Corona, Cancer and Creed
Corona, Cancer and Creed
By June Elizabeth Williams
March 17 was the day my surgical oncologist declared me Cancer Free. After a grueling period of mammograms, ultrasounds, bone marrow and breast biopsies, 20 rounds of Radiation, sickness from medication side effects, I was overjoyed. I literally teared up when she, the gifted surgeon who performed my lumpectomy, gave me the all clear. Ordinarily my husband and I would have gone out to eat in celebration of the good news. But this was March 17, 2020. A time when restaurants were closed and even the hospital requested that guests (my husband) only accompany the patient (me) if absolutely necessary so he waited in the car as opposed to being in the examination room with me as he’d been so many times before.
March 2020 was a month that brought about daily press briefings and lockdowns and quarantine orders and online zoom meetings and memes about toilet paper. As a recent cancer survivor, who had spent most of my time in the house in 2019, the quarantine was not as devastating for me. It was as if the Lord prepared me. It would have been worse had I been living in my native New York or in our adopted home of Los Angeles, where I was on the cusp of a thriving career on stage with The Robey Theatre Company (founded by Ben Guillory and Danny Glover, yes, that Danny Glover) and a career in television with co-starring roles on Fresh Off The Boat, Criminal Minds and Black-ish where I got to play my hero Harriet Tubman. At the end of 2018, my husband experienced two major losses: his grandmother and father died within 3 months of each other, so we left L.A. to support my mother-in-law just as she supported me when my own mother died. The Lord placed me in Durham, NC in January 2019 because our omniscient God knew I would be diagnosed with breast cancer in July 2019 and the Duke Cancer Center, which is one of the best in the country, is ten minutes from my current residence. You see how God works? God also knew I should not be in New York or Los Angeles standing on grocery store lines wearing a Michael Jackson mask and fighting heifers over Clorox wipes and Purell.
What does surprise me is the overwhelming feeling, or at least posting, of fear and anxiety regarding this virus among Christians, especially Seventh-day Adventist Christians. If indeed this is the “End Time” isn’t this what we were taught? Churches are closed and we’re forbidden to congregate. Isn’t that what we were told would happen? Plagues (viruses) would be felt on a global scale. People would be begging for a vaccination and said vaccination could be used to implant a tracking device i.e., the Mark of the Beast. Money would be useless because stores would be closed. Cashless society. C’mon SDA’s from back in the day: Any of this sound familiar? If so, whatcha scared of? Everybody talkin’ ‘bout Heaven ain’t going there…but do we really want to? As a person who has been on the receiving end of the word “Cancer”, I had already thought long and hard about my mortality before Covid-19. I can honestly say I’m not afraid of death, but I am afraid of dying. Dying a slow painful death would suck. But what is worse? Running to “the hills” due to persecution of one’s faith or running out of toilet paper due to corona panic? I’m a Child of God and a Woman of Faith, but I no longer belong to any denomination. If I were to adhere to the eschatological sermons I heard as child, shouldn’t I be rejoicing at all the current events and singing “E’en so, Lord Jesus, Quickly Come” with a peace that passeth all understanding? My mother use to sing “Are You Ready for Jesus to Come?” So, if this is really the End Time, Are You?