What Does "Good" Look Like?

"As for me, it is good to be near God. I have made the Sovereign Lord my refuge; I will tell of all your deeds" (Psalm 73:28).


A colorful scarf encircled her bald head while her rail thin body laboriously, yet steadily, walked from the medical center parking garage to the oncologist's office. Finally sinking into a waiting room chair, she turned to me with a bright smile on her pale face: "Isn't God GOOD?!"
Cancer that been detected in her breast while her third child was only a few months old had spread inexorably to lymph nodes, bones and was now, less than two years later, slithering into the recesses of her brain. She and her husband had recently chosen to stop treatment since medical experts agreed that nothing more could be done to halt the disease.


"Isn't God good"?? What kind of statement is that when Amy was already videotaping farewell messages to her three children? Is this denial in its most basic, and cruel, form? What "good" could there be when this writer, counselor, brilliant intellect, wife, mother would soon be buried and turned to dust?
Through good times and bad, times when it was easy to trust in the goodness of God and other times when he seemed absent, Amy had made it a practice to believe that she lived in the refuge of a good God.


Amy lived only a few weeks after that morning when I accompanied her to the doctor's office, but they were weeks of quiet joy as her husband, children, friends and family members gathered daily in her bedroom. Amy's deep desire was to be a partner in ministry with her husband and see her children grow up. Instead she was showing them how to live?and die?in the presence of a good God.


~Thank You, Lord, for the privilege of knowing Amy and for her decisions to be a vessel through which the goodness of God could be seen.


Questions:
Describe how this story affected you upon reading it. What was the characteristic that impressed you the most about Beth? How do you suppose she became the person that she was during this time of great suffering knowing that she was near death?