God Meets is the rare cancer book (and as above, I use that term advisedly) that addresses both the judgment God places on human creatures in the Garden (death) and the hard road anyone walks toward that end (100% of us).
God Meets Us In Our Suffering: Hope and Encouragement for Those Journeying Through Cancer. By Rolf A. Jacoson with Karl N. Jacobson and Michael Pancoast. Brazos Press. Hardcover. 224 pages. List price: $21.99
It’s fairly common to refer to the various themes, services, or devotional practices that happen in churches during the season leading up to Easter as a “Lenten journey.” Without guides or maps such a journey can devolve into mere wandering and wondering without much direction. Now in the season of Easter, we see the fullness of where Lent and the events of Holy Week converge: the Resurrection of our Lord. It is a gift, in whatever season of life, to have traveling companions in the Body of Christ who know the endpoint and where the ashes of sin and death lead.
Reading the new book, God Meets Us in Our Suffering, by Rolf A. Jacobson, Karl N. Jacobson, and Michael Pancoast [Brazos Press, 2026] makes for an edifying trek with a trio of amiable sinners who know death and resurrection well. They’ve scouted the territory in their own experience with cancer and treatment, death and hope.
For an idea of how God Meets works, look to the famous Reformation altar piece by Lucas Cranach the Younger in the City Church in Wittenberg, Germany. It includes four panels that teach worshippers the things that make for faith. The panel directly above the altar shows Martin Luther in a pulpit on one side and gathered Wittenbergers on the other. In the center Cranach shows Jesus hanging on a cross but with his resurrection’s grave clothes flowing around him.
In the painting, Luther the preacher stretches out his arm to point to Christ. He has the confidence to pay no heed to what Hamlet called the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” and look to his true savior for his identity, his joy, and his hope. The people of Wittenberg in the predella respond to Luther’s proclamatory gesture by turning their eyes to the cross.
This kind of preacher — one who knows their own sore limits and sorry possibilities and yet knows the power of the gospel Paul speaks of in Romans 1 — is what’s called for when a cancer diagnosis is declared. There’s no way around it; the news of cancer’s appearance puts us face-to-face with our mortality, and we see our fragile hold on life. But the three preachers who’ve written God Meets have had cancer and can speak of their experience and point to something more. They let us in on what it’s like to hear the hard word of a cancer diagnosis and be able to look back with both a hard-won sense of humor and a God-given faith.
The book’s subtitle, Hope and Encouragement for Those Journeying through Cancer, uses that journeying language. But it’s misleading, for this is no run-of-the-mill self-help book. First, the authors’ great wit and self-deprecating humor take their writing out of the mill run into occasional laugh-out-loud territory. What’s more, this is a tale of three old friends (two of them brothers) whose power and potential (and in Rolf’s case, his teenage limbs) have been snatched away by disease. Yet they’ve not been left to rely for help on themselves. They’ve instead been so steeped in God’s promises in Jesus Christ that they have eyes to regard even the worst circumstances with joy and hope.
In the preface of God Meets, Rolf describes the conversations he had with Karl and Mike about whether to write about their common cancer stories. His initial response to the idea was, “There are lots of books about cancer. The world doesn’t need another one. It certainly doesn’t need one from me.” But Karl had a different take: “This book starts with cancer, but it doesn’t end there” (xi).
The younger of the two Jacobsons was right. Both these brothers and their bosom pal Mike are proper theologians who know the difference between what saves (Christ crucified) and what doesn’t (literally everything else, including good things like PET scans and chemo regimens). Rolf says that “the truly important thing is that this book really isn’t about cancer, it really isn’t even about disease and disability. It is about life, faith, friendship, loss, and hope” (xii).
I would take it even further and say the Jacobsons and Pancoast have gone beyond their own not uncommon experiences, into more relevant geography. Between the lines, their three histories function like the Psalms. They address God fearlessly and faithfully. In Martin Luther’s Small Catechism’s explanations of the Ten Commandments, each explanation begins with “We should fear and love God so that….” In the same way, God Meets is the rare cancer book (and as above, I use that term advisedly) that addresses both the judgment God places on human creatures in the Garden (death) and the hard road anyone walks toward that end (100% of us).
A theologian of the cross knows that the world’s remedies, whether chemo or immunotherapy, wealth or power, fitness or well-centeredness, are stop-gap measures at best.
The publisher’s marketing on Amazon and, indeed, its title and subtitle imply that this book is a mere tool, a kind of road map to endurance in the face of cancer. But that does a disservice to what Rolf, Karl, and Mike bless the reader with. They are, to a person, theologians of the cross who, as Luther says in the Heidelberg Disputation (1525), call a thing what it is.
The world presents all sorts of things for us to regard as salvific, the “if only” things whose presence would render our present circumstances doable, survivable, or at least tenable — cancer being just one in an endless sequence of crosses we face. A theologian of the cross knows that Christ alone saves. The crucified one has all things under his feet and holds the power of the Resurrection in his hand. Thus, a theologian of the cross knows that the world’s remedies, whether chemo or immunotherapy, wealth or power, fitness or well-centeredness, are stop-gap measures at best.
What’s more, theologians of the cross like Rolf, Karl, and Mike, are so grasped by Christ’s glory that the hardest road, deepest loss, and widest wound can be regarded with the humor of an absurdist. Human foibles and even seemingly hopeless diagnoses are seen in proper proportion to God’s promises. God Meets keeps bringing the reader back to that mindset by putting its authors’ stories alongside God’s Word, particularly in the Psalms.
The hard truth of God Meets is that it takes its readers to the authors’ own Good Friday. Karl Jacobson made it through a diagnosis and treatment for cancer. But at the end of the regimen when life began to return to whatever normal is for a pastor, the bone marrow transplant that brought hope so enfeebled Karl’s immune system that he died suddenly from meningitis. His wry humor, bow ties, and quickness with a bon mot — not to mention his lips that were loaded with gospel — ended in a hospital room in St. Paul.
Karl’s death, though, needs no spoiler alert. Like his fellow authors, he was under no illusion that his journey in this life led anywhere other than the grave. But he also knew there was more. He’d had preachers and teachers who’d functioned like Luther pointing to Christ. On his first Sunday back in the pulpit after his cancer treatment, Karl said, “Let me be perfectly clear — this is not about me, or anything I’ve done or deserved. This is about this life-giving God of ours. This is what God does; this is who God is. Dear friends in Christ, God loves raising people from the dead” (167).
That’s why God Meets makes such a fit accompaniment to Lent. It traces the actual arc of the season, not just by telling the stories of three pulpiteers with cancer, but by faithfully and consistently placing those stories in the biggest story: God’s claim on humanity on account of Christ. The telos is more important than any penitence, diagnosis, or treatment: “God loves raising people from the dead. Believe it. This is the promise for us literally, but it is also the promise and possibility for us — if you’ll allow me a bit of a pretentious word — liminally; that is to say, because we will be raised from death to new life one day, . . . it is possible for us to live in newness of life on this day” [168, ellipses and italics in original].
The promise of Jesus’ resurrection comes down to one sentence at the end of God Meets: “Even if this disease should one day claim my life — even then, I will live” (169). A single sentence that takes you from whatever your disease is, including sin itself, and serves as a pointer straight to the place the entire trail leads. This is how the faithful do any journey. This is where the Gospel always points: to ashes and dust (and cancer cells) raised at the dawn of eternity on a Sunday in Jerusalem to life in Christ.
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