Blessed Be Your Name

Two years ago, after undergoing some intense cancer fighting treatment, I spent most of the time either lying in my bed or lying downstairs on the couch watching my son play mindless video games. Since I had very little mental capacity for comprehending what was going on around me, these games served as good distractions from my then horrible condition.

Since I couldn’t sleep well at night, we would stay up watching television until midnight or so watching endless programs on the Food Channel. I should explain that at that time I was unable to eat. It was everything I could do to drink water. Chemotherapy kills cancer cells as well as many other cells, so consequently I had no sense of taste, since the cells in my mouth were dead. Any food I would try to eat tasted like dirt. Imagine putting something in your mouth and feeling only the texture of it. That’s what it was like. So I would watch food programs and pray that I would someday be able to taste food again.

Then one day a strange thing happened to me. I had been off treatment for about a month and I started to taste a little again. It took about another month or so, but my taste buds returned and now they were enhanced so that everything I ate tasted so much better than I could ever remember.

So why am I talking about this? Well, I guess this is what my life with God is all about. My soul, like the cells in my mouth, was dead. I had killed it by consuming the deadly poison of my own self-destructive ways. But once I realized that I didn’t have to keep taking that poison and stopped, it wasn’t too long before I started to experience a new and enhanced life. Everything was and is so much better now. God has made everything new.So much so that even in the face of death, I can rejoice in his love.

There’s a song by Matt Redman called “Blessed Be Your Name” taken from Job 1:21. May God grant me the grace to sing these words when my darkness closes in.

Blessed be Your name in the land that is plentiful
Where Your streams of abundance flow
Blessed be Your name

Blessed be Your name when I'm found in the desert place
Though I walk through the wilderness
Blessed be Your name

Blessed be Your name when the sun’s shining down on me
When the world’s “all as it should be”
Blessed be Your name

Blessed be Your name on the road marked with suffering
Though there’s pain in the offering
Blessed be Your name

Every blessing You pour out I’ll turn back to praise
When the darkness closes in, Lord still I will say

Blessed be the name of the Lord; Blessed be Your name
Blessed be the name of the Lord; Blessed be Your glorious name

You give and take away
You give and take away
My heart will choose to say
Lord, blessed be Your name