to enough revivals and been doused with enough holy oil to light up New York, and she would have just been miraculously healed without having to go through all that nasty science stuff.

God decided that this woman was worth interrupting his day for, coming down off his cloud, and zapping her with his magic dust and making her all better. My mother, apparently, was not. What makes this woman so different? Does she donate to charity? Live like Mother Teresa? No, nothing. My mother was a religious woman. She believed that God would do His will, whatever that was, and she was at peace with it in the end.

I really hate the words "God's Will". It gets tossed around everywhere. Can't have kids? It must be God's will. Go through treatments, manage to have a child? God's will. Get pregnant, only to lose it? God wanted that child back home, it was God's will for him/her. Get cured of cancer? God's will...although apparently not His will when you GET the damn cancer in the first place. No one gets cancer and gets told "It must just be God's will for your life that you suffer in this manner."  Die? "God took him back to heaven because it was his time" or something similar. God gets all the credit for all the things.

This is, of course, only if you believe that God is in control of every little thing. This is how you end up with people saying "How could God let that little child die? How can He be so cruel as to let the Midwest/East be destroyed by tornadoes and floods? How could he let nuclear weapons be launched? *insert bad things here and how can God let them happen*" Because of free will, jackasses. Einstein once said "God does not play dice with the world." It's...sure, God created the world, and then he let it go. He doesn't roll the die to see who lives and dies, who gets struck with infertility and cancer and diseases and medical issues, which places get to be destroyed today by a natural disaster. No, He just set it free to do what it will. Giving Him credit for being cancer free? No, I don't think so.