I’m home, out of the hospital, and ready to get better. I have to get better. If I don’t all of the plans for my life and our marriage will go out the window.
I’m supposed to get used to the drugs and start feeling less sleepy. Things are supposed to get better. But I remember having cancer, how nothing was ever the same again. I had stared death in the face, lost my hair and a third of my body weight. Then I’d prepared to die bravely.
But now I had no idea of how to coexist with the drugs that suppressed not only my epilepsy, but also my awareness and my emotional affect. I had no idea of how to live with impairment.
The green couch, though splattered with stains from feeding babies, served as a good place to rest while I stared out into space. My two-year-old son and infant daughter hovered in the background, probably making a mess. I’d just called my friend to switch on-call shifts for the last requirement of my CPE, chaplain-training class. In a little while my wife would be home and I would go down for a four or five hour afternoon nap. In one day I’d gone from being a highly autonomous individual with serious responsibilities to being a man who couldn’t drive, couldn’t think straight and couldn’t be trusted to watch his children for more than an hour or two.
My circumstances changed in an instant, but my plans, my identity and my values changed at glacial speed. Throughout CPE training I’d seen myself as one of the smartest and best educated of the students. I’d been selected from over more than twenty people for the single spot in the residency program. My strengths were an ability to listen and “put the dots together.” My classmates described my ability to “put the dots together” as my propensity to hear about an experience ten or fifteen years ago and connect it to something one of my classmates or patients was doing or saying in the present day. I could also write very detailed, in-depth papers about my conversations with patients. My weakness lay in being emotive; even before the drugs I had trouble sharing the emotions of grief or pain with my patients, their families or my fellow students.
It was very important to me to be perceived as being one of the smartest and best educated. I did not want to re-experience the childhood taunts I had suffered as I struggled to overcome dyslexia. In adulthood I wanted to find a profession where my skills and intellect were valued. I’d already been a construction worker, a mailman, a warehouse worker and a teacher. I’d gone to seminary and finished with good grades and good recommendations because I was sure that God loved me and would find a place for me to love Him, serve Him, and maybe even let me take home a paycheck. The chaplaincy seemed like a good fit.
Now, sitting on the green couch in my living room, feeling numb and dumb and tired, I had no idea of how I could continue.
I still struggle to believe it, even now, but much of my suffering came from illusions and deceptions that I’d constructed about myself. I’d struggled with learning how to read and get through school, so it became very important for me to think of myself as smart and have others perceive me as smart. I’d struggled to find a place in the adult world, so it became very important to think of myself as very qualified as a chaplain or minister, and to provide valuable help to others.
I’d suffered pain, disappointment and frustration. I had to believe that God would use me to alleviate those conditions in others. We always try to give away to others what we want the most for ourselves; it is to us our most precious gift.
What I didn’t know then, and continue to learn now, is that my picture of myself as a smart, super-qualified, valuable helper was going to have to die so that God could rebuild me into His humble servant.
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.
During my time as a chaplain I prayed with dozens, maybe hundreds, of patients. Sometimes I felt I was doing a good job. Other times I felt I was completely inadequate.
One night I was the on-call chaplain and got a late call. A Roman Catholic family wanted a priest to come and perform what is commonly called last rites. Unfortunately, there was no Catholic priest in the hospital and little time because the patient needed emergency surgery. At first they didn’t want a Protestant chaplain, but fifteen minutes later they wanted anyone they could get.
I ran and got there just as they were about to roll the patient into the operating room. The family asked me to say a Hail Mary. They settled for holding her hand and saying The Lord’s Prayer. When we finished they wheeled her through the doors. She died in surgery.
The last words she heard on this earth were, “…and deliver us from evil, for Thine is the Kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever. Amen.” And the next thing she heard was choirs of angels.
In May of 2007 all the hard work of seminary seemed to be paying off. I was finishing up my second CPE unit (hospital chaplain training) and applying for a residency program. I was in the process of being ordained by the United Methodist Church. We were close to reaching our family goal of having Leslie home taking care of the kids and me in the work place bringing home the money.
