"Loser?" I Think Not!

Gotta grab my big soapbox for this one! The one with room to pace about as I get this out there. I feel like I'm waging my own little one-woman battle. I've mentioned this briefly in a few of my "notes" on Melanoma Prayer Center. I've mentioned it in a few comments on friends pages. I've noticed some people coming around and changing their choice of words as they change their understanding. It's time to take this to the masses.

To put it simply, what has got me up in arms, is this idea that people "lose" their battles with cancer when they die from cancer. These are folks who fight long and hard. They and their families give it everything they've got. How dare people talk in terms of them "losing" their battle?

I deal with melanoma and I do take this language personally. Let me tell you why.

"Losers" don't have an "in it to win it" attitude. We know we may die from our cancer; we also know we may not.

We are all going to die from something at some point in time. All of us. It may be from illness, from being in an accident, or because a person was in the wrong place at the wrong time. When someone dies in a car wreck, we don't say they lost their battle with a car.

God talks in terms of us getting the "victor's crown" and we get it only after we've fought the fight, run the race, and died. We don't get a VICTOR'S crown before we die, we get it after we die. We don't get a loser's "tsk-tsk, you tried." If God calls us "victors", why don't we?

Melanoma, like all diseases, is limited. It can only do so much. Absolutely, what it can do is absolutely horrible, painful beyond words, costly beyond means, tricky and devious beyond our wildest imaginations...yet, it's limited.

Melanoma, like other diseases, cannot, cannot, follow me into eternity, it cannot touch that part of me made in God's image, and it cannot kill my spirit. It cannot kill my faith. Oh, it may test it and stretch it. It cannot kill it.

Melanoma and all diseases are the ultimate big losers. Those who fight them, die from them, and enter Heaven's gates, do not enter having "lost," but having won.

Melanoma loses. Cancer loses. Disease loses.

People win.

God doesn't go around handing out Victor's Crowns to just anybody.

He hands them to winners.

And I am grateful!