Bye, Mom. This might be the last time I see you, you know.”
I gulped, tears welling up, wondering if Daniel felt some sort of premonition. I was leaving to fly home after spending a gripping, hair-raising, but faith-building two weeks with him.
While with them, I drove our 24-year-old son and his wife from their home in one state to a clinic in another for treatment of his grade 4 reoccurring brain tumor: a trip filled with challenges, answers to prayer, and near misses because of his ongoing challenge with seizures. A firm sense of helplessness engulfed me all the while. As we crossed large expanses of desert, my constant prayer was:
Lord, help us get to the next town without a seizure.
“You think?” I tentatively replied.
“Yeah,” he responded. “You might have a car accident on your way to the airport!”
Oh, Daniel! My funny, edgy son crammed his life with exhilarating, can-do challenges; always witty, unafraid to say anything or take on any new experience.
An intelligent, extreme-sport-loving young man, Daniel did well at just about anything he tried, from skateboarding, mountain boarding, snowboarding, playing his guitar for student-led worships at his school and church, to producing videos and excelling academically; he didn’t do anything halfway. He felt determined to succeed in life and “become a millionaire by the time I am 30.” He often told us this, as well as that he didn’t plan on emulating his dad’s life path of obtaining advanced degrees and yet earn only what Daniel considered a sacrificial salary as a church employee.
On hearing these statements, my husband and I just smiled at each other and thought,
Oh, the brash confidence of youth!
Daniel was diagnosed with a glioblastoma brain tumor in 2007, the summer of his junior year of college. He met his cancer with pretty much the same approach he handled anything in life: with courage, energy, and passion. Cancer changed his life. It changed ours as well.
After Daniel’s diagnosis I prayed that God would pour out His Spirit on our son: an insistent, ongoing, and heartfelt prayer. If this included a present healing, we would of course be thrilled. If not, Daniel would receive the most important and lasting healing of all at Jesus’ second coming.
As I watched God answer our prayers, I received a life-changing blessing as well.
Prior to this, I possessed faith in God, but it was untried and largely theoretical. However, I learned through suffering that God is real and trustworthy. I remember driving to the airport to pick up my husband the day after Daniel received his shocking diagnosis out of the blue.
Gut-wrenching, yet it’s spiritually rewarding to read oneself through the journey of a life-and-death experience such as Daniel’s. Daniel Harper did not survive the brain cancer that invaded his young life, robbing him and his beautiful wife, Logan, of a future together on this earth. However, the very disease that claimed him also made them realize that their previous riches-oriented desires were worthless. The cancer they both bravely fought brought Daniel the hope of salvation in Jesus: healed for heaven.
A love relationship formed, and Daniel died with the appreciation of knowing that Jesus died for him. During the final 16 months of his life Daniel wrote a blog that touched more lives than he could ever have reached if he had lived for 100 more years. The book,
Daniel’s Blog, is an unusual sermon, agonizing in many aspects, but a message of hope and trust in Jesus.—Betty Kossick, journalist.
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Daniel’s Blog, a book containing 41 of the 72 blogs Daniel Harper wrote before he died in 2011, was published in December 2012. Produced by Georgia-Cumberland Academy (GCA) for the purpose of sharing Daniel’s message with his classmates and other GCA alumni, the book continues to challenge and encourage readers far beyond its original intended audience.
As I passed skyscrapers on my left, a dramatic and beautiful visual formed. Dark thunderclouds loomed above the buildings, with sheets of rain cascading down and bolts of lightning in the midst of this localized storm. Behind it all was a glorious end-to-end rainbow. As I witnessed this, I felt a distinct impression from God:
Things are going to get stormy, but everything will be all right.
When we suffer, we long for God to speak clearly, to tell us the end of the story, and to show Himself. While this experience was comforting—and our family had many of them—I learned they weren’t sustainable. I discovered that indeed I could have these assurances as often as I needed them and they were available in God’s Word, an amazing discovery for me.
God’s Word is real; it is meant to sustain us. His promises are food for the soul. Anytime I needed reminders of God’s guidance and presence through the churning waters of watching my child battle cancer, they were there (Ps. 9:10; 2 Peter 1:3, 4). God’s Word became my lifeline, my comfort. And God’s transformative power began to root itself in Daniel’s life.
