Rebuilding the Temple: A Body Worth Fighting For

Posted on May 11, 2026 by Chris

I’m determined to use this cancer as an opportunity to rebuild a healthy body.

Throughout 2025 I had a few physical struggles that left me wondering if this was just the year I really started getting old. So in January of this year, I was determined to make some changes. I adopted a fairly strict anti-inflammatory diet and began incorporating 4-5 workouts a week — alternating cardio and resistance training. By mid-February I had dropped about 20 lbs and was actually starting to feel good again. Good enough to run. Ironically, I was feeling better than I had felt in several years.

But of course, by the end of February it became obvious that I wasn’t just getting old and out of shape throughout 2025. My body was fighting — and losing — to a cancer that was quietly destroying my lungs. The whole month of March was pretty much the battle to keep breathing. By the time I came home from the hospital on April 1st, we had won that battle but lost another 20-30 lbs in the process.

Now that I’m free of supplemental oxygen — thank you, Jesus — it is time to get serious about rebuilding and getting back into a healthy groove.

In some very small ways, that journey began the day after leaving the hospital, as Deb and I started going for brief walks around our little cul-de-sac, dragging along the oxygen tank. Although it was probably only about a tenth of a mile, I was quite short of breath by the time we made it back around to the driveway. During those first few weeks I couldn’t help but think: If there are any more marathons or triathlons in my future, it’s going to be a long road.

By the second week of April I started making trips to Planet Fitness — just 10-30 minutes of simple cardio, walking on the treadmill or pedaling the recumbent bike, along with occasional efforts to maneuver some dumbbells. Within a week of starting those gym visits, I was able to ditch the portable oxygen tank. Now I’m back up to 30-45 minutes of cardio two or three times a week, with resistance work at least twice a week. And later today — I’m getting back on the road bike for the first time since all of this began, heading out for an easy 10-15 miles on the trail to test out the legs and lungs.

Small victories over time…that’s how we win this battle.

When I got home from the hospital on April 1st, I weighed 158 lbs — dropping to 153 by the end of that first week, meaning I had lost a total of 52 lbs since January 1st. Today I’m back up to 163, with a goal of reaching 170-175 by the end of the summer. But the number isn’t really the point. The goal is a feeling — healthy and strong, with enough endurance to return to the things I love: backpacking the Appalachian Trail, riding 40-60 miles a week on the bike, maybe some occasional running.

Sure, I would have rather achieved these results the good old-fashioned way. But cancer stepped in, sped up the timeline, and raised the stakes considerably. What’s been difficult for me is to keep celebrating all the small bits and pieces of progress. My wife has to remind me constantly that just a few weeks ago I needed extra oxygen and now I don’t. For a while, I could barely walk a quarter of a mile and now I can last 2-3 miles. The small things add up over time in big ways.

And this is probably why I’m being reminded of Zechariah 4.

The context matters. The exiles have returned from Babylon and the work of rebuilding the temple in Jerusalem has stalled. The people are discouraged — partly from opposition, partly from exhaustion, but also because what they’re building looks nothing like what stood before. The old-timers who remembered Solomon’s temple reportedly wept when they saw the foundation of the new one. It seemed too modest. Too small. Too far from the glory it was meant to replace.

And that’s exactly where God shows up — speaking to Zechariah right in the middle of it: “Do not despise the day of small things.”

That word hit me. It’s not just discouragement — it’s dismissal, writing it off, refusing to see it as meaningful because it doesn’t measure up to some remembered standard of greatness. And God’s response to that tendency isn’t a pep talk. It’s a theological correction: the smallness of a beginning has never been the measure of whether God is in it.

There’s a temptation — especially for those of us wired toward endurance sports and big goals — to measure recovery against what we used to be capable of. To feel the gap between the person who could ride 50 miles and the person who is currently celebrating 15 minutes on a recumbent, and quietly despise the distance between them.

I know that temptation well. I lived it on those first cul-de-sac laps.

But here’s what I keep coming back to: Zechariah doesn’t just say “don’t be discouraged.” He ties the command directly to God’s involvement — “for the Lord rejoices to see the work begin.” That word rejoices is the same kind of joy we see in the father running down the road toward the prodigal. God isn’t standing at a distance, politely acknowledging your effort. He is glad about it. He takes delight in the small beginnings because he sees what they are the beginning of.

A tenth of a mile dragging an oxygen tank. The Lord rejoices. Fifteen minutes on a recumbent bike. The Lord rejoices. 163 lbs on the way to 175. The Lord rejoices.

