Toward a Better Life

by Peter Morton Coan

  We moved from Canada to Ashland, Kentucky; it's a small town on the Ohio River near the state lines of Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia. It was your typical Midwest river town, where life was slow, family-oriented, with school during the week, church on Sundays, solid American, but very sheltered. There wasn't a lot of crime or violence. It was a nice place to live and raise kids. My father was a pastor at a local Baptist church. My mother was a homemaker.

  From an early age, I went to church. I became a believer at age five, was baptized at age six, and by age seventeen, I felt the call from God to go into the ministry. God had been tugging at my heart for some time. I was a youth pastor well into my early twenties. I went to a local college, Marshall University, and graduated with a teaching degree, and then spent one year attending Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, and that changed me. For the first time I saw life through the lens of a large city and not just a small town.

  When I went to Chicago, I saw things I'd never seen before. I was a twenty-one-year-old kid, and on Sunday morning I would go with a ministry team to a rest home. I was the preacher. I had a song leader and a couple of others who came along, and every week we had to go to the South Side of Chicago, which was not exactly the best part of town. I saw how great the diversities are and the needs are in urban areas; just the whole cultural dynamic gripped me, and I felt like God was preparing me to have a larger vision than just what I had seen up to that point. I learned two things: awareness—that God wanted me to see things through his eyes, not just through my eyes—and the second thing I learned was preparation, that I needed to really prepare well if I was going to become a successful pastor.

  After graduating from Marshall University, I studied for three years at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, in my quest for preparation. I totally engulfed myself, learning Greek, Hebrew, and then I had all the biblical training.

  After that, I was called to pastor at a rural church deep in the heart of Appalachia. They were without a pastor, and I was single at the time, twenty-seven years old. The church had gone through some transition, and so I came in as a young minister trying to revive it.

  I met my wife, Sara, there. Of course, you have to remember, as a single pastor a lot of people wanted to fix me up with their daughters or granddaughters. There was a guy in our church who said, “One of these days, someone is going to walk through that back door and you're going to know it's the right person.” Sure enough, I was preaching one Sunday and Sara walked in. I had seen her a hundred times, and maybe it was the glow of the light coming through the window that day, but I thought, “That's the person for me.”

  One year later, I proposed to Sara. Three months later, we were married and awaiting word on an open position for pastor of a Baptist church in northern Kentucky, near Cincinnati. By this time, I had developed a reputation as an excellent pulpit pastor who gave concise, well-organized sermons without looking at his notes. I got the job, and we moved to northern Kentucky and our new home.

  It was the fall of 1995, and I was feeling on top of the world. I was a young pastor, newly married to a beautiful brunette. We honeymooned in Florida, and then I started work as pastor of the church. That year just seemed like a lot of firsts for us. Sara and I had our first Thanksgiving together. We had our first Christmas together. As newlyweds, we had also just spent our first Easter together, and by this time Sara was six months pregnant with our first child. Then one ordinary morning in May, everything changed.

  I was about to begin my daily routine, which included a visit to a local hospital in Covington, Kentucky, a short distance from downtown Cincinnati, making my rounds offering prayer and solace to those in need. But en route to the hospital, I stopped at a traffic light. Just then, a gasoline tanker traveling approximately forty-five miles per hour failed to brake and slammed into the rear of my car. The impact sent it clear across a main intersection. Fortunately for me, there were no oncoming cars. I had my seatbelt on, and my airbag was deployed, but I didn't feel any pain. It didn't seem like anything was wrong, really, but EMS suggested I go to the hospital for an x-ray.

  The doctors didn't like what they saw, so they took additional x-rays, a CT scan, and made an appointment for me to be examined by an oncologist. I suffered no ill effects from the accident. The problem lay elsewhere, it seemed. The doctors told me, “There's a very large mass in your chest,” something the size of a softball, that the mass was around my lungs and heart—the whole chest area. It was a large tumor, too large to operate. They did a biopsy from the neck, which revealed it was stage two non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. Cancer. The doctors told me the accident may have saved my life because they said, “If we hadn't found this, you'd probably be gone within a year.”

  They also said that because of the location and type of cancer that it was, surgery was not an option. I was going to need six to eight months of intensive chemotherapy and radiation treatments, ending sometime around Christmas. The treatments were heavy chemotherapy doses once every three weeks, with radiation treatments one day per week for two months. The doctors said the best-case scenario was that they would somehow shrink the tumor and give me a few more years.

  My wife and I were in disbelief. How could this be? Sara really took it hard. This was shocking to her. She was living with me in our new life together. She was pregnant, and now she was faced with the prospect that I may not live and our child may grow up without a father.

  I couldn't believe it was happening. I remember being alone in the master bedroom of our home. I just wanted to be by myself. I remember thinking, “This is not the way it's supposed to be,” and I cried out to God. I asked him, “Is this really happening?” And then I felt this sense of assurance that swept over my body, saying to me, “This will be OK.”

