THE EMPTY INCISION:

When Jesus Canceled My Cancer

THE EMPTY INCISION: When Jesus Canceled My Cancer

By Robert Rousseau | Candlefish Ministries

The doctor’s words hit like a blow: “We need to operate immediately.”

Five tumors. One, a golf-ball-sized mass bulging from my neck, was impossible to ignore. The PET scan left no room for debate—no escape hatch, no second opinion that could wish it away. There it was: a fluorescent confession glowing on a screen, and with it a countdown to knives, gowns, and a room full of machines that hum while you sleep.

Fear is not creative; it recycles the same whisper: What if this is the end? It tightens your world to appointments and lab results and what you can’t control. But in the crush of it all, an older, deeper certainty rose up and spoke with a steady voice: my life is not in a surgeon’s hands, and it never was. It is held by the One who made me: “For You formed my inward parts; You covered me in my mother’s womb” (Psalm 139:13, NKJV).

I did not feel heroic. I felt small—and seen.

The Surrender That Brought a Peace Beyond Reason

In the first days after the diagnosis, my prayers were frantic and honest. “Lord, heal me. Please.” There’s nothing wrong with that prayer; it belongs to every groaning body in a fallen world. But as the days passed and other believers began to pray—friends, family, saints I’ll only meet in glory—something in me shifted. My words changed. The tone changed.

I stopped begging for a specific outcome and started pleading for His glory.

“Lord, whatever happens—use this. Glorify Yourself.”

Lazarus’s story rattled loud in my heart: “This sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God” (John 11:4, NKJV). Jesus didn’t say sickness is good; He said it can be a stage for God’s goodness. He didn’t say death is harmless; He said it won’t have the last word. I held onto that, and then came a peace that made no sense on paper—the very “peace of God, which surpasses all understanding,” guarding “hearts and minds through Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:7, NKJV).

Oddly, nothing outward had changed. The scan still glowed. The date for surgery still approached. But my gaze had moved from the size of my tumors to the sufficiency of my Savior. Like Peter on the water, the wind didn’t stop; I just stopped staring at it.

And then something began to happen—something the surgeon didn’t have a category for.

“Robert, Cancer Doesn’t Just Disappear”

In the weeks before the operation, the tumors—the visible ones I could feel, the ones responsible for the ache in my neck and the throb under my ear—began to soften. It wasn’t wishful thinking; it was tactile reality. At my next appointment I told my surgeon, “Doctor, Jesus is healing me.”

He held his ground with kind skepticism. “Robert, cancer doesn’t just disappear.”

I can’t blame him for saying it; his job is to fight what disease usually does. Still, I knew what I was sensing—and I knew Who I had asked.

Faith is not denial; it is defiance. It doesn’t pretend the mountain isn’t there. It looks at the mountain and remembers the God who moves mountains. So I kept surrendering my outcome, kept asking Him for glory, kept living in that unexplainable peace. If the Lord healed me through surgery, to Him be the glory. If He healed me before surgery, to Him be the glory.

Either way, I belonged to Him.

The Morning of the Operation

Hospitals are choreographed mercy: pre-op questions, markers on the skin, lines placed, monitors attached. I remember the fluorescent light over my bed, the appetite you lose after midnight, and the way nurses become ministers by simply being calm.

My last conscious thought before the anesthesia took hold was simple: “Your will be done.” Not as a sigh of resignation, but as a statement of trust. The hands I surrendered to were not ultimately the surgeon’s skilled hands; they were the scarred hands that spread in love on a Roman cross.

I slept.

The Empty Incision

When I surfaced from the anesthesia, everything was fuzzy—the beeps, the soft shoes squeaking down the hall, the dry mouth. But one thing came into focus quickly: my surgeon’s face. The usual professional composure was gone; in its place was a look I can only describe as quiet astonishment.

“Robert,” he said softly, “we opened your neck… and found nothing. No tumors. Just some scar tissue.”

Nothing. Scar tissue. The Great Physician had preempted the earthly one, and left His signature not in a glowing scan or an angelic visitation—but in an empty incision. A wound with no enemy inside it. A battle He had already won before the first instrument touched my skin.

I wept. The nurses did their work. And in the inner room where the soul responds to wonder, I said thank You a hundred ways without moving my lips.

Pull-quote: His scars purchased my peace; mine simply points to His power.

(This is my personal testimony, not medical advice. If you’re facing illness, seek appropriate medical care—and seek the Lord.)

What Healing Is—and What It Isn’t

Let me say plainly what I believe and what I do not. I believe Jesus still heals bodies in our day, according to His wisdom and for His glory. I have a scar that says so. I also believe not every prayer for physical healing is answered in the way we ask. Some believers die of diseases we begged God to remove. That is not failure; that’s mortality in a world awaiting resurrection.

The Bible never promises a pain-free life before Christ returns; it promises a painless life after He does (Revelation 21:4–5). Even Lazarus, called out of his tomb by name, eventually died again. Physical miracles are real, but they are also parables of a deeper grace. They point beyond themselves.

That’s why, overwhelming as my physical miracle was, it pales beside the greater healing I received years earlier—the cure for a universal and terminal diagnosis: sin.

