Please don't hit me when I'm down

It is hard, hard, hard to have cancer for 2 1/2 years and not be healed. I have heard from so many - even those I trust and love - rebuke instead of grace and love. Yet the Bible is so clear: the faithful suffer - Job, Paul, Jesus. Suffering - even big, huge, one-upon-another trials - is not in and of itself a sign of sin. There are nights I lay awake, laying my heart bare before the Lord in prayer. Spending hours in the living room trying not to disturb my family as I pore over Scripture and weep into my Bible. Is this my fault? Could I solve this problem somehow, through my own actions? Do I need to increase my faith? Change a sin habit? Let God "in" somewhere I have hedged Him out of? At times, I've had to table the issue, lay it to the side, and just put one foot in front of the other.

Not only have we been asked to live with cancer. To watch our daughter brought to death's door and come out of a devastating illness with injuries that may last her whole lifetime. To walk the daily walk of those suffering illness...a wife who hates resting spending countless hours unable to lift herself from her bed. A husband doing dishes and laundry instead of pursuing hobbies or his own chores around the house. Children who have a mortal dread of the hospital and emergency room, because they've been there countless times to visit, watching the adults they love and trust crying out to Jesus for healing that does not come. There is little that is fun about this life. There is joy, yes - but entertainment seems like a distant memory from the past. Daily we sacrifice to learn through this trial.

We've given up so much more. We've had to walk away from relationships we treasure because of our inability to see eye to eye any longer on this issue. Suffering is not popular in a pop Christianity culture. It isn't easy to explain. There's no 30 second sound byte that encompasses this issue. It's hard to preach that people may have to lay their lives down for the sake of the Cross. Are we willing to put feet to the words of I Corinthians 4:12? ...we labor, working with our own hands. When reviled, we bless; when persecuted, we endure. We've found comfort in our darkest days in the amazing growth God has provided through this string of trials. There are few we know who understand the place He has brought us to.

"It is as great a mercy to have your salvation proved to you under trial as it is to have it sustained in you by the consolations of the Spirit of God." ~ Charles Spurgeon

We've all been guilty of judging others. At times, we have to vote with our feet, and that inevitably involves decision-making, judgments, discernment. What if we confined our judgments to our own actions, and kept them out of our words? How many wounds would we avoid inflicting on those we love? God says not to judge others now...it's not time yet! Therefore do not pronounce judgment before the time, before the Lord comes, who will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness and will disclose the purposes of the heart. Then each one will receive his commendation from God. (I Corinthians 4:5) It's of note to me that this verse ends with us receiving commendation from God, not condemnation. Didn't He already mete out the condemnation to the One who hung on the cross? And how can we discern what happens in the hearts of others? We can barely make those calls about our own hearts - knowing our internal monologue, struggles, and victories.

There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death. Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died—more than that, who was raised—who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. ~excerpted from Romans 8

The miracle of this is that I can let loose my expectations of human relationships, and let go of my guilt for cancer and my daughter's illness and our continued trials, because I am free in Christ and I am loved by Christ. He satisfies what no man can, He heals what no medicine can, He loves when all others cry condemnation. If I die alone in this world, yet clinging to Christ, I will die rich. It will be worth it all. All the suffering, the sacrifice, the anguish, the Bible pages bled through with tears and the nights of lost sleep and the pain and the bone-numbing fatigue. All this is so much less than what He silently suffered for me, before I ever praised His name or lived a day for His glory.

What if we all chose to follow Christ, keeping our eyes FIXED on the prize, not watching our brother's footsteps to make sure he, too, is trodding the sacred path? (Hebrews 12:2) How much more we might accomplish for Christ's glory...and how much less we might hurt those believers among us who are already knocked down in the battle!

Yes, you can swallow upside down

...and other ways to say, "life goes on."

That should be the title today.

When I took these photos, I imagined some creative, helium-filled happy words about the joys and simplicity of homeschooling. It was the day we learned about the digestive system and I taught the girls about peristalsis. But life intervened, and I never wrote helium-filled happiness, all through a week without seizures and preparing for a long-awaited visit from old friends, and finishing work to meet deadlines, and doing the fall and spring cleaning I missed last fall, last spring.

We kept swallowing, through all those good days of hard work and elbow grease. Nothing seemed too terribly upside down. And tonight it doesn't, either - seem upside down, I mean. It's just a normal night. I can't sleep because the day was stressful and how else to process, other than to read or to write? Amelia had four seizures today. The day was full of poop, puke, pee, laundry, floor scrubbing, and long phone calls to doctors, labs and nurses. It felt oddly and uncomfortably like a 16 hour shift as a nurse. I jumped through all the same hoops I did then...without the resources, without the safe emotional distance. Tomorrow I am supposed to leave her with some college students I don't know well, travel 30 minutes to a rural town with no cell phone service...and be okay with that. Take a day off.

Somehow I don't picture that happening. Tonight, between artisanal local cheeses and my mother's fabulous peppery grissini and sips of Aaron's farmhouse wine, we talked too about death and loss and grief and dealing with disability, seizures.