A year after his diagnosis, subsequent surgery, radiation, and a short course of chemotherapy, Daniel married his high school sweetheart, Logan. They treasured a year and a half of marriage before his cancer returned.
During this time we began to notice what God was doing to mature Daniel’s faith. While Daniel never lost his passion, enthusiasm, sense of humor, or desire to achieve big things, his focus changed. God radically renewed his purpose for living.
He started sharing his thoughts and experiences with the world by writing a blog titled “Precision Points of a Called Christian.” His edgy humor and articulate ways drove home important spiritual truths and caught the attention of many who followed his blog. I so looked forward to reading each one, as they gave me an inside view of the positive details of where his heart was headed.
Daniel wrote so eloquently about priorities. Speaking of his cancer: “It’s been a wake-up call to how short life is, regardless of whether or not you have brain cancer. A wake-up call to get my priorities straight and figure out what I’m really living for. A wake-up call to realize whose hand I’m really in” (July 14, 2010).
He wrote so powerfully about not getting sold on living for this life alone: “Before I got cancer, I was most definitely sold on myself, on thinking that my little life was all-encompassing and important, and that making money and living the American dream was the key to happiness. Sure, I knew all about God, but I had plenty of time to start serving Him later in life. After all, I was in my 20s! Fortunately, I woke up to the reality of how short this life is, whether it comes from cancer, dying in a car crash tomorrow, or living to the ‘ripe old age’ of 95. What is 95 compared to 1,000,095? I’ll tell you what it is. It’s the lie. Ninety-five is the lie. A focus on ourselves and this life is the lie. And please take my word for it. It’ll be a lot easier than going through what I’ve been through to come to that conclusion. Because the more stuff that happens to me, the more I can’t help thinking about going home” (Nov. 8, 2010).
When Daniel was confined to his apartment, he spent his days in cancer-busting efforts, juicing fruits and vegetables, and taking various supplements. This was interspersed with trips out of state for oncology treatments. He decided to increase his usefulness, and he discovered a Web site called writea prisoner.com. He was randomly assigned to a pen pal on the other side of the country, a seemingly random decision, assigned to a random prisoner. But it turned out to be an amazing God-designed, nonrandom connection by a detail-loving Creator!
Daniel’s prison pen pal turned out to be an Adventist, and their correspondence became a great encouragement to them both.
Daniel’s cancer began to take its toll. Terrifying “awake” seizures plagued him, and he tried every means possible to avoid them. His faith grew through his suffering. He often wrote his blog with a blanket over his head to avoid overstimulation, because he felt that God wanted him to continue writing encouragement for any reader of his blog.
During his last months of life Daniel and Logan moved in with our family, to help facilitate his care. My contemporary, edgy son came to absolutely love Ellen White’s writings and anything from God’s Word. He requested repeatedly for family to read to him Ellen White’s first vision about heaven. He especially loved Psalm 18.
Writing his blogs became difficult. But with his mind fully intact, he narrated, and Logan wrote for him. His last blog, finished in the hospital the night before he died, was, in my opinion, the most profound—the culmination of faith that a loving God brought about in his life. Daniel died surrounded by family and friends in August 2011.
God seems to take everyone He loves through some sort of desert experience. These desert periods cure our lack of faith and our wandering hearts. The suffering we experience can help us slowly give up on ourselves when we become broken by the reality of our circumstances.
Suffering changes you. God is able to turn our attention to Himself through suffering as it burns away the dross of the unimportant and the desert becomes a window to the heart of God.
Often God weaves His story, answering our prayers through hard experiences, whether great or small. What Satan means for evil, God uses for our good. Daniel’s illness and death exceeded my expectation for how God would answer my prayer and pour out His Spirit on my son.
Daniel wrote in his last blog: “It is my challenge for you to fight the good fight of faith. Don’t ever give up! Quit looking at the ‘now,’ and look at what is to come. Even though you may feel that you have lost a few battles here and there, you will never lose the war if you put your faith in Jesus Christ. Oh, if we could just grasp and hold on to that faith of a child” (Aug. 10, 2011).
So I keenly wait, keeping my eyes on Jesus, the author and perfector of my faith (Heb. 12:2). I am comforted by the thought that Daniel is merely “tucked in for the night,” waiting for that glorious realization of his healing—the coming of Jesus, where eternity, in reality, will begin.
