Pastor Walter Colace has spent decades serving the community of El Centro, California. As executive director of New Creations and senior pastor of Christ Community Church, he has walked alongside people through addiction, poverty, homelessness, and every kind of crisis. He has been the steady hand, the calm voice, the man who shows up when everyone else has left.
Then cancer showed up for him.
The Diagnosis
The diagnosis hit like a truck. Walter described it bluntly: the cancer was a wake-up call. After years of caring for everyone else, his own body was demanding attention. The treatment plan was immediate — seven weeks of combined chemotherapy and radiation, administered at a hospital in San Diego.
Seven weeks. That meant leaving his family in El Centro every Monday morning and staying with relatives in San Diego until Friday afternoon. Away from his wife. Away from his church. Away from the community he had served for decades. Alone in a treatment chair while poison dripped into his veins and radiation burned through his cells.
The Peace
Here is what makes Walter Colace's story remarkable: he never lost the peace.
Not the pretend peace that pastors sometimes perform because they think people are watching. The real kind. The kind that comes from a man who has spent so many years trusting God for other people's problems that when his own arrived, the trust was already in place.
Walter and his wife were not alone. Family members, fellow pastors, members of the congregation, and friends throughout the community were interceding for him in prayer. The church rallied. The community rallied. And Walter let them.
He described it simply: "We never lost the peace of God or our faith in His ability to heal."
The Ministry
What happened next is the part of the story that stops you. While receiving treatment, surrounded by other cancer patients who were terrified and hopeless, Walter did what he had always done: he ministered.
He shared Christ with a man receiving radiation treatment beside him. While poison was dripping into his own body, while his own future was uncertain, while his own family was hours away — he looked at the person next to him and cared about their soul.
That is not performance. That is overflow. When the peace of God is real in your life, it does not just hold you. It spills out onto the people sitting next to you in the treatment room.
The Recovery
Walter came through the treatment. He returned to his community and his church. He described himself afterward as healthier than he had been in years, with pristine blood test results. The cancer that had been a wake-up call became a testimony — proof that the God he had been preaching about for decades was exactly as faithful as he had always said.
What This Means for You
Most people assume that peace during cancer requires some dramatic spiritual encounter — a vision, a prophecy, a moment where heaven opens. Walter Colace's story says something different. His peace was not dramatic. It was accumulated. Built up over decades of trusting God in small things and large things. So when cancer arrived, the peace was already there.
If you are facing cancer and wondering where the peace is — it may not arrive in a flash. It may already be present in the trust you have been building your whole life. Every time you chose to believe God was good, every time you prayed when things were hard, every time you showed up at church when you did not feel like it — you were building a reservoir of peace for this moment.
You may be more ready than you think. The peace of God is not the absence of cancer. It is the presence of a God you have been walking with all along.