Not because the numbers are impressive. But because the work has begun.

There’s one more piece of Zechariah 4 worth sitting with. In the vision, Zerubbabel — the governor tasked with overseeing the rebuilding — is told that the mountain of obstacles before him will become level ground. And the means by which this happens is striking: “Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, says the Lord.”

I find that both humbling and genuinely encouraging in a season where my physical might is, to put it gently, a work in progress. The rebuilding I’m attempting isn’t just about discipline or willpower or the right macros, as much as I value all of those things. There’s a deeper work happening. The same Spirit who hovered over the waters at creation, the same Spirit who raised Christ from the dead, is the one superintending this particular rebuilding project.

That’s not a metaphor I’m reaching for. That’s the only explanation I have for how we got from March 24th — when my family was summoned to the hospital and the question was whether I’d need to be intubated — to me riding a bike on a trail in May.

Not by might. Not by power. By His Spirit.

I’m confident we’ll clear these tumors and get into remission. Then the real work begins — maintaining a healthy, cancer-averse body for the next several decades. That’s the plan. And I’ve got a God who takes particular delight in showing up right at the moment when a project looks too far gone to bother with.

One small, faithful day at a time.

“Do not despise these small beginnings, for the Lord rejoices to see the work begin… ‘Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit,’ says the Lord Almighty.” — Zechariah 4:10, 6 (NLT)

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Hungry for Air… Hungry for God

Posted on April 26, 2026 by Chris

Not long after my actual cancer diagnosis, I started to experience hypoxemia (insufficient oxygen in the blood) and shortness of breath.

If we go back to the afternoon of my dad’s death, February 16, that might be the first time I really noticed breathing problems. We brought dad home from Vanderbilt Medical Center on Saturday February 14 after several weeks of dealing with complications from a fall that resulted in a “brain bleed” and by 5pm on Monday February 16th he was gone. As we were waiting for the local funeral to come and transport his body, I decided I needed to go for a quick jog to process, pray, and distract.

Several times during that brief 2-mile jaunt, I had to stop and catch my breath. And that’s one of the first times I remember coughing up some blood. Looking back, that’s when I first realized something was seriously wrong with my body and especially my lungs.

Fast forward to the week of diagnosis (officially March 3) and I ended up in the hospital for the first time because of the pain. By the time I was discharged on March 9th supplemental oxygen had become necessary and I began to understand what it was like to get “hungry” for air, or oxygen more specifically.

Over the next two weeks, all the tumors in both lungs seemed to be growing and then the pulmonary embolism was discovered, all contributing to more difficulty breathing so that by Monday evening March 23rd, we were making another trip to the Emergency Department and by the time we arrived, I was experiencing “air hunger” for the first time. I simply couldn’t get enough air. My breathing was too shallow.

The cancer had just claimed too much real estate in my lungs. So this added an element of panic and anxiety to the experience that was about to get much worse. Within 24 hrs I was “upgraded” to the biPAP mask-machine which is a non-invasive alternative to intubation when someone is experiencing air hunger and some level of respiratory failure. This was about the time when it was suggested that my family be nearby “just in case” and we were asked more directly about intubation if it came to that.  My mouth and throat were SO dry from the biPAP but I remember each time the nurse would disconnect the mask and try to fish the straw through the hole into my mouth I would start to gasp if it was taking too long wondering if I might pass out. I won’t soon forget that feeling of relief when the hose was reconnected and oxygen began to flow again.

As this was going on, I remembered an illustration that I previously used with students about the young Plato asking Socrates to teach him about knowledge, wisdom, and philosophy. As the story goes, Plato was begging Socrates to teach him but Socrates just kept walking until the pair stood chest-deep in a nearby lake. Suddenly Socrates turned and wrestled the ambitious student under the water holding him there for quite awhile. Plato burst out of the water gasping for air and asking Socrates what he was doing to which Socrates replied calmly, “Until you want knowledge & wisdom like you want more air to breathe, leave me alone.”

Lying there in that hospital bed, mask strapped to my face, I understood that illustration in a way I never had before. Not as a preacher with a good story to tell. I lived it.

And somewhere in those desperate, gasping moments a question surfaced that I couldn’t shake loose: What else am I that hungry for?

Because here’s what air hunger does that nothing else really can — it cuts through everything. Your body doesn’t negotiate. It doesn’t get distracted or wonder if maybe it’s overreacting. When your lungs are screaming, the to-do list disappears. The minor grievances with your kids or coworkers disappear. The worries about next week just… go quiet. There is only right now and I need more air.

