Blog Clarification

On spot remover bottles there is a warning:  Test this product on a small inconspicuous part of the garment.

To a new blogger there should be the warning:  Before inviting all of your contacts to your blog test your article with a few friends to be sure it is readable and clear.

Today I have bounced back and forth between the overwhelming expressions of love and concern given me by family and friends to the severe awareness that I have caused many people unnecessary worry.  I am very sorry for that.

 Let me reassure you that I am not in a terminal or life-threatening illness.  Over the last few years I have experienced fears, worries, disillusionment and questions that harangue us in seasons of uncertainty, change and loss of any kind.  My experience in an area that is not physical has enlarged my capacity for understanding and appreciating those who deal with heart-breaking prognoses or outcomes.  God’s Word has been especially precious to me in these years and the insights from it are honey-sweet.  I have loved praying God’s Word over friends dealing with illness and other seemingly impossible situations. In posting my first blog I wanted to share some of that sweetness with others, though I didn’t mean to cause any trauma, triviality or misunderstanding. I apologize for any pain I have caused you.

As a new blogger I’ve learned three important things.  One, be very clear.  Two, people care a lot!  And three, I will be far more diligent to comment on patients’ Bridge Pages or Care Pages in the future.  If what I experienced today through the concern and affirmation of friends is any indicator, those comments must deliver healing ointments to the patient’s bed.

Thank you for reading my blog. My PR man and #1 fan Wayne did an excellent job of getting it out there.  Thank you for the promise of your prayers.  I’ll take ‘emJ!

I hope you will continue to read my blog. I’ll try not to make it so traumatic in the future. That’s a way to lose readers! 

Coming up soon:  “Cool Tissues”

Prognosis: Days of Discouragement

Hannah Hurnard’s allegory, Hind’s Feet on High Places, inaugurated my spiritual journey the first time I read it in my early twenties.  The main character, stunted and deformed Much Afraid[1], struggles to make her way to the mountain heights where she is promised to be whole and to abide with the great and loving Shepherd.  At the summit she will no longer be plagued with her physical or emotional limitations.  In her often harsh journey she finds small encouragements that keep her hopeful.  Here is such a passage:

In all that great desert, there was not a single green thing growing, neither tree nor flower nor plant save here and there a patch of straggly grey cacti.

On the last morning she was walking near the tents and huts of the desert dwellers, when in a lonely corner behind a wall she came upon a little golden-yellow flower, growing all alone.  An old pipe was connected with a water tank.  In the pipe was a tiny hole through which came an occasional drop of water. Where the drops fell one by one, there grew the little golden flower, though where the seed had come from, Much-Afraid could not imagine, for there were no birds anywhere and no other growing things.

          She stopped over the lonely, lovely little golden face, lifted up so hopefully and so bravely to the feeble drip, and cried out softly, “What is your name, little flower, for I never saw one like you before.”

          The tiny plant answered at once in a tone as golden as itself, “Behold me!  My name is Acceptance-with-Joy.”

I have recalled with great joy that portion of Hurnard’s book when I’ve witnessed a pansy emerging from a crack in a cement sidewalk, or a single bloom surviving in the crevice of a mountain’s stone wall. 

Right now, living in my current prognosis[2], I long for a drop of that joyful anticipation.

The flower pots in my back yard billowed with blossoms and blooms over the summer.  But with the golden leaves now falling from the trees, I donned my gardening gloves and pulled the straggling plants, clearing the pots before the onset of winter.  To my surprise, in one of the pots, hidden under the old dying foliage was a small cluster of perfectly formed spring-green leaves.  If the leaves weren’t falling like snow flakes around me, that new growth could have convinced me it was spring.  I couldn’t pull it out.  I couldn’t deny it the chance to live. But also my heart sank.  “How long can this plant survive?” I asked myself. “Temperatures will drop soon.  One frost will probably finish it off.”

Equal to the wellspring of pure joy those single blooms popping out of cement or stone boulders have given me, the sadness of this tiny plant’s destiny deluged me. Inwardly I sobbed.

I’m convinced that my prognosis is parallel to that plant.  How long can I hold on?  I don’t expect that plant to make it through the next three weeks.  How do I expect to survive the frigid gusting winds of my own impossible situation? Get real! Am I fooling myself that there will be another spring?  It doesn’t matter how hardy this plant is today.  Its death is certain. How certain can my own deliverance be?

I want to be Accept-with-Joy whether my life is abased or abundant.

