Waiting on God during cancer is a particular kind of hard, because the waiting does not feel like anything. It feels like silence. This episode is about several months of exactly that, and what Dan Green found on the other side of it.

Prefer to watch? This episode is also on YouTube.

THE SITUATION HE WAS WAITING IN

Treatment started in June. Hard chemotherapy, every other week - three or four hours at the center, then a pump on his side for forty-six hours, then a week and a half of being sick, then back again. His white blood cell count fell so far they had to patch him. He says there were days he genuinely believed it was his last on this earth.

And through all of it, he and his wife were living in a motorhome. No house. No money for a house until the motorhome sold. They had been told he probably would not see the end of the year.

So he had one prayer, and he prayed it every single morning: a home for his wife, so he would not have to leave her without one. That is what waiting on God during cancer looked like for him - one request, repeated, by a man who was not sure he had a year.

WHAT WAITING ON GOD DURING CANCER ACTUALLY LOOKED LIKE

Every morning, four thirty, sick from chemotherapy. Coffee, his study Bible, and crying out to God about a house.

And for months, nothing happened.

People called about the motorhome and did not show up. Someone would seem interested and then go quiet. Built up, let down, built up, let down. It is a high-end motorhome that only a small number of people in the country could afford, which narrowed the field to almost nobody.

So I asked Dan straight out why he thought God was doing that to him.

He did not say God was punishing him. He did not say God had forgotten him. He said, "God was testing me. Just testing me to wait on him, to trust in him."

The waiting was not God being absent. The waiting was the assignment.

THE WISDOM THAT MADE THE WAITING POSSIBLE

Somewhere in the middle of waiting on God during cancer, a house came up that Dan could have made work. He walked away from it, and the reason he gave is one of the wisest things anyone has said on this podcast.

He said that if you are absolutely willing to do whatever God wants in your life, then you can relax, because He will help you feel that peace. But if you are always worried you are making the wrong decision, it is because you have not quite let go of your own choice yet.

The worry is the clue.

About a month later, a second house came up in the very same park.

THE MAN HE ALMOST TURNED AWAY

Then a man called from Colorado about the motorhome.

By that point Dan had been let down so many times that he told the man he was thinking about taking it off the market entirely and driving it to Arizona. He very nearly waved off the one person God was sending. His own words: "To think that I was gonna shoo this guy off, that God was sending my way."

The man came anyway. He bought it.

And here is the part that tells you who Dan is. He did not take the money and go home. He and his wife stood in a parking lot and prayed a blessing over that stranger before he drove away - that God would bless him through that motorhome the same way God had blessed them through it.

A man who had been given five years, praying over somebody else's road.

Within about six weeks, the house was paid off. In cash.

THE CHRISTMAS HE DID NOT EXPECT TO SEE

That December, Dan's family gathered on Christmas Eve the way they have every year for twenty-five years. He had not been at all sure he would live to be there.

And they got news. His grandson's scans were clear - no more cancer anywhere in his body.

We should be honest about the whole picture, because Dan was. That little boy is cancer free today, and he also lives with cerebellar ataxia as a result of the surgery. He has lost the use of his right arm and most of his left leg, and he cannot play the football and baseball he loves. Both of those things are true at the same time. This family received a miracle and they are still carrying something hard.

If that is where you are living right now - where the news was good and the road is still difficult - you are in good company, and God has not forgotten you.

IT AFFECTS PEOPLE YOU WILL NEVER KNOW ABOUT

Near the end of this episode Dan says something I think may be the most encouraging sentence in the whole series for anyone who feels their illness has made them useless.

He told us that all of this has drawn his children closer to God. Then he said: "That is a purpose in your life when you're going through cancer. It affects other people that you don't even know about. It affects their faith."

You may be lying in a bed today convinced you have nothing left to give anybody. Somebody is watching how you carry this.

WHAT YOU WILL HEAR IN THIS EPISODE

What the first months of treatment actually did to him

• One prayer, every morning at four thirty, for months with no answer
• Why he walked away from a house he could have afforded
• The phone call he nearly refused
• A blessing prayed over a stranger in a parking lot
• A Christmas Eve he did not expect to see

YOU ARE NEVER ALONE

If waiting on God during cancer is where you are tonight - praying and getting nothing at all back - hear this clearly. You are not doing it wrong. You are doing exactly what Dan did, for months, in a motorhome, sick, at four thirty in the morning.

Isaiah promised that they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength. Not the ones who force it. Not the ones who figure it out. The ones who wait. The strength comes in the waiting.

And if you do not have that relationship with Jesus, or you had one once and it has gone cold or weak or angry, please visit our Accepting Jesus page. Nothing on this site matters as much.

You are NEVER ALONE. Never.