"I may have cancer, but cancer doesn’t have me."

I met Ann Maree in 2003.  She left us on Friday, July 1, 2011.  She was a warrior.

It was unlikely that we would meet, and it was even less likely that we would stay at all connected for the remaining years of her life.  I barely knew her really.  But what I knew was an example of fight and tenacity and stubborn optimism and sheer refusal to give up or give in.  Ann was diagnosed with cancer soon after I met her. 

She chaired the search committee of a church that considered calling me as their pastor.  If she’d had her way I may have ended up there, but as it happened they called someone else and I came to Canada.  When Ann emailed me that she had a deadly form of cancer I didn’t expect her to last more than a few years.  That was eight years ago.  She extended her life through her tenacity, the love and support of those closest to her, and medical care I can only begin to imagine. 

A cyclist myself, I was refreshed to learn Ann was pursuing cycling as part of her treatment and lifestyle.  It seemed only natural that she would link up with Lance Armstrong’s Livestrong Foundation, and I could only smile when I learned that she shared the cover page of a cycling publication with the seven time Tour de France winner. 

Her husband Al knew better than anyone that “Ann was a firm believer in helping others through their own journey, no matter what life-threatening illness they were battling,” as he wrote on her blog annsjournies, recently.   

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.

2 Corinthians 1:3-4

Ann knew firsthand that suffering, when processed through the eyes of faith, gives birth to the ability to comfort those who suffer.   “As she has always said, ‘I may have cancer, but cancer doesn’t have me.’”  

What is holding you back today? What cancer, what seemingly insurmountable problem, what disability, what affliction, what wound, what injury, what devastation, what terminal illness, what circumstance is confronting you?  How will you respond?  Whatever issues you have, those issues don’t have you.  They don’t define you.  As Canadian poet Robert Service has said in his poem The Quitter, “to fight and to fight when hope's out of sight -- Why, that's the best game of them all!”  And that, most surely, is a “game” Ann Maree surely won.