David McDonald’s phone is engaged when I ring. He later tells me it’s because the primary school teacher of one of his children called him with “tears in her voice”. She had been diagnosed with cancer.

It was the end of 2011 when Dave found out that he had stage 4 lung cancer. He was given at most 13 months to live, and was told he would “probably” see the following Christmas. His cancer was incurable.

He and his family were in the process of leaving Crossroads Church in Canberra where he had been pastor to launch a church plant in Darwin. Instead, McDonald would spend months hooked up to an IV pump and was often bedridden.

Dave McDonald’s faith was tested when he was given 13 months to live.

Last year, after more than a year of gruelling chemotherapy, McDonald was unexpectedly given an NED (no evidence of disease) result. Since then, he’s written a book about his experience called Hope Beyond Cure, in which he outlines not only his cancer story, but what he has learned as a Christian through the process. He continues to receive chemotherapy every three weeks. On his non-treatment weeks, he works as a pastor at Central Evangelical Church in Canberra, and as the chaplain for the ACT Brumbies.

Joshua Maule: It was largely through the experience of getting cancer that you started writing publicly. Did the diagnosis you received give you a kind of freedom and authority to write more boldly?

David McDonald: When you don’t expect to live for very long it certainly increases the urgency with which you think and act and speak. And I remember in hospital desperately wanting to call upon my friends who are not Christians to look into [Christianity], and pleading with them to do that if I didn’t get to talk to them again. And I think that urgency is something that I’ve brought to writing.

JM: Can you talk me through some of the things that happen to you when you go through that kind of suffering as a Christian?

DM: I think one of the things I’ve had to work through was having been a Christian for a few decades, having been a pastor for 20 or so years, having believed and taught about God, about the reality of God, his presence, about his engagement with us, the death of Christ for our forgiveness, the resurrection of Christ giving us hope for eternity—those beliefs, and that teaching, was something I was confronted with dramatically. Do I really believe this? Is it the truth? Does it stand up? Is there evidence for it? Have I been kidding myself, or is this the point where I have to hang onto these things more than ever? And going through that process of thinking and doubt, and struggles of faith, and questioning, and reinvestigating things by going back to the Bible, for me reaffirmed and strengthened my faith. It deepened my hope. It gave me confidence that God could be relied upon. But it was very important for me to go through that experience to demonstrate, yes that this faith is real, and that God is faithful to his promises.

JM: What does that strengthening of faith look like in your life and what does it feel like?

DM: I think it’s the putting of that faith into practise in the face of a diversity, or even, contradictory ideas. It’s one thing when life is cruisey and when we expect we’re going to live forever to say: I have faith in God that when I die I’ll be raised from the dead and spend eternity with God. It can almost be an intellectual thing. But when death is on your doorstep—to be quite honest there were times when I did not expect to come out of hospital alive—those things become … it’s like plugging them into an amplifier. And they become so much louder and more significant. And so faith in that context is to trust in God in the face of those things. I’m grateful to God that he pushed me to activate that faith, to trust him in that time and those situations.

Dave McDonald’s new book is available at shop.biblesociety.org.au for $12.95.

DM: We’ve always got competing voices. So there’ll be the voice of the world, the voice of the devil, saying: how dare God do this? Or even pushing us intellectually to say there couldn’t possibly be a God if these things are happening to me. And those voices will speak to us as loudly as we give them opportunity to speak. On the other hand we have the voice of God and we can open his scriptures and see his promises and be reminded of his faithfulness. I’m grateful to God that my friends, my family, my wife, my children, kept pointing me back to the promises of God. It enabled me to be hearing God’s voice more loudly than the opposing voices.

JM: That can be done in a bad way too though, can’t it? As in Christians can give spiritual words to someone who’s suffering, in a way that almost makes them feel guilty or worse about their situation?

DM: Ah, yes. Most definitely that can happen. One way—and I’m thankful to God I didn’t experience this much, other friends have experienced it in very hurtful ways—is that we can receive criticism from other Christians where they’re suggesting that what’s happening to us is God’s punishment. It wouldn’t be happening to us if we had more faith, or if we were being more obedient. And that can send people into quite a difficult spiral of self-reflection rather than turning to the God of grace and forgiveness and life.

JM: Sometimes Christians try to understand God’s will in their sufferings. As in, they try to work out why God allows particular trials to come to them in their life. Do you think that’s a fruitful exercise?

DM: I’m reminded of the book of Job where Job had three friends in particular who were attempting to do just that, and attempting to give God’s perspective on the matter. And at the end of the day, they spoke in ignorance. Job was called to trust that God was powerful and God was good. And Psalm 62 comes to mind as well. The psalm reminds us that God is all powerful and God is all loving. If God was simply powerful and not loving, I’d have fear as I approached him. If he was all loving but not powerful, he’d be impotent to help me. But the combination of those things gives me reason and encouragement to approach God. But I’d be very cautious about presuming to speak for God about the specific circumstances someone is going through.

JM: My final question is about the central part of your faith: Jesus. What did you learn about Jesus through this ordeal in your life?

DM: I’ve learned that it’s all about Jesus. Something that I’d learned to be true, but that I’ve experienced freshly for myself: to know that the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ has dealt wholly with everything that I’ve ever done wrong, all my rebellion against God, all the things I’ve failed to do—even the things that I don’t know about. That through Jesus Christ and his death and resurrection I can be completely forgiven. And it’s also helped me to see the importance of Jesus looking forward. That through Jesus I have hope for eternity, that he rules this world, that I can trust him to bring me through this life, and to share that eternity with him. In the light of eternity these difficulties and struggles and trials that we go through are very small, even though at this particular time they can seem like mountains.

Visit shop.biblesociety.org.au for more details on Dave McDonald’s book ‘Hope Beyond Cure’.