Sin In the System

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back.  I pray my post today makes sense and renders encouragement.

We got word yesterday that another family member has cancer.  It was detected long ago, but when it swelled into a large hard lump in the stomach, medical advice was sought and the sad news became plain.

My family has lost enough loved ones to cancer to feel as if we lost the whole world.  

It is the great mystery of mortality when a truly good person, who has done nothing but love all of her life, dies from such an inexorable disease.

Of course, there is more hope today for remission.  In the case of the person I am thinking about, the cancer may be eradicated when a part of her organ is surgically removed.  I can remember when cancer was almost always a death sentence. 

The bad news, like the disease itself, comes to us as a foreboding word that contains hope, yet that hope wanes when it becomes apparent that all the medical science and all the prayers of all the churches and people are not going to stop cancer's ravaging course. 

Those of us who grieve the loss so keenly remain and remember the life we mourn as we wend our way through our days with a new lump of non-being embedded within our hearts.

Cancer never seems to come at a good time, like when we are ninety-nine years old.  

Cancer comes as if it strikes from the sky: a mother in her fifties who could be alive to love her grandchildren, a  mother in her forties who asks her doctor to keep her alive long enough to see her daughter graduate from high school, a mother in her thirties who feels as if her life has just begun, a twenty something, a teen, a child...  

Cancer favors no time or circumstance.  

There are other diseases that are just as bad.  My saintly grandmother could be alive today, but Alzheimer's devoured her memory and vitality with the same inexorable end.  

Cancer fills us with a special dread.  That mole that changes shape on our faces or backs gives us pause.  That lump we feel rising where soreness signals a mere infection makes us hold our breath.  Those pangs clanging within our bowels spark dread within us.

Every physical I ever had felt scary before and during the process.   My back hurts a lot.  Is there such a thing as cancer of the spine?  Will my blood work indicate a clandestine infection working its nefarious end in my system?

Always, I feel that overwhelming sense of salvation when the doctor says unto me the good news, "Keep doing whatever it is you're doing.  You're as healthy as a horse."

 Cancer just feels evil even though we know it to be a natural malignancy.   

Sin spreads like cancer throughout human history.  It is a cliché, but a very useful one. 

According to Hebrew lore, it starts as an act of disobedience of a god’s commandment to refrain from eating fruit from a particular tree.  It suddenly lurks at Cain’s door then manifests itself in a murder.

It spreads with such rapidity that wickedness and violence cry out to the elohim and the Yahweh who live in the sky.  They decide to wash the world clean with water.

It doesn’t work.  Immediately, after those who have been saved walk on dry land, there is incest, and sin continues its malignant course.

Of all the people who have ever lived, we know sin’s murderous way throughout history and in our own time. 

The systematic murder of Jewish people raises a shudder of amazement within us until we realize that the Holocaust bloodbath may well be just one well spring gushing out of an open vein from the heart of hell. 

We are tempted to despair because there is something terribly wrong with people when they so inexorably perish one another.

But the news is not all bad.  There is gospel, and it has always run concurrently from another vein.

Blessings…