What else do I say? How do I put this feeling into words? I can't really. Inside my skin somewhere is the very visceral memory of the 117 patients I sat with as they died. Babies, toddlers, children, teens, ushered to the very doorstep of heaven by parents who rent their souls in anguish that it is really, in the end, true...this distance between here and there, now us and them. "A close and unbreachable distance: witnessing everything and nothing." 117. I wrote every name in the black book and can recite almost all by rote, memories flooding in to fill the vacuum each name creates as I speak it, even silently. The texture and color of hair on pillows, the small voices, mannerisms and favorite things, all tied together with the ebbing away of that person into just the husk I rolled down to the basement in the dark of the night shift, every third florescent light lit, just enough to give the halls a spooky green glow and not enough to wash away fear.

Mine was a different anguish. Having just enough knowledge and tools at my disposal to sometimes help - the tug of putting technical skill to work while experiencing something so deep emotionally - trying to reconcile faith, in that moment, with something that seems so disastrous and so final. In the end, I chose to reconcile it. I face now my own child's illness. And I walked today at Relay for Life as a cancer survivor-slash-patient, with my four kids, and felt the energy in my limbs and the full turgor of my skin. Contrast it with the weak and dying I see around me in the survivor lap. To be in this place of vigor and youth, to see my daughter there too, yet to be brought back to memories so dark and final...

I've thought of writing up the 117 in a book. I even have a title, and a few chapters. The title usually comes last for me as I write, so when it comes first I assume the project is a failure from the get-go. Who reads depressing books like that - other than other depressed people? And I have nothing to offer them as comfort. All I harbor is a sweet potpourri of dried flower memories, of men and women, girls and boys who are long gone. I can't add much to their stories, as I didn't then either. I was just the watcher from the corner. The vital sign checker. Just outside the sphere of acceptable emotion. I squeezed my own tears in then - bottled them up for later (heaven, perhaps?).

Tonight, I ramble. Find comfort in another, similar experience, phrased more elegantly.

Breathe. Swallow. Repeat.

I wish for the night, I walk through the dark rooms and wish for the sleep that erases all. I hear the late night cricket song and wonder if he is singing a lament for the day past or the day still to dawn.

Soliloquy on ceding the self

An hour of faith and fractured prayer as the grooves in the floor ground into my knees through the velveteen of my pajamas. I knelt before the familiar curve of the cranberry couch, the tattered green cover of my 5-year-Bible for Katrina rough against my outstretched hand. My ear glowing like a hot coal against the arm in which my face was buried, wet with tears.

What brought me to such prostration? Nothing out of the ordinary. Living with cancer at a young age carries with it the consequent awareness that time may be of the essence. Whatever areas of my life are closed off to God, wherever I am retaining that old, desperate grip on self...they show painfully, like a tattered square of aged fabric on a new scrap quilt. Whatever notes I keep in the margins of a Bible, whatever struggles are transparent in my writing here, there is always another level God is trying to nudge me towards.

My life is a long string of chapters with one central theme: resistance. Various personality tests and peer reviews through the years have marked me with words like "rebel", "visionary", "leader", "counter-cultural". They herald strength of character inexorably mixed with the deep veins of ore that God is currently mining and carting out of my mountain - stubborn, immobile, conviction, opinion, anger. What begins as a trait of character is substantiated in a thousand tiny sins with which I, the clay pot whirling on the wheel, laugh up at my Potter, "Trust me, I've got it under control. It's not a problem for me. I'm o.k. with this. You don't need to supervise."

That evening bowed in front of my couch in prayer was weeks ago. For the first time, from the pit of my soul, I cried out for help in a few key areas I've been holding back from God for years. What I couldn't do by willpower alone I prayed fell under that almost unbelievable umbrella of God's power...with Him all things are possible. (Matthew 19:26) I asked God to "root it out of me", an expression I heard first from my mother, who learned it from her mother, Fern. If Fern could give up a 2 pack cigarette habit in the 1970s, before the patches and pills, and psychotherapy and support groups, what are my little sin areas to God now?

I've been walking around in a haze ever since. You know how it feels when you wake up from a deep, vivid dream, and it takes full minutes to absorb the reality of the mysterious mounds and shapes that surround you in your dark bedroom? I feel that way...for days. Afraid I might wake up and God will have abandoned me to my own devices, and I will fail. Of course I expect to fail...perhaps almost too much so! It has been difficult to believe that I could just be done with these areas I've tried so hard to ignore, forget, or destroy in myself. Almost like it is a figment of my imagination. Almost like maybe I could have done it myself if I would have just tried harder.

(Ah, there's the old familiar rub...)

And then I ran smack into the face of Satan this morning, jolting me out of my daze. I felt like a warrior in an unknown land, the familiar heft of the Sword of the Spirit in my right hand (Heb. 4:12); white fog surrounds me, and I am awash in oblivion, walking forward in faith. For just a moment, the fog lifts as I walk up a particularly steep and challenging hill, and I see the face of the Enemy suddenly before me. When I walk back into that peaceful, silent fog, it is with new awareness, yet requires the same confident steps of faith.

So on I fight in my fog. Praying for special protection today as I face renewed temptations. Let me not be lulled to sleep by the age-old tune, "It Doesn't Really Matter". Because it does, deeply, awesomely matter. To God, to me, to my legacy. Let me be faithful today in small things.