Could there be another spring when I display the beauty that abides in my roots and new growth?  How hard should I work at weathering the elements that are determined to bring my end?  Will it do any good for me to continue to believe for something better?  Should I now recognize the inevitable and accept-with-joy?

I think I saw Accept-with-Joy in my friend’s face today when out of her desperate situation she rejoiced in the little drips of hope God had provided for her over the last few weeks.  Her countenance displayed a golden beam.

Will holding on bring the joy and glory to God I direly desire?

Another friend, Janet who has lived two years beyond her seven-weeks-to-live prognosis and growing stronger everyday, told me that many receive her story with great joy.  But there are those, even eye-witnesses to her miraculous recovery, who don’t see it and refuse to give God honor for his deliverance of her.

So I, this Much-Afraid, am wondering what to hope for.  What provision should I anticipate?  How will God best receive glory?  Will it be a treacherous winter? If I hold on will spring sprout new blossoms?  Or do I now bow in acceptance, release my expectations and receive with joy what is currently obviously inevitable? 

After Much-Afraid’s arduous journey she did reach the mountain heights and she received everything and more than was promised. I can’t imagine what that might be like for me, but I take encouragement again from God’s Word through these contrasts.

The desert and the parched land will be glad; the wilderness will rejoice and blossom. Like the crocus, it will burst into bloom; it will rejoice greatly and shout for joy. The glory of Lebanon will be given to it, the splendor of Carmel and Sharon; they will see the glory of the LORD, the splendor of our God.  Strengthen the feeble hands, steady the knees that give way;  say to those with fearful hearts, "Be strong, do not fear; your God will come, he will come with vengeance; with divine retribution he will come to save you."  Then will the eyes of the blind be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped.  Then will the lame leap like a deer, and the mute tongue shout for joy. Water will gush forth in the wilderness and streams in the desert.  The burning sand will become a pool, the thirsty ground bubbling springs. In the haunts where jackals once lay, grass and reeds and papyrus will grow... the ransomed of the LORD will return. They will enter Zion with singing; everlasting joy will crown their heads. Gladness and joy will overtake them, and sorrow and sighing will flee away. Isaiah 35:1-10

What a promise to hang on to! 

The green foliage of the little spring-like plant may soon shrivel up.  But I’m wondering if the woody roots below it may burst forth with new life come spring.

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[1] John Bunyan also has a Much-afraid in his allegory, Pilgrim’s Progress.   Doesn’t “Much-afraid” rightly name many of us in life’s journey?

[2] See my posting “The Prognosis”

The Prognosis

The prognosis came in January.  Eighteen months at the outside.  Less if certain things happened.  We have just entered October.  Every time I write the day’s date I get a jab in my gut.  I’m just that much closer.  Moving from9-27-12 to 10-3-12 may seem so insignificant, but it eats up a significant amount of my eighteen months.  

When we had a swimming pool we always asked when we closed it around Labor Day, “What will transpire between now and when we open this next summer?”  Actually the next summer seemed to come around quickly and no trauma in-between.  Just one-day-at-a-time ticked off the calendar and suddenly we were again scrubbing the tiles and pouring in the chlorine.

When we were children, those days until Christmas or the end of school or grandma’s visit or our birthday don’t tick off quickly enough.  Somehow that changed.  It seems like just yesterday we were in January and now we are in October.  I haven’t thought of what month the eighteenth month would be.  But I intentionally have done that to keep each single precious day in sight.  I’m trying to keep a degree of normalcy.

I’ve had friends who have outlived their prognosis.  Janet was told she would live seven weeks.  At the announcement she said, “Praise the Lord!”  She credits God with her healing and is grateful for the aggressive chemotherapy program her doctors designed.  This morning she held my hand and squeezed it so hard my ring finger screamed in pain.  When I told her she apologized, but I said, “It is a testimony of how strong and well you have become.”  She smiled knowing she has come a long way by God’s grace.

Another friend Bob was sent home from the hospital enrolled in hospice and expected to slip away soon.  Yea! He has far outlived his prognosis.  He graduated, in an “alive” sense, from hospice two times and cared for his wife through her life-ending cancer.  Now more than five years from his threatening diagnosis he lives a busy fruitful life.

 

Maybe I too will go beyond my projected end.

I have more than enough friends who are currently wondering how true their prognosis will be.  Have they figured in what month their predicted end date falls? How close will that be to their birthday, their daughter’s wedding, the birth of a grandchild or their favorite season?  While others are crossing off dates in anticipation, my diagnosed friends and I are painfully aware of how time flies.

