As Gina mentioned, Christopher Hitchens is cutting short a promotional book tour in order to undergo chemotherapy for esophageal cancer. I was reminded that not too long ago, screenwriter Joe Eszterhas (Basic Instinct, Jagged Edge, Flashdance and Showgirls) went through a similar experience. Diagnosed with throat cancer and fearful for his life, Eszterhas sat on a curb and pleaded for God’s help.
And he got it: Seven years after treatment he is cured and also restored to his family and his childhood faith.
“I am witness to and the beneficiary of God’s love for all of us. I am witness, too, to the fact that His love is so strong that it was even able to open my rusty old closed heart. I will thank Him forever because He gave me new life and a heart which is truly able to love for the first time in my life. His love is mine,” Joe Eszterhas has written.
God has a way of getting our attention. And please don’t think by this statement I am accusing God of inflicting a dreadful disease and a painful course of treatment on Mr. Hitchens! Only that He will use anything and everything in our life to bring us back to Him. I pray that Mr. Hitchens can humble himself and call out to God the way Joe Eszterhas did—and with the same results.
Comments:
It turns out that he's quite a bit more complicated than one might expect. In particular, he changed from being a hater of America to being a supporter of it. He's capable of re-thinking even deeply held beliefs. (As are, I might add, most of us here at The Point.)
So we can pray for and perhaps look forward to the publication of "Actually, God *IS* Great" in the near future.
Am praying right now that he and his Christian brother (as well as his other family friends) can all give him strength to fight this hard disease.
And that he is touched by the Lord and senses the Lord's love for him!
Just as the Christians of Saul's day lived to see their accuser take on a new name, perhaps we will live to see one of ours live up to the meaning of his: "Christ-bearer."