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.