“Aslan,” said Lucy, “you’re bigger.”
“That is because you are older, little one,” answered he.
“Not because you are?”
“I am not. But every year you grow, you will find me bigger.”Prince Caspian – Chapter 10
Every day God seems a little bit bigger! We’ve been praying for this day for years now, but when it finally came yesterday, we struggled to believe it at first. But God is really big enough to cure cancer!
It’s been over four years now that Serena has been fighting against cancer. It was diagnosed as Hodgkin’s Lymphoma and we were told that the majority of patients responded very well to treatment and were cancer-free thereafter. Serena had the treatment, which was horrible in itself, but she turned out to be in the unlucky minority who struggle on, wishing that statistics actually meant something to the individual. Her cancer spread from her lymph nodes all through her body. She had chemotherapy and radiotherapy, which shrunk the tumours, but they kept coming back. She spent weeks in hospital too weak to leave the room and needing a clean room to keep out the smallest infection. We tried to get bone marrow for her to try a new therapy but there was no donor that matched her marrow. And then last year the doctors said there was nothing more they could do and she only had months left to live.
But alongside this terrible story of physical suffering is a glorious story of personal transformation. Through the pain and hopelessness Serena reached out to Jesus, and he was there waiting for her, as he has always been, waiting, knocking, calling.
“Who are you?” he said, scarcely above a whisper.
“One who has waited long for you to speak,” said the Thing. Its voice was not loud, but very large and deep.The Horse and His Boy – Chapter 11
We witnessed the transformation Jesus gave to her, the explosion of hope in a hopeless situation: the new joy and peace in the face of sadness and anguish. We knew that the cancer could destroy her body but that Jesus held her soul! We watched and wept at her baptism as she told everyone who would listen that she would trust in God whether he healed her or not. And all the time we prayed for her and with her that God would pull out the cancer and throw it out across the stars, so far that it can never come back.
And Serena has lived more in these years of suffering than in all the years before! She’s travelled the world, met new people and done new things. There’s a picture above with a lion cub in South Africa that inspired all the Narnia quotes! We’ve been amazed by her faith and her excitement and her bravery.
So yesterday Serena and her mum and my mum went to get the results of her latest scan. Remember that at the last scan the doctors said there was nothing they could do, and Serena has had no treatment since then at all. Serena didn’t even want to be in the room because she didn’t want to know how much the cancer had spread, but the doctor told her not to leave because she will want to hear this news: the tumour that was in her right hip has completely disappeared! There was no trace of it on the scan! There was no cancer anywhere else – there were two small hotspots on the scan, but they are so small that they can’t even biopsy them to see if they are cancerous or just scar tissue! We couldn’t believe it, which just shows how much our faith needs to grow, and how much bigger God is than we think he is!
“Please – Aslan,” said Lucy, “can anything be done to save Edmund?”
“All shall be done,” said Aslan. “But it may be harder than you think.” And then he was silent again for some time. Up to that moment Lucy had been thinking how royal and strong and peaceful his face looked; now it suddenly came into her head that he looked sad as well.The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe – Chapter 12
Jesus has done everything necessary to save Serena – to save her body and her soul – but it was harder than we may think. He chose to leave the glory of heaven and be humbled to be born as a baby in a manger in Bethlehem. He chose to be despised and rejected by men, he chose to be beaten and spat upon and whipped. He chose to surrender to death, even death on a cross, so that Serena could live. Thank you, Jesus. Thank you for saving her, and thank you for saving me.
“Listen, Peter. When Aslan said you could never go back to Narnia, he meant the Narnia you were thinking of. But that was not the real Narnia. That had a beginning and an end. It was only a shadow or a copy of the real Narnia which has always been here and always will be here: just as our own world, England and all, is only a shadow or a copy of something in Aslan’s real world.”
It was the unicorn who summed up what everyone else was feeling. He stamped his right fore-hoof on the ground and neighed, and then cried: “I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now. The reason why we loved the old Narnia is that it sometimes looked a little like this. Bree-hee-hee! Come further up, come further in!”
The Last Battle – Chapter 15