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Peach Trees and Gifts

Darkness covered everything except the small halo created by my headlights as we sped along mountain roads well before dawn.  The roads got narrower, rougher and curvier as we neared the Smoky Mountain National Park.  My destination was the Big Creek Ranger station where I was to meet a man named Mark driving a brown Subaru and give him $75.

I had talked to Mark ten days before and arranged for him to pick up me, Adam, and Greg  Stritch at the ranger station at six AM and drive us to where we would start our Appalachian Trail section hike.  As I sped through the darkness hoping to reach the rendezvous in time I worried about the fragility of the relationship.  I didn’t know Mark’s last name; he may not know mine.  No credit card number had been given, no confirmation received.  All I had was his phone number and all he had was my promise.

In the first miracle of our day, I found the ranger station at exactly six, and as I turned into the parking lot headlights appeared in my rear-view mirror.  Mark had been as true to his word as I had been to mine.

He had silver hair tied back in a ponytail–the aging hippie look–and was gently friendly in his questions and advice about hiking conditions.  He had been raised in southern California near one of the places Greg had lived as a boy.  They had surfed the same beaches.  Mark restored old guitars, as did Greg.  He biked and swam as I did.  Common ground expanded, and we seemed to bond in our hour-and-a-half journey to Newfound Gap.

As we neared Gatlinburg, he talked about the fires last winter and the drought that proceeded it.  For ninety days the area was without rain–unheard of in that area–then the forest around the ironically named Chimneys section of the park exploded in flame.  The fire raced down the mountainside, through the valley and into Gatlinburg where homes and businesses were destroyed by the hundreds.

Literally as the smoke cleared, Mark and his wife reassessed the water supply to their own home a few miles away and came to the conclusion that they needed a new well.  Yet, they had no idea where to dig.  Neighbors had dug wells four hundred feet or more in depth, some of them still dry.  His wife had heard of a “water witch.”  They called her, and she told them she would be glad to help.

She was an elderly woman living alone in the mountains.  They picked her up and started to drive back to their property.  She rather suddenly made Mark stop the car when she saw a peach tree.  “Onliest thing to work would be a peach branch,” she said.

Thus armed she made short work of finding the optimum spot for a well on Mark’s property.  Mark’s wife, fascinated, tried the peach wand, too, and felt its power.  Mark, still skeptical, tried, felt nothing, and wondered if this was a group-think con job like a Ouija board.

“I see you need a little help,” the water witch said, and she walked behind him, reached up, and touched both earlobes.

Mark’s hands began to tingle with a sensation he could only describe as electrical and the peach wand pulled him toward the same unseen water source with a force that he was unable to resist.  Convinced, he decided to dig the well on that spot.

The woman chuckled.  Mark offered to pay her.  She refused.  “If I took money for what I did, the water would be no good,” she said.

They dug the well and found plentiful water at forty feet.

Whenever I hear a story like this one I want to jump to one of two conclusions: the story is untrue, or the story is true but the powers are satanic.  But I couldn’t make the jump with this one.

I believe Mark’s story.  He is the kind of man who loves the outdoors and music.  He makes things with his hands and he keeps his word to a stranger to make a rendezvous in the dark based on a single phone call.  He is not a teller of tall tales.

And if his story is true, what could possibly be satanic about an elderly mountain woman carrying a peach branch as she volunteers to help her neighbor find water?

I choose to think that God has imbued this woman with a special gift, given her a special tool–the branch of a peach tree–and a willingness to share her gift.

Though unique, she is not alone.  God gives each of us a special gift to use to bring the Kingdom to the Earth, here and now.  Then He gives us a tool to use that gift.  And He gives us an opportunity to share our gift and encourage others to use it.

For a long time I had a gift–or a calling–to heal.  My tools were sometimes a pen and a prescription pad, sometimes a scalpel, sometimes a drill or a microscope, and sometimes exotic instruments that are beyond description.  The lame walked, the blind received their sight, those on death’s doorstep lived–in a sense, magic every bit as powerful and amazing as the ability to find water with a peach branch.  And every time I consulted with a colleague we learned from each other, commiserated with each other, and encouraged each other–though I don’t remember taking hold of anyone’s earlobes.