Thankfully, most of us will never end up on a biPAP machine. But I’d be willing to bet most of us know what it feels like to walk around with a different kind of hunger we’ve gotten really good at ignoring.

A spiritual hunger.

Augustine put it simply and beautifully: “Our heart is restless until it rests in Thee.” He wasn’t writing a theology textbook. He was writing his own story. He was describing the air hunger of his soul before he finally stopped running and let himself breathe.

And here’s the thing — the hunger itself isn’t the problem. Honestly, I’ve come to see it as a gift. It means something in you is still reaching. Still alive. Still oriented toward something beyond what you can see and touch and manage on your own. The problem is when we spend years — sometimes decades — feeding that hunger everything except what it’s actually asking for.

We feed it performance and achievement. It says thanks but keeps asking. We feed it relationships and busyness and comfort and noise. We feast on approval, then on control, on whatever helps us feel less empty for a little while. Still hungry. Because the soul was made for something specific, and it knows the difference between the real thing and a substitute.

So where do you begin to actually address this deep spiritual hunger?

I think you start with honesty. Real honesty — not the kind you’d say out loud in a Sunday morning greeting. More like the kind you might whisper at 2am. I’m gasping. I’ve been gasping for a while. And I’ve been pretending that’s just normal life.

Then you reach. Clumsily, maybe. Through whatever prayer feels available to you right now, even if it’s mostly frustration and questions. Through Scripture — not as an item to check off but as actual oxygen, something your lungs genuinely need. Through community — the uncomfortable and surprisingly beautiful act of letting people around you see your hunger and realizing you’re not alone in it.

What I can tell you — from that hospital bed, from that mask, from all of this — is that the relief when the hose reconnects is real. There is nothing like the feeling of oxygen beginning to flow again. Pure, unfiltered gratitude. And I believe the soul has its own version of that moment.

Socrates had it right, I think. 

Until we want it like air, we won’t really go looking for it.

So I’ll just wrap up with a question I keep coming back to myself:

How hungry are we? 

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled” (Matthew 5:6) describes a desperate, intense desire for God’s holiness and will, rather than just a casual interest. This spiritual hunger…this God hunger can only be satisfied as we trust Christ completely to fill us.”

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Cancer and Sabbath: Learning To Rest Even If You Don’t Have To

Posted on April 15, 2026 by Chris

There’s a particular cruelty to cancer that nobody prepares you for — and it’s not the one you’d expect.

Sure, there are the obvious brutal realities: the diagnosis that lands like a sandbag to the chest, the medical vocabulary that multiplies faster than you can Google it, the fatigue that makes “tired” seem like wishful thinking. You could write about any of those. But the cruelty you might not be ready for? Cancer is relentless. It never stops. And somehow that makes it feel like you can’t stop either.

From the first moment the oncologist used the word “explosive” to describe the dis-ease,  something shifted in posture — both literally and spiritually. You lean forward. You fight. You research. You follow up, advocate, pray hard, schedule the next scan, refresh the MyChart portal at 2am waiting for test results. Forward motion feels like survival. Stopping feels like surrender.

Maybe that is precisely why, somewhere between the last hospitalization and what now feels like the maintenance season of this targeted therapy I’m currently enjoying, I have landed back on a chapter I’d read years ago in Ruth Haley Barton’s Sacred Rhythms — her chapter on Sabbath. And I have to tell you, it hit different this time around.

“Cease. Rest. Delight. Contemplate.”

Barton structures Sabbath around four movements — ceasing, resting, delighting, and contemplating — and she’s careful to point out that Sabbath isn’t simply a day off. It’s a theological act. It’s the weekly practice of putting down what we carry and trusting that the world will not fall apart because we stopped holding it up.

That’s a bold claim in any season of life.

When you have Stage 4 Metastatic Melanoma, it borders on offensive.

And yet.

The more I sat with it, the more I realized that Barton isn’t describing some luxury spiritual practice for people whose lives are going smoothly. She’s describing a counter-cultural, counter-intuitive act of faith — the kind of faith that says, “God is God, and I am not.” The kind of faith that is actually harder to practice when the stakes feel life-and-death. Sabbath isn’t for the comfortable. It might be especially for the suffering. And yet, the gift I’m trying to receive from cancer right now is what you could call an invitation (but perhaps more correctly, a mandate) to incorporate sabbath.