Then one Saturday morning, our family was working together to spruce up our yard. I was trimming some overgrown shrubbery. The next thing I knew I was looking at a field of brown and someone was asking me about my address and phone number. As my eyes cleared I realized that I was talking to paramedics. I wouldn’t have been able to answer their questions without Leslie’s help. But Leslie convinced the paramedics that she could take care of the transportation–because she wanted me to go to the hospital where she worked and where I was doing my training. We got into our car, and she drove to the emergency room.
Along the way I called my parents and the pastoral care office at the hospital. As we drove I started feeling worse and worse. I felt nauseous and had what epileptics and neurologists call auras, a combination of vibrations, sparkling lights and earthquakes inside my head. We couldn’t get to the hospital quick enough as far as I was concerned. When we pulled up I quickly opened the door, undid my seatbelt and put my feet on the pavement. I was too dizzy to stand up. Leslie ran to get someone with a wheel chair.
I remember being impatient and uncomfortable–then nothing until I woke up in a hospital bed with restraints on my forearms and ankles. As a chaplain I’d talked to many patients in restraints, but now I was the patient, and the feeling was definitely odd. One of the chaplains from the pastoral care office came in, and I could greet her by name, though most of that day I was disoriented. The powerful anti-epileptic drugs knocked me out of reality. Two grand mal seizures within an hour had completely exhausted my muscles, and I could barely move.
I remember one of the chaplain supervisors telling my mother that I’d gotten into the residency program, news I was eagerly anticipating, but I was too far gone to care.
That evening I had an MRI to see if my brain tumor had come back. I couldn’t experience anxiety and fear before the scan, nor feel the joy of relief after learning the answer was no.
I didn’t experience God that day, not personally. But that was because I couldn’t see the other side of my reality. But God showed up.
You could argue that He always shows up, and this is true. But we only become aware of His presence when we pray. If we have a seizure, or are drugged, or just plain too sick to care, we are unable to pray and unaware if the Lord is present or not. When we need Him most, we are unable to call His name.
I am very blessed. From the moment I called, my mother contacted our family and her prayer partners, and by the time the hospital staff extracted me from the car seizing and hauled me through the lobby to the ER, a hospital chaplain, a minister from our church, my parents and their five prayer partners were praying for me and Leslie.
They prayed for my family while they were traumatized from seeing me have a seizure. They prayed for my health, and that I wouldn’t have a recurrence of brain cancer. They prayed for God’s presence to be close to us during a hard and frightening time. And the prayers were answered. God comforted my family, He kept me from further harm, He gave us peace.
Now I try to prepare. Two prayer partners and I meet each week, praying for everything from help finding our lost sunglasses to the forgiveness of sins that seem unforgivable, and healing from illnesses that seem incurable. We know each other and each other’s business. My prayer partners see my blind side, the things I don’t know about myself.
When catastrophe strikes me again, these two people will pray for me. I feel good about it; they’ve already practiced.
Do you know who will pray for you when you can’t pray for yourself? Maybe it will be a minister or a priest or a hospital chaplain. Maybe a family member. But maybe you want someone who has practiced. And the best way to do that is start now. Find someone you trust with your blind side, and share your prayers.
The seminary taught me the joy of daily prayer and Bible study, and prepared me for a mystery.
For a good portion of the seminary experience I was in a covenant with one of the professors to read four chapters of the Bible and pray for ten minutes every day. In truth, I just about wore out the chairs in the prayer room. It became a very warm and welcoming place for me.
I learned to feel the often small but steady flow of the Holy Spirit on a daily basis. I tried all sorts of prayers, but one of my favorites became blank prayer, the process of emptying my mind, my heart, and my spirit of all distractions and waiting for the Holy Spirit to come. I made sure that Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit were very specifically invited. This type of prayer is waiting and listening for God’s presence. The prayer room would go from being a dimly lit room to a raging waterfall of the Holy Spirit. In this way I prepared myself for unusual things to happen.