Today I have a gift–or at least a calling–to be a witness.  My tool is a computer.  I don’t often get to see the magic, but I trust it happens out there somewhere when somebody reads a story and recognizes something familiar, or sees a new truth, or opens their heart and mind to the larger reality of God.

You have a gift, too; I am sure of it.  I don’t know what it is.  Maybe you haven’t called it a gift or recognized a calling, but if you stop and think about it for a moment, you will know what I mean.  You have a toolbox, too.  A stove if you’re a cook, a car if you’re a driver, a voice if you’re a preacher or a singer.  That’s your peach branch.  You can find living water for seekers in a way that is beyond your power or their power to resist, and you have a passion to share it.

Mark dropped us off at the trailhead about 7:30 AM, the place where the Appalachian Trail crosses the crest of the Newfound Gap road.  Darkness had given way to the flat, gray light of dawn.  Wisps of clouds and mists drifted through the mountaintop forest, lending a mystical quality to the morning.  Anything could happen; Brigadoon could appear.

We bade Mark good-bye and I shouldered my pack.  Before I walked away I screwed together the two parts of my aluminum hiking stick.  It has a strap and a foam handle and, on the very top, a knob of some kind of wood.  On that morning, I chose to believe it was peach.  As I started walking, I began to think about earlobes and tingling hands.

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Probably Nothing

When Nothing Was Something

Adam, Jay and I played ping-pong on the upper deck of an ocean liner cruising on the Alaskan Inside.  The night was spectacular.  Though it was ten PM, the multi-colored twilit sky gave adequate illumination for our game, the sea reflected the sky, and distant hills of pine forest slid by.

Family vacations then were a novelty, a rare period of recovery.  This one was especially precious because our family was recovering from Mary’s diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer just a few months before.

Adam was losing at ping-pong.  “I’m see two balls,” he said.  “I don’t know which one to hit.”

Brain tumor jumped to my consciousness.  I had seen dozens of patients with brain tumors whose initial symptom was double vision.  But then I quieted my alarm.  People get double vision for other reasons, I told myself.  And I’m not his doctor; I’m his father.  Let his pediatrician take care of it.

It’s probably nothing, I thought to myself.

A week later his pediatrician examined him.  He said, “It’s probably nothing, but I’d like him to see an ophthalmologist.”

A few days later the ophthalmologist said, “It’s probably nothing, but I’d like him to see a neuro-ophthalmologist.”

At this point, I no longer thought it was nothing.  I scheduled an MRI scan on my own son.  The neuro-ophthalmologist found that Adam had an eye condition that always points to a tumor in the pineal region of the brain.  A few hours later the MRI confirmed his suspicion.

I suppose it’s possible to have a child with cancer and not pray.  Perhaps there are those so convinced of their atheism, or so lost along their way, or so unattached from their child that the impulse doesn’t come.  But I suspect those are the rare exceptions.  Even those with the thinnest belief in an almighty benevolent power are driven to their knees when their child’s life is at risk.

So I prayed.  And Mary prayed, Adam prayed, and the whole family prayed together.  Then I sought out the best medical care possible.

If you’ve followed this website, particularly Adam’s posts, you will know that the subsequent road was hard.  Many things were lost never to be re-gained.  Some dreams folded up and died along the way.

But Adam survived and is cancer free twenty-six years later.  This week Adam and I are hiking together in the Smoky Mountains, one way we have of celebrating life and health.

So here is a question I have kept to myself for a quarter century.  Did Adam survive as an answer to prayer?  Or did Adam survive because of good medical care?  The person of faith in me says that my prayer was answered; the doctor in me says that surgery, radiation, and drug treatment cured him.