  The Old Testament speaks about the “still small voice.” I felt like God spoke to me through his Holy Spirit, that “this is all in my greater good.” He didn't tell me I was going to be healed. He just said, “I am with you.” His presence felt so real. I felt him saying to me, “I'm going to get you through this whole process.”

  So I was probably in denial no more than twenty minutes. I felt drawn to the Bible and particularly Philippians 4:4–7, which I read every day: “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. Let all men know your forbearance. The Lord is at hand. Have no anxiety about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God which transcends all understanding will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”

  In the following weeks, the disease and the treatment took a real toll on me physically. I lost all my hair. I was pale, gaunt, emaciated looking. I lost much of my energy and strength, and there was a terrible metallic taste in my mouth that never seemed to go away so that food never tasted good. I started to wear hats to protect my bald scalp against sunburn. I was never sick growing up. Just the opposite. I was healthy. Athletic. I didn't smoke or drink. In addition, the irony for me: here I had gone to visit hundreds of people in the hospital over the years—cancer patients, all kinds of patients with serious illness—but I never thought that I would be one of them.

  The doctors didn't understand. They said it could be from environmental factors. Genetic factors. I once had an uncle who died of stomach cancer.

  There were many questions that I had, but I always found myself going back to the Bible, to scripture, to resolve them. First of all, you have to understand that both believers and nonbelievers can say that it's not God punishing me per se, and that it could be for the greater good of humanity, so to speak; that oftentimes God has cured people, oftentimes he allows us to go through tests and trials to demonstrate his compassion and love, and I really came to the conclusion that if this was God's course for my life, so be it. If I were to pass, and then there was a greater good, then both Sara and I were comfortable in knowing that we had done everything we could and that it was out of our hands because we sought ou
t the best doctors and followed the medical regimen to the T.

  In addition, as part of my daily regimen I took walks and read verse. Pray and walk, that's what I did for six months. I felt very reassured that God was going to take care of me, so I really put my faith in him. There were many scripture passages that were therapeutic for me.

  But it was Sara who held me together. She did this through her love and refused to let me feel sorry for myself. She has such strength of character. She said things like, “We're going to beat this! We're going to get better!” We developed a strong “we can get through anything” bond. Doctors would fill my body up with chemicals, and I knew I would throw up, but this one particular time, I just couldn't make it to the bathroom of our new house, and I threw up in the kitchen, on the carpet, in the sink, everywhere, and there she was, cleaning up my vomit. It was a very humbling experience.

  Then there was the emotional stress of not knowing if my sickness would negatively affect our child in Sara's womb. A sonogram told us it was a boy. Would I be alive to see my son's birth, or even the first few months of his life? But that wasn't all. The doctors told us that due to the chemotherapy, we'd probably never be able to have more children.

  In the meantime, I continued to preach every Sunday, as much for my sanity as to reassure the congregation that they were not going to lose their pastor. After all, it had taken the church more than two years to find a new one. I could see the uncertainty every Sunday morning when I preached. I had only been there about seven months. The congregation looked sympathetically toward me: “Here's someone going through pain; let's see if his message matches his faith,” but there were doubts and concern. I mean, several people told me, “Until we get the all-clear sign, we still don't think you're going to make it.” And they just didn't want to get too close, too emotionally attached. They had just lost a previous pastor, and they were just getting to know us, and then I got sick, and so the attitude of many church members was, “We're going to back off until we know that you're going to be around.”

  Sometimes I wasn't even aware of how the congregation was behind me because when you go through something like this, you have to walk it alone. I know there were times I absolutely dragged myself to the church for services so as to not to let the church congregation down. I kept them apprised of my medical situation and infused my sermons with the circumstances of my life. One of the phrases I used a lot during this time was, “You can't get bitter—you gotta get better.” Meaning you can't get bitter toward God. He has a plan, and it's going to see its course.

  We received hundreds of cards and phone calls, and we were on prayer chains across the state of Kentucky. Of course, my mother was at our home almost daily, especially after one of my four-hour treatments, and my condition was showing no improvement. I was about to have my sixth and final chemotherapy session when the doctors informed me that a CT scan revealed that the mass in my chest had not shrunk and requested that I undergo additional treatments, and that shocked me.

  I didn't expect that. Neither did Sara. She was now in her third trimester, and things looked really bleak. I felt really bleak. And I didn't understand all that was happening. I had faith. I had people praying for me. I had been anointed in the name of God to be healed—so I had all of it.

  It felt like our faith was being tested. One day, a woman, a complete stranger, came into my office and said, “I just want to tell you that I heard about your plight and I have bad news: You're not going to make it! God has something else in store for you,” and she left like some demonic apparition.

  “Who was that?” my secretary asked.

  “I don't know,” I said. And I never saw her again.

  Another time, Sara answered the phone and allowed a salesman to make an appointment, not really knowing what the appointment was for. Turns out it was someone selling plots at the local graveyard. My mother answered the door and she was stunned. She said, “Why are we having this conversation?” She thought Sara and I had made arrangements to buy cemetery plots.

