Alabama cancer survivor learns new meaning of faith, control

As a young adult, Candy Wood’s life seemed like a fairy tale. She was a performer, majoring in dance and drama in college, and leading the easy no-worries lifestyle that many young women dream of. She had two beautiful children and a successful husband. Nothing, it seemed, was wrong in her life. All was right with the world.
   
“Twenty years ago, I was living it up,” Wood told her attentive audience at the “Just Give Me Jesus” conference held recently at First Baptist Church, Butler.
   
“We had gone on our annual ski trip to the Colorado slopes, and it was a beautiful day. A friend of mine had just lost a child and I was thinking of her while lying back on a snowbank gazing at the sky.”
   
It was then that Wood told God something that has haunted her for two decades. “Nothing bad ever happens to me,” she told Him. “I don’t need You for anything really. I’ll let You know if I do.”
   
Shortly after that trip, Wood noticed what she thought was a small cyst on the right side of her nose. A biopsy revealed that the cyst was, in fact, a rare form of tumor that is usually found on the extremities. Devastated, afraid and emotionally irrational, Wood found herself searching for answers.
   
“I was saved at age 15,” she recalled. “But I didn’t understand about faith. I was spiritually ignorant and thought that it was all about how good you are, or how many good deeds you do in your life. I didn’t understand what it meant to have God in control of your life.”
   
The night after her biopsy, at the age of 30, Wood says she finally surrendered to God for the first time. As her quest for medical treatment began, so did her search for answers from God. For the first time in her Christian walk, Wood began to study the Word, to pray and to seek the will of her Father.
   
Over the course of the next few days, Candy sought the Lord’s guidance in the selection of surgeons to perform the delicate operation of removing the baseball-sized tumor. Tests suggested that the tumor involved the optic nerve and vessels to the brain. To remove it meant she would suffer permanent facial deformity, the possible loss of her right eye and the possibility that she would die during surgery. The success of the surgery was, at best, a remote chance. Doctors had never performed this particular procedure and were doubtful of its success. And failure meant that within six months she would be dead.
   
Against all odds, the surgery was successful. The doctors were astonished and could give no medical reasons for her survival. But Wood knew the reason. Prior to the surgery, she had asked the Lord to show her in His Word a little piece of comfort, to give her something that would help her through the struggle. As she opened her Bible, it fell open to a passage in Psalms.
   
“I shall not die, but live, and declare the works of the Lord” (Ps. 118:16–18, KJV.)
“Since then,” Wood told the conference attendees, “God has honored that promise.” During the next several months, Wood’s recovery was slow and often painful. As her body healed and became stronger, her relationship with Christ grew strong as well. The Lord had taught her some incredible lessons. But her story was only beginning, as were the lessons she would learn.
   
An infection sent Wood back to the hospital for more surgery. One procedure after another failed to produce the needed results, leaving her hospitalized in isolation for five weeks. Throughout those weeks, the Lord used people and circumstances in amazing ways to heal Wood and to build her faith.
   
“That was the most physically painful and difficult five weeks of my life,” Wood said. “But it was also the most joyful because I spent them with Jesus. It was God and me, and I would never want to change that time.”
   
From her miraculous healing to her strength in the face of fear, those who listened to her story were struck with the unmistakable evidence of God’s hand at work. The women at the conference listened intently as Wood related story after story of the Lord’s intervention in her life.
   
Her testimony was filled with stories of the lessons He has taught her through the trials. The stories, often funny and always insightful, brought tears of shared pain, as well as joy.
   
Wood’s tumor returned two years later. She underwent more surgery and reconstruction. In 1990, she was released from the doctors’ care and has been cancer free for more than a decade. Today, despite her facial disfigurement, Wood exudes a calm beauty and warmth of presence that draws others to her.
   
She stands before her audience, a paradox of gentleness and strength, of humor and insigtfulness, of fragility and power.
   
“I don’t want you to leave here saying, ‘What an incredible story!’ I want you to leave here saying, ‘What an incredible God!’”