See that chair across the room? That's where God can sit.

He's lucky to get into the room (but I can't really stop him, can I?).

Yeah. God and I are in a bit of a tiff right now. You see, he killed my wife. Ok, maybe he wasn’t the hit man, but he certainly put all the pieces together that made it happen. You see, when my wife was sick—she died over four years ago as of this writing and was sick for a decade before that, actually two, since we didn’t know the cancer was coming back during the first—we were pretty good Christians. We went to church, and we listened to a number of preachers and teachers. We read the bible. Well, at least we read the parts that they told us about.

When she was dying—breast cancer was the cause—I searched the bible for a miracle solution. In so doing, I found out that God was not quite the good guy that the preachers made him out to be. In fact, he’s why there is disease in the world. He created cancer (if you think cancer is some twisted aberration in his creation, then you serve a weak God who couldn’t control his creation). I can show that biblically.

This gets us to the type of posts you will see here from me. I have done a lot of apologetics writing and interaction. I’ve talked to pastors, teachers, scholars, laymen, and what have you. I’ve argued with the best. Many times, no final conclusion was found (in fact, most times). That being said, this blog will be quite “technical” in that I’ll not just post my opinions, but I’ll back them up with scripture—lots of scripture.

If you are looking for a devotional or some feel-good readings about faith and God, then you’ve come to the wrong place. I’m not here to make you feel good. I’m here to show you the shadowy corners of the bible that the preachers won’t teach from. On that note, I am not some atheist looking to discredit God. I am a Christian, and I believe fully in God. I believe his book is true.

Are you brave enough to come along? Let’s see…

A little bit of history

In October 2002, my wife found a lump in her breast. In April, she had her first mammogram, and it was clean. By October, she had a 1.5 cm tumor. She went into surgery and had the tumor removed. She had to go back for margins, where they cut a little more away to make sure that there wasn’t any cancer remaining. She then had to go through tests with a radioactive (which she didn’t know about at the time) dye injected into her lymph nodes to try to detect if cancer had metastasized. She was clean.

Her father, a big follower of TV evangalists, warned her not to get chemotherapy, which would have been the next step. That and a drug called Tamoxifen. “Chemo kills more than it helps!” said the man with a 6th grade education. He got that from TBN doctors, who likely just wanted to be controversial. He also got it from men like Kenneth Copeland and his wife Gloria, who shunned typical doctors in favor of “miraculous healing from Jesus.” After all, he made your body; who knows better how to fix it. Therein lies the problem: He created your body and its ability to accept a disease that would eventually kill you. And you want him to reverse the destruction?

No, she didn’t go in for chemo. I argued that she should at least take Tamoxifen, but she refused that as well. The margins were clear, and she would just stand on her faith that she was healed.

Flash forward to 2011, and we have a dimple pulling in on the breast, indicating that the cancer had returned. I told her we'd just have to return to the doctor. She said she would never go back to the doctors because they'd just want to cut her breasts off. Jesus would have to do the healing this time.

Long story short, by 2014, the breast was getting quite hard. The cancer broke the skin, and she had bleeding episodes—almost like a sac of blood built up under the skin and then just burst occasionally. There was a time later, in 2017, I think, where she stood over the toilet because it kept squirting blood with her heartbeat. It wouldn’t stop. She wouldn’t let me come in and help—in fact, she wouldn’t let me see the progression at all—because over the years I continued to try to get her to go to the hospital. I was faithless, you see. I was not putting all my eggs in the Jesus basket. And she had to stand in faith if she were to defeat this demon.

Well, that’s what Andrew Wommack taught her. This is the primary preacher that I say did more to kill her than any other. He did more than the Copelands to convince her that going to the doctor showed a lack of faith in Jesus. His books (and others that he recommended) were stacked next to her on the table, yellow highlighter staining every page as she read and reread the books, looking for the answers. She played his videos over and over on the internet. She studied Mike Hoesch videos from Wommack’s Charis Bible College. He had a tumor grow on his chest to the size that he needed a bra to hold it up. Then one day Jesus decided that he’d been through enough, and the tumor shrank, eventually going away. He refused surgery because that would show a lack of faith in Jesus. I think he had that tumor for about 7 years. These are the teachings that killed my wife.

She got worse. In August of 2018, she fell (she did so a number of times), and one of her lungs burst. She agreed to go to the hospital. When an oncologist would come into the room, she would vehemently chase them out. She wanted to hear nothing about the cancer. After many days of trying to decide what to do after the doctor gave her options for her lung, and me being angry with her for not making the right decision quickly, she finally agreed to surgery to repair the lung. It was successful. The surgeon had to go in and scrape the chest wall to give the lung a chance to reattach. I asked him when he came out after the surgery to tell me of its success, "Did you see any cancer around the lung.” He looked me in the eye and said matter-of-factly, “Bob, there’s cancer all through her body.”

She went home, and for about a week or two, she actually got a little better. She could breathe, and for the first time in six months, she could climb a flight of stairs. Slowly. Just once up and once down.

In February of 2019, she asked me to call an ambulance. I thought she wanted to deal with a dehydration issue she had. I was so naive. In the ER, she looked at me and asked, “Do you want me to go home?” I was dumbfounded. “That’s why we are here. So you can get some help and come back home.” She said, “No, I mean home to heaven.”

She went in on Sunday afternoon, ate very little of their dinner. She slept through Monday. And in the wee hours of Tuesday morning, she died. Praise God for his healing touch, right? “Hally-lew-ja” as her father would say.

Finishing up

As I said in the introduction, I’ve engaged extensively with apologetic sites. I’ve been a part of many debates and arguments. I’ve been accused of ad hominem, creating straw men, logical fallacies, and the lot. I’ve had disagreements with people over theology and eschatology, among other things. And it must be understood that if you disagree with my posts, many times it is likely a theological misconnection—that is, you, for instance, may be a Calvinist; therefore, you are wrong. Ha ha!! See what I mean?

I have the intention of posting regularly. I don’t know what “regular” is at this time, so enjoy this blog as it comes. Let’s see if I can hit a weekly cycle.

I don’t know much about Substack yet, and I’m not sure how communication and interaction work. If you do, write me if you like what I say, or if you don’t like what I say. I won’t promise a prolonged one-on-one interaction in a chat or email, but I’ll certainly embed your comments and my corrections in a future blog post. How’s that?