  We were feeling low and weary from the stress. We decided to get away for Labor Day weekend to Lake Cumberland in Tennessee. A church member had offered us use of his cabin. So we decided to go there and look at life and hold each other a little tighter. One afternoon, we went to the swimming pool and started talking about what if I don't make it. We talked about the financial aspects of it. Would Sara go back to live with her parents? Or would she stay in Kentucky with an infant? We had to have this conversation. It wasn't something we wanted to have, certainly not in the first year as husband and wife. But there we were having this conversation of what-ifs. I remember some insurance company once itemized the big stresses in life: a move is a big stressor, a new house is a big stressor, an illness, and the birth of a child. I mean, we had all of them going at the same time.

  Then, at some point during that weekend, our attitudes became more optimistic, and we said, “Let's go forward and talk about the birth of our son.” We were thinking negatively—that maybe things won't go well, maybe I had only a year to live, but our son was still going to be born, so we started channeling our energies positively as to what we could do to make his arrival great, which was only a few weeks away.

  Driving back home from Lake Cumberland, I recall feeling what a blessing that weekend had been because it just rekindled our honeymoon all over again. I felt so happy that I had married her. I didn't want that weekend to end—physically, spiritually. Of course, we believed that God was going to take care of us. We were just leaning on him.

  The key scripture for me was [Philippians 4:7]: “And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”

  I felt like not only was God guarding my heart with that scripture, he was guarding my mind, too, because it was almost like he gave me a covering of protection so that I wouldn't think too far ahead, and in that way stay positive.

  But once home, reality set in. It was an emotional low point when the ladies of the church held a baby shower for Sara. We came in that night, and the ladies knew things weren't going well medically, and I think they felt more sorry for us than happy for us, and that they were going to have to find a new pastor again, and that Sara would likely be moving back home, and I'll be in heaven. Gone. This was the bottom.

  Then one day, I went to the hospital for a special SPECT scan: a threehour procedure in which doctors had me drink dye to get a good look at the inside of my body. Everything in a SPECT scan is either green or red. The green is healthy tissue; red is the tumor. The doctor said he would get back to me in a couple of days, but the technician already had the results and let me see them.

  I looked at the chart and it looked all green! I was thinking, “Praise God. Thank you, God.” I had completed all of my chemotherapy treatments, and it was just miraculous! After the doctor told me the results in person, it was an even greater relief. He couldn't believe it. He was elated! I don't think I heard him say “miracle,” but I know he was thinking that. I think it certainly was an act of God, working through those doctors, through those medicines, that he divinely allowed me to heal—not just physically, but emotionally, mentally, spiritually.

  I immediately called home. Sara and I both cried. My father wasn't an emotional person, so he didn't like to talk about my illness. It was something we didn't bring up much, but when I was healed, it was like the weight was off his shoulders. He cried. My mother cried….

  I reported back to the congregation the joyful news. It was a Sunday service, the first Sunday after Thanksgiving. The congregation of 350 stood on its feet and applauded. Sara beamed. I tried to sum up my feelings that day, which is that God had really guided my heart and my mind. That God can take the bad and turn it into good, that he's in control! I was feeling not only hopeful, but that God was going to bring hope and happiness to a lot of people in the congregation who had been there with us and sacrificed and prayed and connected with us through our pain. One man said afte
r the service, “You're the only miracle I know.”

  Soon after, we were blessed with a healthy seven-pound, four-ounce, brown-haired baby boy!

  I remember that day. I just drove around for an hour by myself, listening to my favorite spiritual songs on the car CD player. It was just a beautiful, bright sunny day, and I thought, “I've got my health, I've got my son, I'm going to live! I'm going to enjoy life! I'm so blessed!”

  The following year, we were quite surprised when we had our second child, a daughter, and even more surprised two years after that when we had our third child, a son. We were so thrilled to have three healthy children! As far as my health, the doctors say I am cured, the cancer in total remission.

  Now I wake up every day thanking God for the blessing and the challenges—because God has allowed us to go through this for a reason, and it's to help others. It's to be an encouragement. I think my surviving cancer was another event to help me become a better pastor. I see it all as a connection. To be a better minister and a better person, and to be able to really minister to people where they are. That's what I want to do. I've learned that even in the darkest valley, God will be with you if you allow him to be.

  A few years later, my parents returned to Canada, and Sara and I decided to go as well and keep the family together. Her parents had already passed. And we'd done our work here. It was time to go home. The children were still young. They, of course, were born here, so they're American citizens. So, of course, was Sara. But interestingly enough, my father, mother, and me—none of us ever became citizens. We had our green cards, but that's all.

  So we returned to Canada and the life we once knew. It was a simpler life, and that's what we wanted. Fewer people. Less congestion. Less complication. Less drama. More open land. Lakes and streams. Beautiful scenery. Nature. The hand of God everywhere; after all we went through, both for ourselves and our children, this is what we wanted to be near: the hand of God.