Sometime over the past many months I’ve been blogging, I noticed a lot of people linking to Mark Palmer’s Journal and talking about prayer for his healing. I learned a bit of his story and began reading the occasional updates on his blog. When we had a beer a short while back, Arlen filled me in a further.

Mark Palmer is the postmodern Job of emerging blogdom. He’s got every reason to despair, and can apparently see none of those and only see every reason for hope. The other day he wrote something that floored me:

I guess what I really want to say is just this: be hopeul. Don’t stop fighting. On some level this thing is bigger than all of us. It’s not about having a wife die of cancer at 26, and then 2 years later getting the same terminal illness. It’s not about me and how I fight this disease or how our little family walks through it. The bigger picture is the battle against sickness and death that we all face because we live in a broken world. But it’s even more about the Kingdom that has broken in and offers us a chance at relief from that disease. It offers health and victory where before there was none. There is hope in the midst of hopelessness. Death is not where we lose; the onset of hopelessness is the great defeater. So allow hope to rise up within you. And when it seems that hopefulness is the least appropriate response in this situation, let is rise up even more. Whisper your hope when you lie down at night; scream your hope when you wake in the morning. Live your hope as if it is the one and only thing that sustains you in this ravaged world. You will not be disappointed.

I’ve noticed his post and this paragraph linked by many blogs since it first appeared… but I hope that since many of the visitors to this site will, like me, not really know Mark Palmer, more folk will become aware of his struggle through this post. Please join me and offer a prayer for Mark’s healing, for his young son Micah, and for his wife Amy.