The Deadlier Disease

“All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23, NKJV). That’s not a verse designed to injure self-esteem; it’s a medical chart for the soul. Sin isn’t just the bad things we do; it’s the bent in us that wants to be our own god. It produces symptoms—pride, lust, bitterness, greed—and its prognosis is non-negotiable: “the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23, NKJV).

But here is the blazing center of the good news: on the cross, Jesus Christ—who knew no sin—was made sin for us, “that we might become the righteousness of God in Him” (2 Corinthians 5:21, NKJV). Isaiah said it centuries before Calvary: “But He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement for our peace was upon Him, and by His stripes we are healed” (Isaiah 53:5, NKJV).

When I repented and trusted in Christ alone, He didn’t negotiate my guilt down to a manageable level. He removed it—“as far as the east is from the west” (Psalm 103:12, NKJV). That is the healing that will matter ten thousand years from now, when galaxies grow old and the New Jerusalem shines forever. A physical miracle, however glorious, is temporary. Salvation is eternal.

The Scar That Preaches a Sermon

The scar on my neck is not a badge for a battle I won. It is a living sermon. It declares that “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever” (Hebrews 13:8, NKJV). It reminds me that God is not a museum piece. He is alive. He still interrupts diagnoses. He still steadies panicked hearts. He still answers in ways that confound the proud and comfort the humble.

My scar cannot heal yours. But it can point. It can point to the hands that carry scars of their own—scars that paid for peace with God. His scars purchased my peace; my scar points to His power.

The Questions People Ask

When you tell a story like mine, people ask reasonable questions.

“Couldn’t the scan have been wrong?” Maybe. Machines aren’t perfect. But the scan, the palpable masses, the symptoms, the clinical urgency—they all lined up. And even if a scan misread a shadow, the God who rules the atom is not offended by doing His work through ordinary means. I’m content to say this: what was expected wasn’t found, and the timing bore the signature of answered prayer.

“What about the people who pray and aren’t healed?” I have stood beside hospital beds where the outcome we begged for did not come. I have preached funerals. I have buried friends. Jesus taught us to ask boldly and to trust deeply, and those are not opposites. The church does not traffic in guarantees we can’t keep; we traffic in the presence of a God who will not waste our pain. In Christ, all healing is certain—some now, all later.

“So should I stop treatment and just pray?” No. Seek the Lord and seek wise care. God often heals through the means He made—medicine, surgery, rest. Prayer is not a replacement for obedience; it is the posture of it. If God interrupts with a miracle, rejoice. If He carries you through ordinary care, give thanks. In both, Christ is near.

What the Waiting Taught Me

The days between diagnosis and surgery taught me to live slower and truer. Coffee tasted like a psalm. Ordinary conversations had weight. Scripture felt less like a book and more like a Voice. I found I was kinder. I repented faster. I laughed more freely with the people I love, and I held less tightly to things I can’t carry into eternity anyway.

Affliction, in the hands of God, is not a thief; it’s a tutor. It taught me again that worship isn’t what we do after God gives us what we want; worship is the way we live while we wait on Him. And when the answer came—when the incision was empty—it didn’t feel like the end of faith but the deepening of it. God had not just done something for me; He had shown me again who He is.

Your Invitation to the Ultimate Healing

Friend, you carry the same terminal condition I once carried. It isn’t cancer—it’s sin. You may be healthy by every measurable standard and still be spiritually dying. Christ offers you the cure, free and full.

1. Acknowledge your need. “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23, NKJV).

2. Believe in Christ. He died for your sins and rose again on the third day (1 Corinthians 15:3–4).

3. Call on Him. “For ‘whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved’” (Romans 10:13, NKJV).

You can pray like this right now:

“Lord Jesus, I confess I am a sinner. I believe You died for my sins and rose from the grave. Forgive me, save me, and make me Yours. I trust You alone as my Savior. Amen.”

If you prayed that in sincerity, tell another believer today. Open a Bible—start in the Gospel of John. Find a church that preaches the Word without apology. Be baptized in obedience to Christ. And begin to walk with the One whose scars secure your peace.

The Blessed Hope Beyond All Scars

Jesus didn’t only heal my body; He secured my future. He promised to return and “make all things new” (Revelation 21:5, NKJV). As His follower, I live with the blessed hope that He could come for His church at any moment (Titus 2:13). The trumpet will sound, and “the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout… and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up… to meet the Lord in the air” (1 Thessalonians 4:16–17, NKJV). In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, “the dead will be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed” (1 Corinthians 15:52, NKJV).

On that Day, every faithful scar will be swallowed by glory. The stories written in our bodies will be fulfilled, not erased. The Great Physician will put His final hand on all creation, and the groan of the world will resolve into praise. Until then, we live as those already healed at the deepest level—forgiven, adopted, kept—and sometimes, by His mercy, healed in our bones as a signpost of the Kingdom breaking in.

Are you ready for that Day?

“Behold, now is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation” (2 Corinthians 6:2, NKJV).

A Final Word

I carry a scar that preaches to me every time I shave: Christ is alive and kind. He doesn’t owe us anything, yet He gives and gives. He can remove a tumor, but He came to remove the stain of sin. His scars purchased my peace; mine simply points to His power. And if He could meet me on an operating table with an empty incision, He can meet you right now—wherever you are—with a full salvation.

Come to Him.

Robert Rousseau