Telling your family you have cancer may be the hardest conversation a person ever has. Dan Green had to do it while his family was still reeling from the last one - and he could not get the words out for three days.

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THE WEEKEND HE TOLD NO ONE

Dan read the word cancer on a scan report on a Friday evening, sitting by himself in a motorhome parked at his son's house. His wife was up at the house with the grandkids.

He did not go and get her.

The next morning he drove over to his daughter's place and worked on her car, because he had promised he would. He said nothing. Sunday came and went. He carried the worst news of his life entirely on his own until Monday morning.

His reason was not pride. It was this: "What in the world am I gonna tell my family after all they've been through?"

WHY TELLING YOUR FAMILY YOU HAVE CANCER IS SO HARD

Most of us assume the hardest part of telling your family you have cancer is finding the words. It is not. The difficulty is that you are about to hand people you love something they cannot put down.

Dan is the one in his family who fixes things. He is the man they call. So when the news landed on him, his first instinct was to protect them from it, and he spent three days working out how to do that.

That is not weakness. Of the many people I get to talk with about their cancer journey, I can honestly say it is what most of us do at the very beginning.

THE DAUGHTER WHO WAS SIX WEEKS BEHIND HIM

When Monday came, Dan called his doctor and asked to be seen that day. Then he invited his wife along - carefully, without alarming her - and they heard it together. A rare cancer. Fast-growing. No cure.

Then came the part he had been dreading. Telling your family you have cancer is hard enough to do once. Two days later Dan had to do it again - this time to the daughter whose own ten-year-old son had been diagnosed with a brain tumor only six or seven weeks earlier. She had to sit in a motorhome and hear that her dad had cancer too.

He apologized to them. They told him to stop apologizing.

And then, with nothing good to offer anybody in that room, Dan said this: "No matter what, God always will see you through. He will never let you down."

He did not say it because things were going well. Nothing was going well.

I HAVE NEVER ASKED GOD WHY

Somewhere in all of this, Dan told us something that has stayed with me since. In two years, he has never once asked God why.

He is careful about it. He does not claim it as a virtue and he certainly does not hold himself up as the standard. He simply says that instead of asking why, he asks what the purpose is, and what God wants him to do next.

If you have asked why - and a great many of us have, more than once - you are not doing anything wrong. Dan has something to say to you directly about that in the final episode of this series, and it is worth waiting for.

GOD DID NOT CREATE US TO BE ALONE

Near the end of this episode Dan says the thing the whole conversation was building toward, and he says it almost in passing.

"Cancer is an odd thing about making you feel so alone. I'm not sure why that is."

Then he admits something that took real courage. He has always been a bit of a loner. That is simply how he is wired. And what these two years have taught him is that being alone sometimes is fine, but you must not fall for the lie that it is fine all the time.

"God did not create us to be alone. That's why he created Eve."

That is not Dan's idea. It is the second chapter of Genesis, where God looks at the one man He has made and says it is not good for him to be by himself. Aloneness was the first thing in all creation that God called not good - and He fixed it before anything had even gone wrong.

WHAT YOU WILL HEAR IN THIS EPISODE

• Why telling your family you have cancer is harder than just finding the words
• The Monday phone call: "I need to see you, and I need to see you now"
• How he told his wife without frightening her first
• The hardest conversation - the daughter already living through her son's cancer
• A doctor who would not shake his hand, and what Dan did with that
• Why he has never once asked God why

YOU ARE NEVER ALONE

If you are sitting on something right now that you have not told a single person, hear this clearly: you are not weak and you are not doing this wrong. You are doing what most of us did. But you were never meant to carry it by yourself - not the cancer, and not whatever else is on you tonight.

Dan will tell you plainly that he has no idea how anyone gets through something like this without the Lord Jesus Christ. If you do not have that relationship, or you had one once and it has gone cold or weak or angry, please visit our Accepting Jesus page. Nothing else on this site matters as much.

You are NEVER ALONE. Never.