The Test I Didn't Study For

I grew up on Prospect Avenue in the Bronx, a block from Arthur Avenue, where everybody knew your business before you did. My house was full of candles and saints from a different tradition than the one I practice now — Santería was the language of faith I was raised in before I ever knew there was another one to choose.

I lost my mother in 2011. I came to Christ in 2022. And in 2023, I was diagnosed with lung cancer.

I want to tell you about the lesson I didn't see coming, because the ones I expected — patience, gratitude, "don't sweat the small stuff" — all showed up right on schedule. This one snuck in through the side door.

When Cancer Challenged My Idea of a Finish Line

Before my diagnosis, I thought faith was something you arrived at. A finish line. I had spent so long circling different rooms of belief — the ones I was born into, the ones I found later — that I assumed the day I called myself a Christian was the day the searching stopped.

I thought surviving cancer would look the same way: a finish line. Scan clear, ring a bell, done. Testimony complete.

It didn't work like that, and that surprised me more than the diagnosis did.

There was a night after surgery when I lay awake doing the thing every cancer patient knows too well — cataloguing every ache, deciding whether it meant something. My chest hurt in a way I couldn't tell was healing or something worse.

And instead of the steady, finish-line faith I thought I'd already earned, I found myself praying the same three words my mother used to say over a locked door when I was small: Lord, let me see clearly.

Not because I'd lost my faith. Because I finally understood it wasn't a finish line at all. It was the thing I reached for in the dark, over and over, the same muscle worked again and again — not proof I'd already arrived, but the reason I kept getting up.

Learning to Live in the Unfinished

That's the part nobody tells you. Survivorship doesn't hand you a completed faith any more than it hands you a completed body. Both keep asking something of you, every single day, long after the paperwork says you're in remission.

I still have follow-up scans. I still have nights where the ache in my chest makes me sit up and reach for the cross around my neck before I reach for anything else. I used to think that meant I hadn't grown enough. Now I know it means I'm still standing in the room where the growing happens.

I write Bronx-set stories now — mysteries, a memoir, a book about the mutation that tried to end me, told with as much humor as I could find in it. Every one of them has a character who prays a small, unfinished prayer at a moment they don't feel strong enough for.

I didn't plan that pattern. I only noticed it after the fact, the way you notice a scar has healed a particular way only once it's already done healing.

If you're newly diagnosed, or newly in remission, or 10 years out and still catching yourself checking a symptom against a memory — I want you to hear this from someone one block off Arthur Avenue who thought she already knew the ending: you are not behind.

There is no line to cross where you're finally, fully arrived — not in your health, not in your faith, not in your grief for who you were before any of this started. There is only the reaching.

Over and over.

And the reaching, it turns out, was never the incomplete part of the story. It was the whole point of it.

Lord, let me see clearly today. I still say it every morning. I no longer wait for the day I won't need to.

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