It was the spring of 2006, my last semester of seminary. God had blessed me with a stunningly beautiful wife and a six-month old son. They gave me great joy, and I thoroughly enjoyed the seminary experience and community. I was, however, taking five classes, caring for my son, and did not have enough time to do the work. Four hours of sleep each night was not enough. I was in over my head and often fought off sleep as I sat in class.
One morning in preaching class as I listened to one of my fellow students preach, the Holy Spirit came upon me. I started seeing clouds of fire above his head. It wasn’t a little cloud, but clouds that spread out all across the front of the classroom. There was tension and for some reason I remember praying to God, saying, “Strike Lord, Strike Lord.” In my mind I saw the fires coming down and touching the preacher. It wasn’t malicious or intended to harm him, but more to inaugurate something, something important. After the sermon I told him what I’d seen.
None of the other students had seen what I had. I know they talked about my vision, and wondered about me. Since then I have lost track of the speaker and I can’t say if the vision ever had significance to him or his ministry.
A couple weeks later I was listening to another student preach. My eyes were drawn to a cloth that was hanging from the podium. It had depictions of children from all over the world. The Spirit came upon me, and I started to see them move and even dance. When the sermon ended, the other students filed out for a break.
I sat still, trying to process what had just happened. One other student stayed behind, someone I’d known for the past four years. She was often more emotional than rational, a characteristic that had placed her on the fringe of the seminary community. She knew I had seen something and asked what it was. I told her, and we prayed together. Then the break was over, everyone came back in, and we never spoke of it again.
I have had no visions before or since, and I have no idea how they may be important to others. Some will think they were a product of my sleep deprivation or scar tissue from my tumor. But for me, they were important spiritual experiences. I learned visions are real, and I learned to value the emotional faithful friend who stay in the room with me more that the rational one who leaves.
Sometimes God does strange things, things that remain a mystery to us, things that may change us in ways we do not understand.
I was nineteen. I’d finished my first year of college and came home to find that my church was in turmoil, an old wineskin being filled with new wine.
The church I attended since I was six had always discouraged words like Holy Spirt, saved and born again. The church put a premium on making the congregation feel comfortable, not spiritually challenged.
From where I sit today, it seems like a travesty and an utter waste of God’s resources. But there is a place for such gateway churches, places where people can come and learn about God and the Bible before they receive the Holy Spirit. The trick is not to get so stuck in that spiritual comfort zone that we never get out.
The new minister challenged that spiritual comfort zone, using words like Holy Spirit, saved and born again. The agitated congregation pushed back with words like he doesn’t understand us, he doesn’t know who we are and we want him moved to a different church.
In the midst of this storm, the pastor’s wife took over running the youth group. As soon as she did so, all the high school youth and experienced youth counselors stopped showing up. She was left with a handful of middle schoolers.
During her first summer as youth director she decided to take the kids to a Bible Camp. It had been a blessing to her when she was teenager and she wanted the kids to have the same benefit. But she could only get one chaperon, a mother of one of the kids, and she felt that she needed a male chaperon as well. At nineteen I was barely qualified to chaperon a dog, and certainly not 7th graders, but I went anyway.
Take suburban youth from a marginally spiritual congregation and throw them into a charismatic Bible camp in rural Georgia and you get culture shock. I was certainly in culture shock. People were raising their hands, shouting amen and the charismatic pastors were very different than anyone I’d ever heard. I don’t know if previous years had been as intense, but during that week we were getting up at seven and going to bed after midnight.
I believed then, and still believe, that the vast majority of the counselors and staff were born-again Christians doing their very best to introduce the kids to Jesus Christ. But their keynote speaker, the man who preached twice a day and sometimes exceeded his scheduled time by more than two hours, struck me as wrong from the get-go. He was intense, unrelenting, and definitely violating my spiritual comfort zone.