What Cancer Exposed in Me

Here’s what I’ve noticed about myself since diagnosis: I have a powerful instinct to manage my way through this. To be informed (SO many educational YouTube videos in my history), proactive, organized, spiritually alert, appropriately grateful, honest and transparent in my updates, and generally successful at this not-dying business.

Barton would probably recognize that instinct. She writes about how Sabbath surfaces our compulsive need to do — to produce, perform, and justify our existence through activity. She points out that the ancient Hebrew word for Sabbath, shabbat, simply means “to stop.” Not to slow down. Not to pivot to a more spiritual form of productivity. Just — stop.

That is either profoundly liberating or deeply threatening depending on your personality type. Since performance and productivity are often how I measure my worth and contribution, ceasing makes me feel vulnerable. Less than. Sabbath is the act of trusting that what you cannot control, you were never controlling in the first place. Not everyone has the blessing of being forced to learn this lesson.

Rest as an Act of Trust

One of the images that has stayed with me from Barton’s chapter is the Sabbath as a rehearsal for death and resurrection. We stop. We let go. We wake up. We find that God was at work while we were resting.

That image lands differently when death has stopped being an abstraction.

There was a Tuesday morning early into my third hospital admission — Deb and the kids were summoned, close friends and extended family gathered. The question lingering in the air that I was struggling to pull oxygen out of was whether this would be a day for desperate measures (like intubation) or desperate prayer? In those moments, I had very little control or agency but we did opt for the solution that would acknowledge how much agency the Spirit had in the situation…especially as spontaneous prayer efforts started happening literally all around the world.  All I could do was receive. Receive prayer, receive care, receive whatever God was doing.

In that involuntary ceasing, something happened. Not just medically (though the tide did begin to turn, and I won’t minimize that miracle). Something also happened spiritually. The frantic forward lean relaxed a bit. I began to lean back (into God and those around me) and trust in a way that I perhaps had not yet fully embraced until that point. Cancer helped me move past the for God posture to the more load-bearing stance of being with God.

Delight Sounds Ridiculous (Until It Doesn’t)

I’ll admit that when I got to the “delight” section of Barton’s Sabbath chapter during this season, I laughed a little. Delight? I’m connected to an oxygen leash and my lungs are hosting an unwelcome squatter. What exactly is there to delight in?

But here’s what I’ve discovered, and I think Barton would nod along: delight finds you if you stop moving long enough to notice it. And for those of you who don’t have the “advantage” of a cancer diagnosis right now, you have to figure out how to stop moving around so much.

Delight doesn’t require good circumstances. Thankfully, it simply requires attention.

Sabbath trains us to pay attention — to small mercies, ordinary gifts, the presence of people who show up. Cancer, strangely enough, can do the same thing. Both are invitations to notice what we usually run past. But I encourage you to learn these lessons withOUT the whole cancer thing!

Contemplation Reorients Us to God

I often think of contemplation in contrast to action. In some ways, it’s in opposition to pr

oductivity and performance. To imagine being more contemplative would typically lead us towards thoughtful “activities” like reflection and meditation. If I were to think about which aspect of Sabbath keeping benefits most from a cancer diagnosis, it would probably be contemplation. We just are not conditioned to value time spent  in this way as compared to time spent focusing on outcomes, results, productivity, and the like.

This is where Sabbath becomes deeply relational, not just restful. When we make room for contemplation we make room for reflecting on God’s presence, remembering God’s faithfulness, and recentering our identity in Christ. Sabbath helps us remember who God is—and who we are in Him.

An Invitation

If you’re in this with me — fighting your own battle, walking alongside someone who is, or just living in that chronic low-grade exhaustion that modern life specializes in — I want to extend the same invitation Barton extends:

What if you stopped? Not forever. Not even for a whole day at first, if that’s too much. But what if you created a small space of ceasing — put down the managing, the monitoring, the strategic prayer list for just a couple of hours — and just let yourself be held?

God is not wringing His hands while you rest. He was at work before. He’s at work now, and He’ll be at work while you sleep on Saturday or Sunday afternoon.

Sabbath, it turns out, is not about what you give up for a day.

It’s about what you discover you’ve been given all along. And what have you been given? Put some sabbath resting into practice and find out!

“Sabbath is the holy day on which we celebrate the fact that God is God and we are not.” — Ruth Haley Barton, Sacred Rhythms

If this resonated with you, I’d love to hear about it in the comments. And if you’re currently on your own cancer journey, know that you are not fighting alone — not for a single day of the week.

Posted in Cancer Fight, Faith, Prayer, Theology | Tagged , , , , , | 11 Comments