Five years ago today I found out that God had healed me of cancer. Five years.
FIVE. YEARS.
Five years! Hallelujah! Five years ago I jumped out of my seat and danced around praising God, and I do it again today to celebrate.
Five years ago I saw God work in ways that I had only dreamed about and hoped for. In ways that seemed to good to be true.
Five years ago, God turned our mourning into dancing.
I want this to be clear. When I say God healed me, I mean the God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Jesus is the one who healed me. When we prayed for healing in Jesus’s name, what that means is that we acknowledged the authority Jesus has because He is God, and appealed to that authority. He is the one who everything was created through and the one who holds all things together (Colossians 1:16-17). If we had prayed to someone or something else to do it, nothing would have happened. We prayed to Jesus for healing because He invites us to ask (Matthew 7:7-11). We cast these anxieties onto Him because He cares for us (1 Peter 5:7).
The same Jesus who healed the leper, the blind man, and all the other people we read about in the Bible also healed me, Ruth Lindberg. There is no one else who can do this.
I wrote the account below a year ago and posted it on Facebook to celebrate the four-year anniversary of being healed, and so I am simply re-posting this here and updating the timeframe to describe what happened that morning in the oncologist’s office. All of my CTs, labwork, and physical exams for the last five years have shown no cancer and I have been in good health.
I had hoped to throw a big party in the backyard to celebrate this day with whoever could come. Celebrate with me this way instead - with a prayer of praise and thanksgiving. Thank you Jesus! To Him be all glory and honor and power forever and ever. Amen.
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On this morning five years ago, I sat in my oncologist's office waiting for the results of my CT scan the day before. A few weeks beforehand, God had made it clear to two prayerful leaders from my church that He was going to heal me of cancer. God confirmed it to me personally a few days later through a powerful, physical encounter with the Holy Spirit - which I had not believed could really happen, until it happened to me. Yet more often than I care to admit, seeing is believing, and I needed to see the results of that CT scan.
The nurse pulled up the radiologist's report on the computer screen and we read these words together: “No enlarged hilar or mediastinal lymph nodes. Resolved enlarged right-sided intrapulmonary lymph node. IMPRESSION: No evidence of metastatic disease. Interval resolution of the enlarged intrapulmonary lymph node.” In layman's terms, the cancer that was clearly there six weeks prior was completely gone. My CT was completely normal.
I leaned back in my chair, stunned. God did it. He really did it. And then I jumped out of my seat and started hooting and hollering and dancing around, King-David-in-his-ephod style, not giving a thought to anything but amazement and wonder and profound joy. The poor nurse had no idea. She looked like a deer in the headlights as I put my arms around her and gave her a big hug. I sometimes still wonder if she knows she had been given a front-row seat to witnessing a miracle.
My oncologist came in a little later, and agreed there was nothing there to treat (so no need for the chemotherapy they were all thinking I would need). We went together to the radiology department so we could see the scans ourselves. The radiologist had pulled up four of my CTs for us to look at, which is what I have recreated in the picture here. Top left was from over a year prior, when my chest CT was normal, he explained. Top right was when the lymph node had started to grow but was not big enough to ring any alarm bells. On the bottom left was the CT from six weeks prior - I added the yellow arrow to point to the pathologically enlarged lymph node which was biopsied two weeks afterward and showed recurrent cancer.
"And here," he said as he moved his mouse pointer to the image on the bottom right, "is your scan from yesterday, and the lymph node is back to normal. It looks like it did a year ago.” I don't think he realized he had a front-row seat to a miracle either, but I thanked him and my oncologist and went on my way. That was five years ago today. I am glad to report I am still cancer-free, and still amazed and profoundly joyful. We prayed to God in Jesus's name for healing and He said yes. I know this raises as many questions as it does answers, but one thing we can be sure of is that Jesus is the same, yesterday, today and forever, and he is still doing miracles as he did here two thousand years ago. And for that I will be thankful all the days of my life.