At first I tried to dismiss my misgivings by reminding myself that it was just a difference in styles of our preaching and worship. By Tuesday I was uncomfortable enough that I wanted to pack up, take all of our kids and go home. I felt like something was pushing me to leave, to flee from danger. On Wednesday he started saying weird things like, “stop reading your Bibles, stop talking to your counselors and just focus on me and what I’m saying.”
I talked to our youth director immediately after the morning sermon and shared my discomfort. She listened to me and agreed that what he was saying was a little disturbing, but she dismissed my discomfort by saying that it was just a different culture of Christianity. There was no way that she could have taken our kids home early. If our church members heard even a whiff of a rumor that she took the kids to a camp where the preacher was “talking crazy,” her tenure as youth director would be over and her husband’s position as pastor would be threatened.
Wednesday evening and Thursday morning were epic struggles. I didn’t want to make a scene, but the Holy Spirit was pushing me harder and harder to leave. My level of discomfort was very intense.
Thursday night I got up and walked out of the sermon. The counselors, the grown-up ones from Georgia, were alarmed. They thought I was one of the youth; there was only a year’s difference between me and the oldest youth. They told me that I had to go back in. I said I wasn’t going to. They said I could either go back in immediately or go home immediately. I picked up the phone and called my mom in Florida. I was explaining that I needed the impossible, to be home that very night, when our youth director walked in, took the phone and told my mom that I was having trouble with the sermon, and that she would talk to me.
We went to the church van and started talking. Explaining the promptings of Holy Spirit seemed impossible. I talked about doctrine, words and feelings. I couldn’t explain how endangered I felt by that preacher. The youth director was unconvinced, and I felt that everything would keep going on as it was. I was only a chaperon, powerless to change anything.
Then another camp counselor came by, sobbing uncontrollably. The preacher had opened spiritual wounds from her childhood and made her feel like she didn’t belong in God’s kingdom. She joined us; we talked and prayed. What was unconvincing from me alone became very convincing when there were two of us. Our youth director, the sobbing counselor and I decided we needed to talk to the camp’s directors.
As can be expected, the directors were less than enthused to hear from us at midnight. They talked about how the preacher was “breaking new ground” in his church and how we owed them more than to just pack up and leave. In the end they insisted that we talk to the preacher face to face.
The pastor, his wife and the camp directors met with the three of us in a small room. The sobbing counselor talked about how the sermons made her feel and the sorrow they caused. Next, our youth director spoke about how she had the gift of discernment and how she was convinced that there was something wrong. The preacher never blinked through their comments.
Then it was me, the nineteen-year-old “chaperon.” The preacher stared at me with intense eyes. I returned his gaze as I spoke. I tried to defend myself from the inference that I was only upset because of the cultural gulf between charismatic rural Georgia and stuffy suburban Jacksonville.
“It doesn’t matter if it’s charismatic or not. What is important is that it is of God,” I said.
I was completely unprepared for what came next. The preacher kept his gaze on me and asked point blank, “Can you forgive me?”
A more seasoned Christian would have said Yes because we are quick to say we forgive. But I didn’t know, and still don’t know, what I was supposed to forgive.
I said, “I have nothing to forgive. It is a matter of trust. We need to trust that you are giving the message God sent you to deliver.”
We left, and I went to sleep uncertain if the preacher with the intense eyes had heard me or changed. I only know that I said the words the Holy Spirit had given me.
The next morning the preacher abandoned his theme of “Being Desperate for God.” He talked about God’s grace and love, and how blessed he was that God had given him his wife and her love. After that final sermon the preacher and his wife sought me out and thanked me–again for something I didn’t completely understand.
God did something there, something good, and he used me to do part of it. The Holy Spirit may call us in our distress, even while we feel powerless against the might, wisdom and conventions of our world. When I was powerless, the Holy Spirit filled another counselor with her pain and sent her to me at just the right moment. Together we could confirm and reinforce what the Holy Spirt had been telling us, and we could change our world.
Is there a time when the Holy Spirit filled you with distress, urged you to cry out, and you felt powerless?
