The Bitter Cup

Most versions of chemotherapy are basically poison. The idea is to kill off the cancerous cells before all of the non-cancerous cells have been killed off. As crazy as it seems, a doctor can successfully eliminate cancer without killing the patient by administering the exact right amount of poison. Because chemotherapy kills a lot of regular cells in addition to the cancer, there are a whole host of side decidedly unpleasant side effects - nausea, vomiting, fatigue, anemia, hair loss. You feel like you're dying because basically you are. But in happy cases, on the far side of all of the carefully administered poison, you can, if you're lucky, emerge cancer free. Doctors have to resort to such extreme measures because we haven't figured out an easier way to get the cancer out. Cancer can spread through our organs on the microscopic level, and we don't have any better tools for getting it out than poisoning the whole body and hoping the cancer dies first. Hopefully many of us will not have to face physical cancer firsthand, but all of us will have some form of spiritual cancer or another that we must overcome if we are to be saved. We will all have to go through spiritual equivalents of a chemotherapy regime. These are bitter cups to swallow. They are painful. They steal our happiness and kill our spirits slowly. But they are administered by the Master Healer. He knows precisely how much of the refiner's fire we can take and still survive while the spiritual cancer dies. Repentance can make us feel weak and nauseated. It may even make us want to tear our hair out. To let go of an addiction, to forgive the unforgivable, to have the humility to accept God's will when it means the end of everything we care about, to pick ourselves up and move on from unbearable grief - these are bitter cups to swallow. But we can trust that the Lord will not give us more poison than we can handle, and He will not allow us to die before our time, and on the far side of the refiner's fire is a spirit that has been completely purged of the Spiritual cancers that were eating away at us. I know sometimes the pain is so great that it seems that the cure is worse than the disease, but we can trust that however sharp and clear and interminable our pain seems now, if we hold out faithful, our pain will be swallowed up in the joy of Christ.