March 2020. The whole country was about to shut down. COVID was closing in. And in the middle of a city bracing for a pandemic, a man in London received a different kind of devastating news.
Non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
His doctors were direct: the cancer was treatable but not curable. That particular combination of words — treatable, not curable — is one of the cruellest phrases in oncology. It means they can fight it, slow it, manage it. But it will not go away. It will be there for the rest of your life. However long that is.
The Fear
Then lockdown hit. And suddenly he was not just a man with cancer — he was a man with cancer, alone. Hospitals were overwhelmed. Visits were cancelled. The normal support structures — church, friends, family — were behind closed doors. The fear that comes with any cancer diagnosis was now compounded by the isolation of a global pandemic.
He was scared. Not the kind of scared that people admit to politely. The bone-deep, sleepless kind. The kind where your mind plays the worst scenario on repeat and you cannot switch it off because there is nowhere to go and no one to sit with you.
The Healing Rooms
But even in lockdown, he found the Healing Rooms. Both the Havering Healing Rooms and the London Healing Rooms were operating — adapting, like everyone else, to remote prayer sessions. He reached out. They prayed.
Not once. Repeatedly. Persistently. The kind of prayer that does not stop when the situation does not immediately change. He held onto scripture — particularly the promise of healing through the wounds of Jesus. Not as wishful thinking, but as a lifeline thrown into the dark.
Something began to shift inside him before anything shifted in his body. The fear, which had been his constant companion since March, began to loosen its grip. It was not that the diagnosis changed. It was that the presence of God became more real than the presence of the cancer. The peace was not logical. It was supernatural. And it came through the prayers of people he had never met, speaking into his life from their own living rooms.
The Scan
When the next scan came, the results were not what his medical team expected.
His spleen — which had been nearly twice its normal size, swollen with large tumours — had returned to its correct size. The tumours were gone. His liver levels, which had been elevated, were back to normal.
Treatable but not curable. That was what they had said.
God had a different word.
What This Means for You
If you have been told your cancer is "not curable" — those are the words of a medical system that is doing its honest best with the tools it has. And those tools are good. But they are not the only tools.
There is a God who is not limited by what medicine can or cannot promise. And there are people in this country — in Havering, in Leyton, in churches and healing rooms across the UK — who will pray for you as if your healing depends on it. Because they believe it does.
The fear is real. The lockdown may be over, but the isolation of a cancer diagnosis never really ends. But you are not alone. Not in the waiting room. Not in the scan. Not at three in the morning when the fear is loudest.
God is closer than the fear. And He is not limited by the word "incurable."