Is there a time when you cried out, and He sent you a brother or sister to cry with you?
And when two or more of you are gathered together, maybe crying together, isn’t He with you, and can’t you change the world?
In the summer between my sophomore and junior years of college I volunteered at a missionary training camp in northeast Alabama. If I mentioned the nearest town, people would ask, “Where is that?” And I would have to say, “In the middle of nowhere.”
My main job was to work with the various youth groups who would come on mission trips for a week. Most of that work took place in the Third World garden, where we practiced growing food in a Third World setting, without pesticides, machinery or store-bought fertilizer. We made a lot of fertilizer through composting, mixing dung with soy leaves and letting it cook. Weeding was also at the top of our list. Sometimes we rounded up chickens, picked plums, or dodged geese determined to drive us off. It was hard work but it only lasted for a couple hours between breakfast and lunch.
The highlight of the week was Thursday evenings when we brought youth groups down to the model Third World village. It had no electricity and no running water. The only sleeping accommodations were hammocks. We cooked rice and beans over an open fire and rewarmed it for breakfast.
I never figured out how to sleep in a hammock. After dinner I would stake out one of the wooden benches, put my sleeping bag on it and doze on and off until morning. It was a stark lesson on how most of the world lives, and we taught it every Thursday night.
The camp was never short of interesting people. Former communist revolutionaries from Bolivia, couples who’d spent their lives as missionaries in Nepal, French-speaking missionaries from Mali and, of course, Ken and Sarah Carson, the directors, who spent more than ten years as missionaries in the Bolivian jungles. One of their most vivid stories was of how they’d been living on mildewed rice for so long that their children started eating cockroaches in protest. Every week there would be someone else from a different part of the world with a different story.
During the week I had little free time. The other volunteer and I got up before five to help cook breakfast. Then we would work in the garden until lunchtime. Then there was a bit of program after lunch, and we’d be back for dinner. Sometimes, maybe a lot of times, we’d be with the youth group in the evenings for Bible Studies or whatever they were doing.
From what I understand, we had it easy. Every previous summer they’d worked the kids and the volunteers in the afternoon as well. The problem was that it was so hot that they needed to buy Gatorade so the kids wouldn’t get sick. In the end they decided that the work the kids did in the afternoon wasn’t worth the cost of Gatorade.
Once the kids left on Saturday mornings the camp became a ghost town. The kitchen was closed, and the fulltime staff was gone until Sunday night. I lived in what we called the glass bottle house made of mortar with glass bottles stuck in the walls so light could get into it during the day. It had no electricity, no running water, and was closer to the Third World village than the main buildings. But watching a lightning storm through those bottles was worth whatever inconvenience. On the rare occasions when I did drive my car out to the ridge above the house, I could literally roll down my window and pick blackberries without getting out of my car.
That summer was a time of incredible spiritual growth for me. I experienced the Holy Spirit on a regular basis. During the week I was surrounded by mature Christians who had given, were giving, or were expected to give their lives for Christ. During the weekends I took up the disciplines of prayer, Bible study and fasting. The fasting was more a matter of convenience. To get food I would have had to walk out of the woods, get in my car and drive for half an hour to get the food and another half-hour to get back. I usually made a foray on Saturdays, but I would fast from sundown on Saturday nights until the evening meal on Sunday when the next youth group came in.
One Sunday morning I woke up absolutely convinced that the Holy Spirit was telling me to be baptized again. In human terms that was a somewhat difficult proposition. I couldn’t remember my home church ever baptizing an adult and certainly not baptizing someone who’d already been baptized as an infant. But I made my way to the side of the river and started upstream. I was praying the whole way, seeking an inspiration on how I could baptize myself. After a twenty-five minute walk I was sure that I couldn’t do it alone. I started back.
Five minutes later I found myself in the middle of the river with no idea how I’d gotten there.
I guess I could have slipped, or “accidently on purpose” slipped, and forgotten the moment. But that day I felt that God said, “So you want to be baptized?” and shoved me into the middle of the river.
