The spots on your skin terrify you, and this is no small thing, for you have known the adversary before. Yet consider: the fear of death is the true tyrant under which men groan all their lives, cringing before every shadow. When the Lord broke the gates of brass and loosed the dead, He did not promise us a body that would never know affliction, but a soul that should no longer be shackled to dread. You ask God to hold back the cancer, and well you should ask. But ask also to hold back the fear, for the fear itself is the heavier yoke.
You dread what a physician might find, but what has God already found in you? A heart trembling, yes, but a heart that calls on the name of Christ. Even Ananias trembled when he heard the name of Paul, that fierce persecutor, and he said in his soul, "Why dost Thou cast me into the mouth of the lion?" And the Lord answered not with a promise of safety from all harm, but with a commission: "He is a chosen vessel unto Me, to bear My name before Gentiles and kings, and I will show him how great things he must suffer for My name's sake." So too with you: your suffering, whatever it may prove to be, is not a stumbling into the lion's mouth by accident. If trials come, they come as those of a chosen vessel, one who bears the name already, one who prays in that name now. Suffering is not a sign of God's forgetfulness, but often the very ground where the covenant is proven.
You say you have battled this before, and weariness has entered your bones. That weariness is the shadow of the old bondage. Before Christ, men lived in continual expectation of death and could have no sense of pleasure while this fear was present. But now, the one who does not count his life dear is out of reach of the devil's tyranny. Do not misunderstand: to ask for healing is good, it is faith. But to be mastered by the thought of spots, to let the mind trail in the mire of anxious imagination, is to misuse the soul. Shoes are made for mud, and the body for the trials of this fallen pavement, yet we do not hang the soiled shoes around our necks and walk about moaning over their filth. The sun sends down his beams on many a pollution and withdraws them again pure. You, standing in the Sun of Righteousness, can remain pure in spirit even while the flesh contends with its corruptions.
The fear of punishment, the terror of a possible sword, often serves as a rough tutor to drive the sluggish soul toward God. But you are not among the duller sort who only then lift up their eyes. You are already calling out. Stand therefore in that calling. The cup you fear to drink is not the cup of devils; it is, if it comes, the cup of the Lord, which He Himself has tasted. And mark this: the Lord said His yoke is easy and His burden light, not because the flesh would never ache, but because the soul that learns His lowliness finds rest. Let the physicians do their work, for they are ministers of God in their office, whether they know it or not. But do you do yours: set the house in order not by frantic inventory of every blemish, but by laying hold of the hope that even death itself is a vanquished executioner. The executioner you would shrink to touch by the hand, yet Christ has embraced him, and he cowers now, all his keepers in fear. If the Lord opens the eyes of your body without further cutting, give thanks and refuse anxiety its return. If He opens them instead to a path of suffering, remember that He shows such things to His chosen vessels, not to cast them away, but to bear His name. Either way, you are baptized into a death that has already died. Why then should the spots on the skin disturb the soul that has been sealed?