Making hard decisions during cancer is its own exhausting job, on top of everything else. Treatment options. Money. Where to live. Whether to tell people. And all of it arrives while you are more tired than you have ever been in your life.

HE WALKED AWAY FROM THE HOUSE

My friend Dan Green was living in a motorhome with his wife, in treatment for stage four cancer, and looking for a house. He had one prayer: get her settled somewhere before he was gone.

Then a house came up that he could have made work. The money was there. It would have solved the problem.

He walked away from it. He said he just did not feel like it was the one.

About a month later a second house came up in the same park, and that is the one they bought.

WHY MAKING HARD DECISIONS DURING CANCER FEELS IMPOSSIBLE

Here is what I wanted to know, and I suspect you do too. How did he walk away from a solution when he had been begging God for one?

Most of us cannot. We turn a decision over and over, we look for signs, we make lists, and underneath all of it is a low hum of dread that we are about to get it wrong. That dread is what makes making hard decisions during cancer so much heavier than it should be. It is not the decision. It is the fear attached to it.

THE WORRY IS THE CLUE

Dan's answer was this. 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.

Read that again, because it is doing something clever.

He is not saying the peaceful option is always the right one. He is saying the worry is diagnostic. The churning is information. That is the real test for making hard decisions during cancer, and it is a far kinder test than the one most of us apply to ourselves - it is not telling you which house to buy, it is telling you that you are still holding the pen.

That is why he could let that first house go without falling apart. He had already handed the decision over. So walking away cost him nothing, because it was never his to win.

AND YOU ARE ALLOWED TO ASK

There is a verse in James that I love for exactly this. If any of you lack wisdom, it says, let him ask of God, who gives to all men liberally and upbraideth not - and it shall be given him.

Upbraideth not. He will not scold you for asking. He will not sigh, or point out that you have asked before, or suggest you should have worked this out by now.

So ask. Plainly, out loud, as many times as you need to.

IF YOU ALREADY DECIDED AND IT WENT BADLY

Now I need to say something carefully, because there is a way to read all of this that would hurt somebody, and I do not want that.

If you made a decision that turned out badly - a treatment that did not work, a move you regret, money spent on something that failed - none of this means you did not trust God enough. Peace is not a guarantee of outcome. Dan had peace about that second house and it was still a house bought by a dying man for his widow. Peace did not make his situation easy. It made it carryable.

And God is not finished with a decision just because it did not go the way you hoped. He has been redeeming bad outcomes for a very long time.

YOU ARE NEVER ALONE

Whatever you are turning over tonight, you do not have to solve it by yourself before morning. Making hard decisions during cancer was never meant to be a solo exam. Hand it over. If the worry stays, hand it over again. That is not failure - that is most of us, most days.

And Jesus is right there in the room while you do it. Sometimes we only have to turn our head ninety degrees to notice He is standing beside us.

If you do not have that relationship with Him, or yours 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.

Listen to the Podcast - Dan's Story, Part Three: The Man I Almost Turned Away