It would literally take a miracle. Medically speaking…stage 4 is big time.
In a video announcement on his ministry’s website on Thursday, international evangelist Luis Palau asked for prayer after being diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer.
Palau’s son, Kevin, explained that Palau, 83, and his wife Patricia “had a super busy fall … traveling around the world sharing the Good News like they always do,” but the evangelist returned from a long visit to the United Kingdom in December “with kind of a chest cold … that wouldn’t go away.”
“We finally got Dad to go into the doctor,” continued Kevin, president and CEO of the Luis Palau Association. “And to our surprise, the early report we got, just before Christmas, was that there was some cancer in one of Dad’s lungs.”
More recently, the Palau family learned that the cancer is in stage 4, which is the most advanced stage with a five-year survival rate of less than 10 percent.
“That’s the reality we are dealing with now,” said Kevin. “[We’re] praying about what that means. … Mostly we are asking for people’s prayers.”
“It was a shock,” said Luis of his diagnosis. “I haven’t been in a hospital one night, except when I broke a bone back in 1984 after Mission to London.”
“The first thing you do, in my case, is cry. I think, ‘oh wow, I could be gone in a few months,’” said the senior Palau. But he doesn’t feel “panic or horror.”
“Many people are praying that the Lord would do a miracle,” he said. “It would literally take a miracle. Medically speaking…stage 4 is big time.”
“In many ways, I feel the Lord has much more in store for me. Yet whatever tomorrow holds—I’m completely at peace,” Palau wrote in the website’s health update section.
