The moderator of the United Church of Canada, Rev. David Giuliano, has been blogging about his his ongoing battle with cancer at wondercafe.ca, an online effort of the United Church. Giuliano heads a denomination of 6 hundred thousand Canadians. (requires registration)

His blog - The Valley of the Shadow was started in May.

Giuliano says he has enough respect for his own privacy not to have included every detail of his hospital experience, yet his blog is at times explicit and graphic. As he wrote in May about his upcoming facial surgery:

“A patch of me will be ‘excised’ from my left forehead, scalp, eyebrow, eyelid and temple down to my skull, along with a little bone. It will be replaced by a hunk of my back. The bone will come from the tip of the scapula. Veins and arteries will be untangled like the wiring on a British sports car and reconnected.”

The blog has also been funny, as when Giuliano described a nurse at Toronto General Hospital pulling sticky electrocardiogram wires from his body.

“She ripped the stickers off and I ripped off a prayer for those who endure hair-waxing.”

But mostly Giuliano has laid bare his faith, asking the questions that trouble Christians in times of suffering.

“I don’t believe in a God,” he wrote, “who protects me while millions of others suffer and die.

“Sure, I’d like God to give his or her head a shake and say, ‘Wow, all these people are praying for David. What was I thinking when I gave him that tumour! Abracadabra-shazam!’ (But) that doesn’t seem to be happening.”

Ultimately, Giuliano says his blog is an attempt to convince fellow members of his own church not to hide their personal suffering and weaknesses, but to share their burdens with others.

It’s also a statement about leadership, he says, “a counter-cultural way of being in a culture that wants perfect leaders, and sees imperfection as blemishes — shameful and weak — rather than sources of wisdom, interdependence and even strength and beauty.”

via: CanWest

Another Christian leader openly discussing illness is Glenn Penner, Chief Executive Officer of Voice of the Martyrs Canada. He began blogging in 2005, and has posted about his stem cell transplant and his battle with cancer. Penner blogs at The Persecuted Church.

Innovative Canadian minister and Saskatoon chaplain Darren Friesen of Saskatoon; friend and pastor to other pastors is going to be undergoing open heart surgery June 18th. Darren blogs at The Invisible Sun.