Since then, I’ve never worried about being baptized. If I am willing to trust my Christian community and accept the urging of the Holy Spirit, I am born again. Every day, God shoves me into the river.
Having cancer is fear: like having a gun put to one’s head. The day before the diagnosis, one could go where he or she wanted. When the diagnosis comes down, the patient’s autonomy boils down to a single question. Will I accept or refuse treatment?
As they were prepping me for surgery they screwed metal bolts into my skull. It was like something out of a horror movie, and I just lay there acting like it was normal while they tightened the metal halo, and my head felt like a grape being squeezed. A few minutes later they had me lie down on the gurney. I was encased in a metal cubic framework screwed into my skull.
Then, a month later I could actually smell my skin burning during radiation therapy.
During cancer treatment there dozens of atrocities visited upon a patient’s body. I had to have my blood drawn every week. My veins weren’t so good so it took a lot of sticks. I can remember telling myself that if I got better I would never let anyone stick me again.
Then there was morning when I came in for a CT scan. They gave me a “Big Gulp” sized cup of contrast. I drank a little less than half and couldn’t get any more down. My mom urged me to keep drinking; I did my best. Then I started throwing up.
I feared not only dying or discomfort. I also feared of my utter lack of autonomy. They could have told me that they were going to have to cut off my leg or my nose or blind me and I would have had to say yes. In this way being a cancer patient is like being in a concentration camp, except that a concentration camp seeks to kill while cancer treatment seeks to give a long, arduous road to life.
Where is God in the midst of this journey? He carried me when I wasn’t strong enough or brave enough to walk. I wasn’t particularly pious or spiritual. I just had a feeling, a spiritual feeling, that I was going to be ok.
During my cancer treatment I suppressed my fears and thoughts of trauma. Later, when God put me down I had to deal with them. God carried me through a horrific wasteland, like a battlefield inundated with explosions, shrapnel, barbed wire and terror. When he put me down I had to look back over that wasteland and examine the scars on my body, my spirit and my soul.
“As the sun was setting, Abram fell into a deep sleep, and a thick and dreadful darkness came over him. Then the Lord said to him, “Know for certain that your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own, and they will be enslaved and mistreated four hundred years. But I will punish the nations they serve as slaves, and afterward they will come out with great possessions”(Gen 15: 12-14).
The Israelites did not come out of Egypt without scars. There were the literal scars from the whips of the Egyptians and the overseers. There were the memories of the babies killed by the soldiers or eaten by crocodiles in the Nile. Bodies were broken by decades of slave labor. More than all of these, they lived with constant anxiety. They had lived for four hundred years in a setting where one simple change, like not gathering enough straw, could bring utter ruin.
My biggest anxiety was the MRI machine. To me, going into an MRI was like being buried alive. Less than six inches separated my eyes from the top of the tunnel. The sides of the tunnel pressed my arms to my side, and it was always cold, around sixty degrees. The mechanical voice on the intercom told me time after time not to move. Even swallowing my saliva worried me. A typical MRI takes about 50 minutes. Of course, in the machine I had no way of sensing of time. All I had was my thin, cotton gown. About halfway through the scan they would move me partially out of the tunnel, stick me, and add contrast to my veins.
Above all the unpleasantness hovered the fact that one MRI in August of 1991 had changed my life forever. One bad MRI took me into the wasteland of cancer. Any MRI after that could return me to the same wasteland.
It was the summer of 1992. I was going for my first annual MRI scan. By that time I’d started to rebuild my life. I was driving again, taking tennis lessons. I had enough hair to brush, and I looked forward to my senior year of high school. I walked into the imaging center determined to put on an optimistic face.
In reality, I was absolutely terrified.
God must have laughed at my phoniness.
When I registered, a new Christian manned the desk. We talked about the cancer and my fear that it would come back, and I received the gift of peace. God knows and ministers to our fears, even the ones we are afraid to admit to ourselves.
