Faith and a Fatal Disease

3 Ways Faith Helps in a Fatal Disease.

If physicians say you or your loved one has a fatal disease, how can faith help? Many say their faith made all the difference. I’ve found that faith helps most people in 3 main ways:

1. Your Faith in God reminds you of your PAST.

Faith is not so much a feeling or belief. Faith is a relationship with your God. Faith doesn’t just happen suddenly. When you put your faith in someone you love, over a period of time you build a relationship that is full of memories of experiences.

Part of your faith in God is also built on the memories of all that God has done for you and others. Faith is less an intellectual thing but more a commitment and closeness to someone who loves you and will stand by you no matter what. For those of us with faith in God, we don’t deal with our diseases alone. We remember our past and trust the God of our past to be with us through it all. And ultimately, nothing can separate us from his love or from the love we have for one another.

2. Your Faith in God gives you strength for your PRESENT

Faith in God reminds us that we were created with a fee-will to use in our present. We can’t change the past or see the future. But we can use our faith in our present. We can choose what we want to do with life’s hard challenges. To live is to have many difficult times, like this disease. Faith says, hard times can take much from me that I cannot control, but it cannot take away my will to decide how I am going to respond to my situation.

As a family member, you can have much taken from you. But you still have the freedom to choose what you will do with what you still have. Faith in God gives you the power to choose to act on your God-given will-power. No matter what happens, you still have the right and ability to decide to continue to follow his example of giving all you “do have” in service to him and his children. Your present has changed because of your disease, but your ability to choose has not changed.

3. Your Faith in God gives you assurance of your FUTURE.

Every disadvantage has an advantage. To put it another way, every problem we have, no matter how serious or fatal, can be used to make us better or bitter. Faith in God gives you assurance that you are more than your disease. You are still God’s child and you have a valuable future in his eyes. What you do with your new disadvantages will make you proud or disappointed in yourself. Your faith in God gives you the ability to say, “In strength or weakness, I will serve him and show others what it means to be a person of faith.”That is power and love at its best.

Even if you get the most difficult diagnoses or tough news about your future from your doctor or others, your faith will help you say, “I have an important future because I am important to God. I am his beloved child. My Father is with me and is counting on me to do what I can with what I have. I will be a faithful servant of his until I go to be with him in my next future matter what. My future is in His hands.” Bill