One morning, I woke up as a middle-aged dad about to start an entirely new career. The next morning, I awoke for the first time as a cancer patient. That was over four years ago, and what a journey it’s been! You can read more of my story here, but here’s the short version: I’ve run, walked, stumbled and crawled to places I never thought I’d see, to learn things I thought I already knew.

One of the hard-and-fast rules of hiking is to never go off trail. When the treatments for my under-studied cancer worked, we were left with no other choice. So, how do you get where you want to go when there’s no blazed path to guide you? I’ll share a few things that helped me through the wilderness. I think they could help you, too.

Often cancer care is focused on the body, maybe the mind, if you’re lucky. But, how you care for your spirit during the time you need it most? I’ll share what worked (and what didn’t) to care for my spiritual health, and what those spiritual experiments - both ordinary and extraordinary - taught me about my spirit and what I need to thrive.

We are meaning-making creatures, no-more-so than when suffering calls meaning into question. We search for a moral to the lesson, a sign, or something we can cling onto as the storm swirls around us. Let me tell you a little about how this pastor with a PhD in Theology struggled to find meaning after diagnosis and the lessons I’ve learned from that struggle.

When you wake up the first morning after diagnosis, the world can feel like such an odd place. The lens through which you viewed the world the day before no longer helps you find your way. We want to fight it, but what happens when we embrace our change in perspective? What happens when we come to the terms with the fact that everything is just different now?

The impact of a serious medical diagnosis can’t be understated. It can call into question everything you consider “important.” So how do you figure out what’s important to you and let those things guide you throughout? I’ll share what that process - its peaks and valleys - looked like for me and offer a few suggestions for you.