When I was diagnosed with cancer, I entered a new world. One I knew well as a doctor, but which was foreign and strange. I was the one receiving the tight, sympathetic smiles, the one being told "this won't hurt at all." I was also the one in terror, at the mercy of some doctor somewhere who would look at my cancer and tell me if I would live or die. Living there, in the shadow of death, I realized how close we all are to that valley. We pretend, but we'll all walk that valley someday. It would have been easier to walk the valley as my former self, as an atheist. But I'd become a believer...