Sorry about so many posts. But I had positive things to share. I awaken at 2 AM this morning. I checked my phone and there was an automatically generated text message that my cancer labs were in. With hesitation, I got up to check them. With so much at stake, it can be nerve racking having your mouse cursor hovering over the results button. Your entire life and future flashes before your eyes for a millisecond. To cut to the chase, my cancer labs were normal. This means I’ve been in deep remission for a year. I am of course thrilled.

Yes, also of course I thank God for this, but not in the way you might think. My relationship with God does not hinge on the supernatural, as if the natural, which is created by God, is bad. I thank God for the wonderful way he has made nature and allowed, within the laws of nature, good people, each created in his image, to use their brains, their knowledge to find a way to use an antibody to go after this cancer. The process of developing the antibody that has worked so well for me was nothing less than brilliant. A miracle (implying the supernatural) is where I would be dead for a week, someone prays, and I wake up. Or, someone prays and my cancer suddenly vanishes without any other treatment and my kidneys are restored. In modern history, such events have never been recorded, yet I can still hope for a miracle.

Giving credit to nature doesn’t negatively reflect on God or on my faith, but on us with this dualism that nature is bad and super-nature (supernatural) is good. If you believe in God, then you must believe that nature is his, not the devil’s and to praise the beauty of how nature works, and how humans, created by God’s design, is to praise the creator. My point being, and I will get into this more later, it is yet another aspect of magical thinking, to pretend that things are miracles (outside the laws of nature) when they are not. To live honestly, is deeply frowned upon in some religious societies, but the expectation is to pretend that supernatural events are happening all around us. There is tremendous pressure within those societies to fake it. Again, my mantra is that if God exist, he lives within reality. The more we live in reality, the better we can see God. I digress but I wanted to use this moment to illustrate this notion. But with that said, of course I am deeply grateful to God and the scientists and doctors, nurses, PAs, my own body, all who have made this possible.

Mike