In the summer of 2010 the popular author and atheist Christopher Hitchens (above, is a picture of one of the books that he authored), was diagnosed with cancer. With his usual candor and clarity, Hitchens movingly described his battle with the illness in an article he wrote for Vanity Fair.

I am badly oppressed by a gnawing sense of waste. I had real plans for my next decade and felt I'd worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again?. ... To the dumb question "Why me?" the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?

I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instead of just being a gravely endangered patient. Allow me to inform you, though, that when you sit in a room with a set of other finalists, and kindly people bring a huge transparent bag of poison to plant into your arm [his chemotherapy treatment] and you either read or don't read a book while the venom sack gradually empties into your system ... . You feel swamped with passivity and impotence: dissolving in powerlessness like a sugar lump in water.*

To say that I felt incredibly sorry for the man who wrote this would be an understatement.  From the interviews that I have watched him in, to the tart and angry verbiage he has used to describe Christianity, I'm almost sure that he would have rejected my sorrow for his feelings of "lost-less-ness," but I'm sorry nonetheless.  

Could there ever be a more honest and true statement from someone who rejected a belief in God, and made a handsome living at mocking the idea of Christianity? Even though he is not with us anymore, I legitimately feel for what this tortured man must have been going through.

When it is my time to prepare myself for life's end, I want to be able to sing that old hymn, "Blessed Assurance, Jesus is Mine."  Without that assurance, I would have to join Christopher Hitchens in exclaiming, "I am oppressed by a gnawing sense of waste."

Lord, thank-you for the gift of salvation. Help me to rightly represent you to those who do not believe.  In Jesus name, amen!

Have a great day and God bless!

Pastor Mike / The Open Word