Both, I want to answer.  I have faith that God is real and He heard and answered our prayers.  And I have faith that medicine and surgery prolonged Adam’s life.

But is it true?  Before neurosurgery and radiation therapy, parents prayed for their children with brain tumors, and they died.  I have personally treated a teen-ager with a similar tumor who had no family, nor apparent faith, and he lived.  The medical care seems to be the most critical element, at least to my worldly eyes.

Then again, I prayed to the Almighty, the creator of the universe, and He granted my request.  Should I say now that the prayer had nothing to do with the outcome?  That the radiation would have cured him anyway?

When Nothing Was Nothing

A few months ago, my daughter, Brieanna, called.  She had developed a lump in her armpit.

It’s probably nothing, I said.  She was nursing her second baby; maybe the lump had something to do with that.  Small cuts or infections in the arm could cause a swollen lymph node.  Or a viral infection could do the same.

Two weeks went by and the lump increased in size.  She had no symptoms or evidence of breast feeding problems, injuries or infections.  It’s probably nothing, I told myself.  But I wasn’t so sure.  This is how lymphomas start.  A nightmare scenario played itself out in my mind: my grown daughter with cancer, her two little boys needing her, her devastated husband.  Such scenarios are easy to imagine after your wife and another of your children have been diagnosed with cancer.

So Mary and I prayed for healing.  Brieanna scheduled a doctor visit and an ultrasound of the swollen node.  On the morning of the the ultrasound the lump unexpectedly disappeared.

“What do you think?” Mary asked me.  I still have a small amount of credibility when it comes to family medical matters.

The residual doctor part of my brain thought, unrecognized breast infection or cuticle infection or a virus.  Probably nothing.

Then I caught myself.  When I pray for something and get it, I am sometimes quick to forget the prayer and ascribe the good fortune to natural or manmade causes.  Something wonderful had just happened.  I should not be so quick with an explanation; I should be quick with grateful praise.  The appropriate response is Thank you, Jesus.

“It was probably nothing,” I told Mary. “Or a miracle.”

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Scathed

The MRI showed the tumor as a white Rorschach blot in the midst of gray brain.  Two words bubbled to the surface of my mind: evil incarnate.  Evil had become flesh and dwelt among us.

Clinical jargon quickly took over my thoughts: Large pineal area tumor in an adolescent male presenting with visual signs typical for a tumor in this area.  Most likely diagnosis: germinoma.

My mind flips forward to surgical approaches for a tumor like this, the advantages and disadvantages of each, the myriad of complications.  Then I stop.  This time I am sickened by the violence that is surgery, and I am afraid.

This time the tumor, this incarnate evil, is in my son’s brain.

Eight years before, our family went for a Sunday afternoon family walk on the beach.  Although it was Fall, the afternoon turned warm, and the boys (then aged six and eight) started wading in the surf.  Soon they were up to their necks, and I jumped in to join them leaving Mary with baby Brieanna in her stroller.  The boys and I splashed for what seemed a mere moment in the surf before I realized we were treading water.  I looked up and could see the shore only when we bobbed to the top of a wave.  It looked a mile away.

I had heard of riptides but never experienced one.  Somehow I had to keep us together and bring us home.

At my direction Jay slid over my back and wrapped his arms around my neck as I did a slow breaststroke back to the beach.  Adam swam in front of me.  I talked and made a game of bobbing in the waves.  I didn’t want them to be frightened.  If any one of us panicked we were all doomed.

A long time later (thirty minutes? forty-five? an hour?) we made it to shore.  I stood at the waterline, relieved and exhausted, Adam next to me, also tired and probably irritated that he had to swim all the way while his little brother got to ride.  I congratulated myself that I had concealed the danger from the children and they could still feel safe.

Then Jay ran to his mother shouting, “Mommy, Mommy!  Daddy just saved us from a watery grave!”

They knew.

A few months later I saw a newspaper report about a fellow neurosurgeon who had completed his residency in Boston and took his family for a vacation to Florida before starting his career in Atlanta.  He went swimming with his two sons, got caught is a riptide and they all drowned.  A reminder–it could have been us.

