Carol McLeod’s breast cancer diagnosis unleashed a storm—just as it does for the more than 250,000 other women worldwide diagnosed with this disease each year. But she made it her determined purpose to refuse to let cancer win.
The same night McLeod and her husband received the news from her doctor, “I was scheduled to teach a Bible study to 200 women in a town an hour away, and I did it. I went, and I said to my husband, ‘This will not pause my destiny. I will not stop serving the Lord, ministering to women. I’m going,” she tells host Marti Pieper on this “Hope Through Cancer: Breast Cancer Awareness” podcast on Charisma News.
The next week, McLeod says, was a blur of testing and doctor’s appointments. But the next Monday, she was scheduled to receive the protocol, the plan for treating what she says was a “very aggressive cancer.” And that day, she says, “The storm of the century hit Buffalo, New York … we had two blizzards back to back. There were over 80 inches of snow in five days. … And so the doctor called me and said, ‘We can’t see you till Thanksgiving weekend, and I thought, What? We’ve got to get this cancer out of my body? Right, but the roads were closed for two weeks. …
“There was a storm going on inside of me, and there was a storm going on outside my windows. And I felt blinded by it all. I felt trapped by it all. And the Holy Spirit said to me, ‘Carol, I want you to study every storm in the Bible. So that’s what I spent those two and a half weeks doing. I hunkered down in the Word of God and studied every storm and extracted life principles from each one.”
From the story of Noah, who experienced the first storm in Scripture, God taught McLeod to obey the Lord “one hammer hit at a time,” she says. “What Noah was asked to go through made no sense in his human heart, but he’d heard the voice of God. So during my cancer storm from Noah, I decided, I’m going to walk in a higher level of obedience than I ever have. I’m going to listen for God’s voice and obey completely.
“And you know, one of the things that I read about Noah’s storm was that he didn’t know what an ark was. He didn’t know what rain was, but he knew who God was,” McLeod continues. “And I didn’t like learning about cancer. I couldn’t believe that I had to walk through this, but I knew my God, and I knew my God was good. And I knew my Dad was a healer, and I knew that my God was protecting me. “
To learn more about Carol and her now cancer-free life and ministry, listen to this podcast!
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