Mind over difficult matter

DALLAS

Matt Chandler doesn’t feel anything when the radiation penetrates his brain. It could start to burn later in treatment, but it hasn’t been bad this time lying on the slab - not yet, anyway.

Mr. Chandler’s lanky 6-foot-5-inch frame rests on a table at Baylor University Medical Center. He has on the same kinds of jeans he wears preaching to 6,000 people at the Village Church in suburban Flower Mound, where the 35-year-old pastor is a rising star of evangelical Christianity.

Another cancer patient with whom Mr. Chandler has become acquainted spends his time in radiation imagining that he’s playing a round of golf. Mr. Chandler on this first Monday in January is reflecting on Colossians 1:15-23, about the pre-eminence of Christ and making peace through the blood of His cross.

Mr. Chandler wears a mask with white webbing that keeps his head still as the radiation machine delivers the highest possible dose to what is considered to be fatal and incurable brain cancer.

This is Mr. Chandler’s new normal. Each weekday, he spends two hours in the car - driven from his suburban home to downtown Dallas - for eight minutes of radiation and Scripture.

He is trying to suffer well. He would never ask for such a trial, but in some ways he welcomes this cancer. He says he feels grateful that God has counted him worthy to endure it. He has always preached that God will bring both joy and suffering but is only recently learning to experience the latter.

Since all this began on Thanksgiving morning, Mr. Chandler says, he has asked, “Why me?” just once, in a moment of weakness.

He is praying that God will heal him. He wants to grow old, to walk his two daughters down the aisle and to see his son become a better athlete than he ever was.

Whatever happens, he says, is God’s will, and God has His reasons. For Mr. Chandler, that does not mean waiting for his fate. It means fighting for his life.

Thanksgiving morning. Mr. Chandler pours himself a cup of coffee, feeds 6-month-old Norah a bottle and - as he is about to sit down - collapses in front of the fireplace.

He has no recollection of the seizure. He bit through his tongue and punched a medic in the face.

At a hospital, Mr. Chandler gets a CT scan, followed by an MRI.

Not long afterward, the emergency room doctor delivers the news: “You have a small mass on your frontal lobe. You need to see a specialist.”

It was Thanksgiving. Mr. Chandler had not seen his children - Audrey, 7, Reid, 4, and the baby - for hours.

Story Continues →