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  • Keep Breathing
    • Keep Breathing: Introduction
    • Part 1
      • Stay Grounded
      • Keep Breathing
      • Gather Information
      • Feel What You Feel
      • Take in Support
      • Pray
      • Practice Surrender
      • Notice Your Reactivity
    • Part 2
      • Realize What Is Happening to You
        Is Happening To Everyone in Your Life
      • Take Inventory
      • Let Go of Shame
      • Extend Grace
      • Show Up
      • Learn Vulnerability
      • Make Amends
      • Stay Present in Times of Waiting
    • Part 3
      • Be Still and Keep Moving
      • Know You Are Not Alone
      • Ask for Healing
      • Seek Guidance
      • Meditate
      • Pursue Peace
      • Acknowledge Death
      • Grieve
    • Part 4
      • Express Gratitude
      • Stay Open to Joy
      • Make Room for Laughter
      • Celebrate Each Day
      • Let Yourself Be Carried
      • Be Who You Are
      • Know That You Are Loved
  • Desperate Hope
    • Shocked by the Diagnosis
    • Responding to Feelings of Fear, Anxiety, and Sadness
    • Ordering Desperate Hope
  • TLC Leader’s Manual
    • Group Leader Resources
      • Introduction to TLC
      • Meeting Format
      • Notes to Group Leaders
      • When a Group Member Dies
    • Strong Feelings
      • Understanding our Feelings
      • The Emotional Roller Coaster
      • Living With Fear
      • Dealing With Depression
      • Living with Anger
      • Grieving Our Losses
      • The Experience of Gratitude
      • Celebration and Joy
      • Experiencing Peace
      • Finding Hope
    • Challenges to Faith
      • Stretching Our Faith
      • Prayer
      • Examining Our View of God
      • Healing Prayer
      • The Lord Is With Us
      • God’s Healing Presence
    • Changing Perspectives
      • The Seasons Of Survival
      • Living Sanely in An Insane World
      • One Day At A Time
      • Positive Thinking
      • Accepting Our Need for Help
      • Building Friendships
      • Perspectives on Treatment
      • Coping With Pain
      • Repairing Our Self Esteem
  • Contact

The Lord Is With Us

The Lord replied, ‘My presence will go with you, and I will give you rest.’
Then Moses said to him, ‘If your presence does not go with us,
do not send us up from here’

Ex 33:14-15

How important God’s presence is to us! All of us who live with cancer have faced difficult seasons when we have felt alone. We are alone with our thoughts as we contemplate the seriousness of a diagnosis; alone lying in the hospital awaiting surgery; alone spending long anxious moments under the eye of the scanner; alone with the seemingly endless discomfort of treatment; alone during sleepless nights; alone with our helplessness! We are alone but for one glorious truth. The Lord is with us!

We are not always able to experience God’s presence with us. Sometimes when we feel overwhelmed with the side effects of treatment, or discouraged by low energy, or anxious about the future, God may seem very far away. Perhaps one of the worst pains of all to endure is this spiritual pain of feeling separated from God.

The truth is, however, that God is with us whether we are able to experience God’s presence or not. God is with us in the midst of our darkest moments of life. Scriptures tells us that God goes before us, surrounds us, guides us, holds us by the hand and carries us in loving arms.

To you I call, O Lord my Rock;
do not turn a deaf ear to me.
For if you remain silent,
I will be like those
who have gone down to the pit.
Hear my cry for mercy
as I call to you for help,
as I lift up my hands
toward your Most Holy Place.

Praise be to the Lord
for he has heard my cry for mercy.
The Lord is my strength and my shield;
my heart trusts in him, and I am helped.
My heart leaps for joy
and I will give thanks to him in song.
Psalm 28:1-2, 6-7


Questions for Discussion – Session 1

“You have let me experience the joys of life
and the exquisite pleasures of your own eternal presence.”
Psalms 16:ll (Living Bible)

1. Describe a specific time in your journey with cancer when God seemed far away.

2. What was that experience like for you?

3. What was helpful to you at that time?

4. Describe a specific time when you were especially aware of God’s presence with you.


Questions for Discussion – Session 2

Where is God? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing him, so happy that you are tempted to feel his claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to him with gratitude and praise, you will be–or so it feels–welcomed with open arms. But go to him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After then, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become.
(C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed.)

1. What thoughts and feelings do you have about this quote from C.S.Lewis?

2. What is frightening about such an experience?

3. If you were in Lewis’ place what would you want most from friends?

4. What would you want most from God?

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TLC Leader’s Manual

A photocopy-ready version of the TLC Leader's Manual is now available for download. If you are thinking about starting a Cancer Support Group, this might be helpful!

PDF version

MSWord version

Quote of the moment

"Some mornings when I am out walking I look up at the sky and it seems far away. On other days I realize that the sky kisses the earth. As I walk, I move through sky. I walk surrounded by sky. I breath in the sky. It lives inside of me. Whether the sky seems close or far away, the truth is that it is always close. And, so it is with God. God is the One in whom we “live and breathe and have our being” (Acts 17:28). God is with us. Always. God’s loving presence caresses us, surrounds us, fills us. I am not alone. You are not alone. God is with us. And God knows. You can trust this absolutely."
Juanita Ryan

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