But we were unscathed.

We learned that our lives could change in the blink of an eye, that our time together is not a given–it is a gift.  We also felt that regardless of how hopeless our situation, we were under God’s protection.

Eight years later I looked at Adam’s MRI and had the same feeling I had when I bobbed to the top of the wave and saw the shore a mile away.  We had a long swim before us with no guarantee we would ever reach safety.

The next several days were filled with a trip to Shands Hospital in Gainesville, a brain biopsy and shunt, a spinal tap, and an appointment for radiation therapy–all this before Mary’s last chemotherapy appointment (a whole story unto itself).  And prayer.

We prayed for healing.  And because we knew that each of our lives and each of our children’s lives are a gift, not a given, we prayed for peace and the Lord’s will to be done.  But along with these prayers, we also had a sense of vulnerability.  Evil had become flesh and dwelt among us.  We were scathed.

Adam lost his hair and he lost his strength.  The tumor shrank, but a shunt infection caused pain and high fevers requiring another operation and weeks of antibiotics.  By Christmas, all he could do was lie on the couch, dozing, warmed by Fluffy the dog.

We continued to pray.  Adam regained some of his strength, but never returned to being a gymnast.  A few wisps of hair returned to replace the dense blond mop he had before.  He kept up with his classes and finished his junior year on time.  He could walk and drive and a few months later he could jump enough that his feet actually left the ground.  The tumor remained absent on follow-up scans.

But we all lived in fear.  A headache could precede disaster, cold symptoms might be the beginning of the end, a phone call could bring tragic news.  We felt vulnerable.

So we prayed more.

Recently our adopted son, Peter Ter, was in Jacksonville to introduce his bride to his Florida families, and he reminded me of what vulnerability brings.  He spent his childhood separated from his family, wandering through south Sudan and Ethiopia seeking refuge from the violence of civil war.  Eventually, he landed in a Kenyan refugee camp where he lived through most of his teen years.  He came to this country in 2001, just before response to the 9-11 tragedy closed the borders.  Since then, he has worked hard, studied hard, graduated from UF, and obtained two Master’s degrees and has served overseas in the Peace Corps in Azerbaijan, China, and the Republic of Georgia.  A year ago he returned to the U.S., moved to D.C., got a full-time job at Peace Corps headquarters, fell in love, got married, and is expecting his first child.

He recounted some of the hardships of the refugee camp, the hunger, the physical punishments, the pain, and the loneliness.  His hope came from only one thing: a Bible that a Catholic priest had given him.  Each day he would read and pray that he would be respected, useful, and not alone, and each day he would feel God’s presence.

Now he has respect, an admirable mission, and he is loved.  But now he says that what he misses is the nearness to God that he felt in the refugee camp.  He does not miss the suffering, but he does miss the complete dependence on God that is so easy to lose when all your prayers are answered.  To be near God now, he must learn a new discipline.

Like Peter, I don’t miss the riptide.  And we don’t miss the dark days of our cancer year.  Mary and Adam carry physical scars; all of us carry emotional scars.   Those experiences forced me to cry out to God in pain and fear.

In response, He gave me a vision.  I saw the universe as one part of the mind of God.  The universe was so vast, incomprehensible, yet God was bigger than even that.  And me?  I was just a tiny part of God’s mind–just one of His ideas.  But an idea, a thought, in the mind of God!  I think my ideas are important.  I don’t give them up, I treasure them, use them, sometimes modify them.  They are what I am.  I might be tiny in the mind of God, but tiny does not mean I am unimportant.  I am His idea and part of His mind.

We have been frightened.  We have been scathed and will be scathed again.  But for now, we have been saved from evil incarnate.  And when evil comes again, I know we will never be alone.  In the mind of God we will each rest in the peace that comes from being His special idea.

