Driving Home from Work: a Devotional on Casting Your Cares on the Lord
Thoughts from an Onco-hero… like you.
1 Peter 5:7 Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you.
The heaviness of working with cancer patients typically does not catch up with me until I’m in my car driving home from work. It’s not that I haven’t done a good job that day. Usually, I can see that I have done a very good job. It’s just that at the end of the day I go home to my family and my clients go home to their cancer.
My drive home can be particularly bad when one of my cancer patients received bad news. Do you know what that means? It means I received bad news too. Each time one of my cancer patients hear “The treatment’s not working.” or “You will be in cancer treatment for the rest of your life.” or “It’s time to consider hospice.” I hear that everything I am doing is not enough.
On one drive home from work, my mind began whirling tightly thinking of one particular struggling patient until my mind slammed into the realization “There’s nothing more I can do.” This was the first time I remember praying my “bossy” prayer. It goes kind of like this:
“Ok God. There’s nothing I can do so they’re all yours now. You’re in charge. You take care of them. I can’t carry them anymore. Please God, hold them tight.”
My “bossy” prayers have 4 basic elements:
“They’re all yours now.” I begin with the illusion that I was in charge to start with. Foolish me.
“You are in charge.” Yes, the bigger truth that God is in charge and not me finally hits.
“I can’t carry them anymore.” I realize how drained I am from trying to carry the struggles of my patients all day.
“Please God, hold them tight.” Finally, I hand them over to God for him to care for them as only He can.
I probably should prayer these prayers on every ride home, but unfortunately, I don’t. Too often I wait for the pressures of my work to build up inside me before I’m gripping the steering wheel and praying a bossy prayer again.
For me these steering wheel prayers are what the psalmist was talking about in Psalm 55:22a: Cast your cares on the Lord and he will sustain you. Not only do I need to cast my cares on the Lord, I need to stop pretending that carrying around the cares of my cancer patients is a good thing. It’s not. The truth is I cannot sustain them, or myself or anyone actually. That’s God’s job. And He is very good at it. Which is a good thing because I couldn’t keep doing this work without Him being in charge. Praise God.