If you have ever wondered how to pray when you have cancer, this episode is the most freeing thing you will hear all week. I asked Dan Green whether he and his wife had become prayer warriors through all of this, and the first words out of his mouth were, "To be honest with you, I don't really consider myself a prayer warrior."

CONSIDER WHO SAID THAT

This is a man who gets up at four thirty in the morning, every morning, sick from chemotherapy. Coffee, his chair, and a study Bible that never leaves his side. He has done it for twenty-five years. He prays for the strangers in the treatment chairs around him while they are sleeping.

And he does not think he qualifies. If you want to know how to pray when you have cancer, that is the man answering.

HOW TO PRAY WHEN YOU HAVE CANCER, ACCORDING TO DAN

He told us something that took some honesty to admit. For a long time he felt guilty, because so many of his prayers were about himself and his own family. Guilty.

Then he started reading the Psalms, and he found David doing exactly the same thing - crying out to God about how alone he felt, how low he was, how much he was hurting. It is in the Bible. On purpose.

So his advice on how to pray when you have cancer is not a method. It is this: relax, and talk to the Lord like you are talking to a friend. Reverently, but plainly. Man to man, as he puts it. Because that is how He wants it.

The sixty-second Psalm says it this way. Trust in Him at all times, pour out your heart before Him, God is a refuge for us. Pour it out. Not tidy it up first, not make it presentable. Pour it out.

WHAT HIS MORNINGS ACTUALLY LOOK LIKE

He is not a devotional man, and he says so. He picks a book of the Bible and works through it, a chapter a day, for two or three weeks. He keeps commentaries nearby and two or three translations on his phone. Before he reads, he asks the Holy Spirit to show him something.

Sometimes something jumps off the page and lifts him. Sometimes nothing does.

And here is his word for the weeks when nothing does: God gave us His Word for a reason, not just to carry to church on Sunday. There is an answer in there for everything we face in this life. Spend the time. Do not give up. Keep at it.

THE ANSWER THEY WERE NOT HOPING FOR

In the second half, the story picks back up. Dan went to Fred Hutch for a second opinion about a last-chance surgery done for this exact type of cancer - and he speaks warmly about the people there.

His oldest daughter drove him up for the scope that would decide whether he was even a candidate. He could read her face afterward. They got home near midnight before his wife told him what the doctor had said.

There was too much cancer. The surgery could not be attempted at all.

Dan did not rage about it. He told us he was settled - his wife had a home, and that was the one thing he had asked God for. And he also said something I have thought about since: he never really asked God to heal him. He just accepted what came.

A STRANGER IN THE DRIVEWAY

Then a man he had never met knocked on his door to buy a part off Craigslist.

Dan did what Dan always does and told a complete stranger about the Lord. Somewhere in that conversation the man mentioned a supplement.

Let us be straight about this, because Dan was. He does not know whether that supplement had anything to do with what happened next. Throughout it all, he never stopped his chemotherapy - not for a single treatment. He cannot even remember the name of the product. And before he ever touched it, he prayed over it for weeks - his own words were, be careful, go slow, wait for God.

We are not naming any product here, and nothing in this episode is medical advice. Talk to your oncologist.

A few months later, a scan came back stable for the first time since his diagnosis.

GOD CAN USE ANYTHING

Dan's own conclusion is better than any product name: "Jesus used mud to heal a blind man. God can use anything."

And that is really the answer to how to pray when you have cancer, too. Dan takes everything to Jesus first - a scan nobody scheduled, a house, a buyer from Colorado, an offhand comment from a stranger in his driveway. All of it goes to God before it goes anywhere else.

That is not a technique. That is a relationship.

WHAT YOU WILL HEAR IN THIS EPISODE

• Why a man who prays every day at four thirty says he is not a prayer warrior
• The guilt he carried about praying for himself, and what freed him from it
• How he actually reads, and what he does when he feels nothing
• The second opinion, and the answer they were not hoping for
• A stranger at the door, and what Dan did before acting on anything

YOU ARE NEVER ALONE

If you have been carrying a quiet worry that you are not very good at this - that your prayers are too small, too selfish, too repetitive, or too angry - let this episode put it down for you. You are praying the way David prayed. Jesus is not grading you. He wants you.

Learning how to pray when you have cancer is really just learning to keep talking to Him, on the mornings you feel something and the mornings you feel nothing at all.

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.