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What I Learned on Day One

Adam

The day after my first two seizures I was in the hospital so doped up that I looked like the Star Trek character, Data. My flat affect was a side effect from large doses of antiepileptic drugs. But it wasn’t just my face; my brain was weird. The drugs fought with the scar tissue in my head that wanted to cause more seizures and, although seizures are now rare, my brain has never been the same.

My life as a chaplain, as an ordained minister, as someone who could go on international mission trips was over. I just didn’t know it yet. Considering how doped up I was, I’m not even sure that had I known I would have cared.

One of my chaplain training instructors told us on Day One of our training there were only four things that could happen when a patient went into the hospital:

The patient would get better.

The patient would stay the same.

The patient would get worse.

The patient would die.

He was trying to teach us that death was normal. It didn’t take me long as a hospital chaplain to understand that death was also common. So was staying the same and getting worse.

On that Day One after my seizures I had the vague assumption that things would return to the way they had been before the seizure. I didn’t understand that things were changed forever. Much like an amputee who understood that his or her life was different, I knew something had changed. But like an amputee who thought a prosthesis would return 99% of their ability, I thought the anti-epileptic drugs were going to let me go right back to work as a chaplain. But a prosthesis is not a real leg, and a drugged brain is not a normal brain.

Years later, I tried to explain to a counselor that the drugs made me feel and act differently than the “real me.” My statement was irrelevant. The “real me” no longer existed. I will need these drugs for the rest of my life. The person they make me is the person I am.

When I was sixteen I worried about the tumor, the surgery, and the radiation causing brain damage. The damage didn’t seem to appear significant at that time but it caught up with me later, in my early thirties. I was very fortunate to have more than fifteen years of Christian experience and community before the first seizure. In my mind, I went to seminary to lead a church or serve as chaplain. In God’s mind I went so I could learn to be a Christian before my mind didn’t work quite right, before the drugs pulled me into a perennial slumber.

These are the things that I learned on Day One:

Don’t drive for six months.

Don’t swim for six months.

Don’t walk alone for six months.

Don’t be alone taking care of your children for six months.

 

This is what I learned since:

Trust in the Lord.

He is with me even when my mind is too foggy to see the iceberg in front of my Titanic.

God’s love is not based on what I could do before or on what I can’t do now.

My job is to respond to God’s love with love.

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A Funny Thing About the Cat

I’ve had messages from God–a sign I asked for, a voice when I cried out in desperation, an answer to a prayer, a vision to bring me out of the deep depression, an unexpected visit from someone with a word of encouragement.  But I’m hesitant to claim that God speaks to me in special ways.  To believers, I sound prideful; to people without faith, I sound quite insane.

But really, what good is a God who doesn’t speak to you?

On a Sunday afternoon in August a few years ago, the temperature was brutally hot, the drive across the Buckman bridge was aggravating, and the call was urgent.  A fifty-year-old woman had arrived by ambulance at the Orange Park emergency room unconscious and hypertensive.  A CT scan showed hemorrhage deep in her brain.

A shadow of hopelessness started with the first call and hung over all subsequent events.

A bleed like that normally causes death or severe disability, and rarely does surgical intervention do anything to alter the dismal course of events.  But the first task is to decide if the problem is indeed hopeless, and this requires urgency.  If anything beneficial can be done, it must be done quickly.

I finally arrived and walked across the frypan hot surface of the parking lot in back of the hospital, the shortcut to the radiology department.  I wanted to see the scan before I saw the patient.  I wanted to know how bad the bleed before the family asked.

Blood filled the deep areas of the brain called the basal ganglia and dissected into the upper reaches of the brainstem, the part of the brain that allowed for consciousness.  With a bleed like that, one could survive, but one would never wake up.

The problem is that it is always hard to stop saving a life.  Families have difficulty giving up.  Doctors are trained to keep people alive at all costs.  Liability lies with doing too little, never doing too much–even if the cost is prolonged suffering for both the family and the patient.  I headed to the ER for what I expected would be a difficult discussion with the family.