A very few know my condition.  I want it that way. It means that some of my actions, decisions or isolation may not be understood.  My prognosis is not physical.  But it is life-as-I’ve-known-it altering.  It robs every day of its ordinary life.  Every day is a pendulum that swings closer to the end. 

Banner People

We will shout for joy when you are victorious and will lift up our banners in the name of our God. Psalm 20:5

Our friend, Fos, is a banner that waves high and marks the spot, “When you are faced with your mortality, here is where you come.”  He is in the midst of his second campaign against cancer in two-and-a-half years.  He was the one who started me thinking about banners.  I linked the other words with it, he didn’t.  He’s too humble to do that.  But those of us who see his standard waving, know the truth.  We read his honest, straight-forward and faith-filled blog and he inspires and encourages us in our “mole-hill” challenges.

I then thought of other banners I’ve had in my life.  Most of these I’ve gotten just a fleeting glimpse of as I marched through my own life.  I think of them as standards on the battlefield that let us know that our commander is very close by.  If we are in trouble we move closer to the standard.  We can follow the standard to the place of safe refuge. 

I recall a banner from thirty-some years ago.  A couple shared their story and their vision for a new venture.  They had owned a construction company and when hit with the current recession had either closed up shop or sold the business.  They were now in foreign missions construction.  What caught my attention the most was the knowing look that transmitted between them as they talked of a loss that led them into something more marvelous that they could have imagined.  I saw that look and sighed, “Oh how awful to lose what you have worked for.”  We were just emerging from a struggling phase of a fledgling business.  I was finally wearing stylish clothes and getting decent haircuts because there was finally money to do that.  I couldn’t imagine having that grateful look if it all went by the wayside.  But their standard was waving, “If you have to let go of something to grasp onto something better, have no fear.”

I met Renee last fall and was immediately struck with her lovely and warm countenance.  She showed interest and support of our celebration she was attending by asking questions, complimenting the surroundings and personalities.  It was much later in the day when I heard someone mention the tragic death of Renee’s daughter.  Her reply was, “Even when you experience great loss, God is good to teach you through it.”  At that moment she raised a banner for me. It signified, “When your heart has broken, if you let the Savior bind up your wounds, this is what you can look like.”

    

Dave and Shirley have only known frugality and generosity in their material lives.  The money that has gone through their hands to worthwhile causes and needy individuals that coincidentally cross their path at gas stations and grocery stores is more than the income of even affluent people.  They certainly did not deserve to be victims of a Ponzi scheme.  I can remember Dave and Shirley beamed when they first made their investment.  They told us the man they invested with said, “Your investment (nearly a million dollars) has taken us to a new level where my wife can now stay home with our children.”  Dave and Shirley’s hearts are as good as gold.  Later when the scheme was reveal, that gold was polished before my very eyes when Dave and Shirley raised a standard that shouted, “When you have been taken advantage of, forgiveness is the only sure route away from bitterness and into peace.”

After a battery of tests, Janet’s doctor informed her she had a rare brain cancer and had seven weeks to live.  The medical center shook as Janet raised her banner. “Well, praise the Lord,” she said as she maneuvered it into place.  Many people, well and sick, rallied around that standard as Janet moved through her treatment, therapy and restoration.  Now two years later that standard declares, “If you have an impossible situation, remember nothing is impossible with God.”

At a fall bazaar I was manning an inactive craft table so I was free to listen in on my friend’s conversation with a woman she had known several years before in her church.  I never caught the name of the pixyish lady dressed stylishly in black and donning a velvet hat with the brim turned up off her very pleasant face.  I listened because the conversation was so uplifting. I didn’t hear a negative word from her, but I learned through my eavesdropping, that her marriage of forty plus years fell apart, she now lived in a senior residence that I think was government subsidized and she had sold her car because it cost too much to maintain.  The woman who bought it asked her to drive her around in it.  They were together at the bazaar. Her story intrigued me because it was so dissonant from what I was witnessing in her.  Through a conversation that I wasn’t even involved in, that woman unfurled a banner for me.  “If life gives you lemons you can make much more than lemonade.  You can squeeze joy out of them.”

I currently have a friend who has lost her marriage, her financial support, her health, her sight and shares an assisted living space with her mother who is confined to a wheelchair.  I put myself under Mary’s banner every Wednesday afternoon.  We talk and we laugh together. Her standard reminds me that, “Contentment has nothing to do with what we have or what we have lost.”