Pancreatic cancer?  In too many cases these days, such a diagnosis is a death sentence.  Rarely does anyone who is diagnosed escape its clutches.

    When one of my oldest and best friends shared with me recently that he had been given a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, I cratered.  Why him?  Why now?

    There are no reasons, there are no explanations.  The timing and meaning is beyond anyone's ability to fathom.  So when he asked me to pray for him, I of course said I would, fervently and often.  And I told him that although I believed that God loved him, I had to be honest:  I do not always know what such love means, for anyone.  God's love, I said, is often difficult to penetrate and understand.

    But it's there.  When nothing else is there, God's love is there.  Claiming this in the face of a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer is, however, perhaps the supreme act of faith.

    Yet what else ought faith to be?