The emergency room doctor intercepted me.  “There’s something you should see before you talk to the husband,” he said.

“I’ve already seen the scan,” I replied.

He nodded.  “Yes.  But we got a chest x-ray after she was intubated and put on the respirator.”

  I had only a moment to wonder why he wanted me to see it.  He led me to a view-box upon which hung a chest x-ray that showed lungs riddled with tumors of various sizes.  “Metastases?” I asked.

“Yes.  Breast cancer,” the ER doctor said.  “I went back after the x-ray.  She’s got a big mass in her left breast.”

We went together to the patient.  Her depth of coma was expected from the findings on the scan.  A tube protruded from her mouth, connected to a respirator that filled her lungs every five seconds.  Cardiac monitors beeped in the background.  I untaped her eyes for a brief exam of her pupils and reflex eye movements, then re-taped them and confirmed a three-inch mass in her left breast.

You can’t die twice, but two things can kill you.  If I had any doubt about the advisability of recommending aggressive intervention, that doubt was now dispelled.  If, against all odds, we could save her life with an operation and a long, difficult hospital and rehab course, the likely result would be to leave her in a vegetative state.  Now her exam and the chest x-ray told us that if we intervened, she would also die a prolonged painful death from disseminated breast cancer.

I went to talk to the husband, uncertain how approach this double tragedy.  But I had time.  The urgency was gone.  Only the cloud of hopelessness remained, now darker than ever.  So I asked him what happened.

He started her story a few months back.  They were simple people, living in a small house on a rural lot.  She had lost her job and her health insurance, and didn’t have the energy to find another.  She stopped taking her blood pressure medications.  Although public assistance was available, she didn’t want to be beholding to the government.  Then today she had a headache and collapsed.

I told him about the bleed in her head, and that the prognosis was very poor.  Even if she lived, she would never be able to live independently again.  Then I told him that she also had breast cancer, a large tumor that had already spread to her lungs.

He told me she’d discovered the lump a few months before, but didn’t want to see the doctor about it–possibly for the same reasons she didn’t get the blood pressure medicines.  She didn’t want to be beholding.  But she seemed to have another reason.  I don’t want to know, she told her husband.

I understood.  Every day she didn’t go was one more day no one could give her bad news.  But inwardly she must have been preparing for the end.

I recommended that we treat her with comfort measures only.

He nodded as he stood looking somber and alone.

I murmured something in the line of sympathy and started to move away to begin the process of reversing the well-oiled medical system that prolonged lives and change it into a system that provided comfort.

Then he said, “It’s a funny thing about the cat, though.”

For a moment, I thought I misunderstood.  “The cat?”

He kept his gaze fixed on the curtain around his wife’s gurney.  “Yep.  About two months ago a stray cat showed up on our porch.  Never had a stray before.  She started feeding it and it stuck around.  Since he looked like he was going to stay, she took him to the vet.  She asked the vet about a lump on the cat’s side.”

“Uh-huh,” I said.  People had many different responses to sudden loss.  He was the first I had heard talk about their cat.  I didn’t want to discourage him.  “Go on.”

“The vet said the cat had cancer.  We should put it down.”  He continued to stare at the curtain.  “But she said no.  As long as the cat was comfortable, we would take care of it.  The lump is bigger, but the cat is still there.”

He turned his eyes from the curtain and met my questioning look.  “So I’m just saying.  It’s a funny thing about the cat.”

The patient died thirty-six hours later, comfortable with her family at her side.  I don’t know about the cat.  But I had to agree with the husband: it was a funny thing.

I am convinced of God’s personal love, and that He will use any means to to bring us a message that we need to hear.  One day we will face our death or the death of a loved one.  Often we face difficult decisions at the end.  He tells us in His Word to prepare, and to not be afraid.

But sometimes we need a very personal message that He is with us always, that even in the shadow of death there will be time and space for love.  I am confident that He will find a way to give us that message, and comfort to those left behind.  Sometimes He even sends a cat.