IN MARCH 2014, I was diagnosed with cancer of the tongue. I was twenty-five years old.

I had two major operations, followed by six weeks of radiotherapy. Just when I had started to get over the first lot of treatment, the cancer came back - it had spread to my neck. Once again, I had surgery, this time with a dose of chemo on top of the radiotherapy. Even now, in 2018, I'm not over the physical and emotional trauma of double cancer, and though it's gone for now, I'll live with the threat of it returning until the day I die.

I've experienced the love and help of friends and family - Christians and non-Christians - who dropped off (soft!) food hampers and gave me lifts to my many hospital appointments. I've also had to deal with the same crisis of faith most Christians go through when life gets rough: if God is good, then why cancer? If God's really on our side, why do we suffer at all? Christianity certainly helped me through. Like any religion or philosophy, it can provide therapeutic comfort, but there's more to it than that. In Jesus, I have a friend, God and Saviour who knows what it's like to suffer, and the Bible tells me that - even in the hardest of times - God is working for my good. Only my Christian faith can make sense of my cancer, not only as something to be survived or endured, but as something with a purpose. I thank God for my cancer.

O.K. Hunt, Grace Baptist Church, Ulverston