I CAME across a story of Regina Brett on how she got through her battle with breast cancer in her best-selling book “God Never Blinks: 50 Lessons for Life’s Little Detours” and thought of writing about it because it is a great lesson for us on gratitude even amidst the most difficult moments in life.
When Regina started to have her chemotherapy sessions, she saw someone wearing a baseball cap bearing the words: Life is Good. She said, “Life didn’t feel good and it was about to get worse, so I asked the guy where he got that hat and got one for myself and started wearing it. And life was good. Even though my hair fell out, my body grew weak, my eyebrows fell off. Instead of wearing a wig, I wore that hat as my answer to cancer, as my billboard to the world.”
I thought this is not just an amazing response to life’s trials but actually “heroic”. I wish to have Regina’s heart and many readers of this article might want to have that kind of heart too, because oftentimes our initial reaction to big sufferings in life is to question God and say “Why me?” or “What have I done Lord to deserve this?”
“Everything has a reason”, the saying goes. When we embody this saying, we acknowledge that we are not victims of chance or life’s random occurrences that is exemplified by another saying, that sometimes “Sh*t happens.” If we have that strong faith in God, we expound the saying “Everything has a reason” with Scripture’s explanation for why evil and sufferings happen in this world in Romans 8:28, “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.”
Romans 8:28 is the most quoted passage and most pondered on by Christian theologians and philosophers in reflecting about God’s answer to man’s perennial question on why there is evil in this world. God allows evil and sufferings to happen in this world because He will draw good from it. Sometimes we see the good that an undesirable event would bring about like a drug addict getting sick because it helped him quit his bad habit.
But oftentimes we don’t, like an innocent kid having cancer and is suffering terribly from it. We don’t see what good the suffering of innocent people can bring about but God who looks at the overall picture about our lives including past, present and future has that greater good in mind. That’s why faith is important because we might not understand our suffering but we trust that God does something good to us through that suffering especially in view of eternity and our spiritual growth. And it’s also the reason why Romans 8:28 has a requirement and it says, only for “those who love Him”. For those who don’t have faith and love for God suffering would be meaningless and would often provoke anger and depression.
In the case of Regina Brett, her cancer brought about a lot of good to the readers of her column because she was able to write a great number of articles about it that narrates her journey in overcoming it and beating it; including the wonderful story on how that hat got to be worn by many others. Regina passed on that hat to a friend of hers who requested it, who also got cancer. Her friend got well too and Regina continued passing it on to other cancer patients.
The hat became known as the Chemo Hat. It passed on for 11 years to her friends who got cancer and lost count of the number of people who are still alive receiving a miracle and passing on the hat. The company Life is Good, Inc. got to know about the story of their hat from Regina and held a meeting and challenged their employees to spread that hat to someone needing a lift in life. And that Chemo hat continues to inspire and cure cancer patients as we speak.
A second lesson on gratitude is Regina’s friend who bought her that first Chemo hat, a house painter named Frank who lives by two simple words: Get to. Frank teaches us a great lesson in gratitude that instead of saying, “I have to go to work today,” Frank tells himself, “I get to work today.” Instead of saying, “I have to buy groceries,” he says, “I get to buy groceries.” Or instead of saying “I still have to fetch my kids in school.” He says, “Happy to get to fetch my kids in school.” We often take for granted the simple things we are able to do every day and we should be grateful to God that He still allows us to be able to do them. (ECC)
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