

Thursday, July 24, 2008

Tony Snow's Testimony

I received this from a friend. It is an outstanding personal testimony by Tony Snow, President Bush's former Press Secretary, and his fight with cancer.

As a commentator and journalist, he announced that he had colon cancer in 2005. Following surgery and chemo, Tony joined the Bush Administration in April, 2006 as Press Secretary. Unfortunately, on March 23, 2007, Tony, age 51 and a husband and father of three, announced that the cancer had recurred, with tumors found in his abdomen. This lead to surgery in April, followed by more chemotherapy.

He returned to work in the White House Briefing Room on May 3, 2007, but resigned some time after that 'for economic reasons and to pursue other interests. He wrote this testimony some time after his departure from the White House and it needs little intro . . it speaks for itself.


The first is that we shouldn't spend too much time trying to answer the 'why' questions: Why me? Why must people suffer? Why can't someone else get sick? We can't answer such things. And the questions themselves often are designed more to express our anguish than to solicit an answer.

I don't know why I have cancer, and I don't much care. It is what it is, a plain and indisputable fact. Yet even while staring into a mirror darkly, great and stunning truths began to take shape. Our maladies define a central feature of our existence: We are fallen. We are imperfect. Our bodies give out.







There's another kind of response, although usually short-lived, an inexplicable shudder of excitement as if a clarifying moment of calamity has swept away everything trivial and tiny, and placed before us the challenge of important questions.



Finally, we can let love change everything. When Jesus was faced with the prospect of crucifixion, he grieved not for himself, but for us. He cried for Jerusalem before entering the Holy City. From the Cross, he took on the cumulative burden of human sin and weakness, and begged for forgiveness on our behalf.




His gift was to remind everyone around him that even though God doesn't promise us tomorrow, he does promise us eternity - filled with life and love we cannot comprehend, - and that one can, in the throes of sickness, point the rest of us toward timeless truths that will help us weather future storms.




What is man that Thou are mindful of him? We don't know much, but we know this: No matter where we are, no matter what we do, no matter how bleak or frightening our prospects, each and every one of us who believe each and every day, lies in the same safe and impregnable place, in the hollow of God's hand.'

T. Snow
Deceased July 12, 2008…RIP