When astronauts and cosmonauts return from the space station there is a rush to get them out of the return vehicle. They are then plopped into lawn chairs so their bodies can have some time to adjust to full gravity. It is the first step of restoring their bodies from the atrophy they experience without gravity.
Like space vehicles that carry astronauts through the freezing vacuum of space and the fiery tempest of reentry, God carries us through the hell of cancer and other crises. Then the survivors often go into a deep depression even as their bodies start getting better. During the crisis, patients and their families pour every bit of their physical, spiritual and emotional assets into the eclipsing task of survival. When the question of survival is no longer central, they are in deep emotional and spiritual deficit. That deficit has to be paid back.
It was February of 1992. I was going to live. Eventually, I would grow my hair back. The muscles, though never as toned and defined as they had been when I was a gymnast, would return so that when I jumped my toes might leave the ground.
But my spiritual self was lost and confused. I’d just had a very intense experience with God. I’d felt the Holy Spirit inside of me. It made me hungry for more. I didn’t know anyone who had the same experiences. When God stopped carrying me, I felt like he’d dumped me in a wasteland. In reality he was teaching me to exercise my spiritual muscles. Just as my leg and arm muscles needed to be rebuilt my spiritual muscles needed to be rebuilt.
As a pharisaical Christian I tried the things that I’d tried before: Bible studies, my church’s youth group, service projects, and even making plans to become a minister. Talk about the blind seeking to lead the blind! I was in a desperate search for the love that God showered upon me during my sickness. I felt that I had something special to share because God had saved me during the darkest part of my life. It took me years and years of seeking, searching and stumbling to get connected to mature Christian communities.
After more than twenty years I’m still working on being a good servant. By now I’ve identified some of the reasons why my journey was so long, arduous and frustrating. First of all, I wasn’t ready for a community of mature Christians. I could no more survive in and tolerate such a community than I could wake up one day and run a marathon without any training. I needed a steady diet of prayer and Christian fellowship.
The second biggest hurdle in my Christian journey was that I completely misunderstood the nature of being a servant of God. I thought that I was going to do great things for God, and He was going to reward me with money, power and prestige. It took me years and years and years to understand that what I did was not important. Only what God did was important. The best feeling in the universe is to be a tool in God’s hand when He is working. Too often I’ve been the hammer thinking I had a better idea than hitting the nail. A true servant of God is forged over years and decades to perfectly welcome and facilitate His will. I still have a long way to go.
My most challenging hurdle was that I didn’t start with fellow travelers, guides or mentors to lead me through the process. This was 80 to 90% my fault. I’d always taken myself too seriously. I’d was obsessively independent. That’s how I ended up with such an atrocious plan for salvation. As one of my former professors was fond of saying, “When you get singled out, you get picked off.” The Christian journey is not meant to be walked alone. It is meant to be walked with Christian brothers, sisters, fathers and mothers.
If I could go back 25 years to being the skeletal, baldheaded, traumatized boy that I was, these are the things that I very much wish that I’d done sooner:
I would actively solicit a prayer partner, someone that I could meet with weekly. We would talk, share our challenges and pray for each other during the week.
I would seek a mentor, an older, mature Christian who could build between my independent, egotistical self and a more selfless Christian community.
I would find an area of service that would remind me of God’s work, and my humble place in that work.
When God lays us down, and stops carrying us through our crises, He is priming us to actively seek Him and learn to serve Him. It isn’t an easy process. It’s a long journey during which we build our spiritual muscles and become disciplined in our journey toward being at the heart of his will.
It was a Sunday of August 1991. I was lying/sitting in the hospital bed. The doctors had come and explained what they were going to do. My parents had gone to the hotel. I was sixteen, looking at the prospect of brain surgery. Earlier that day my mother tearfully told me that she didn’t know if I would live two days, two weeks, two months or twenty years. She did say that God had something for me to do and that he would give me the time to do it. There was a lot riding on the next morning’s procedure. If the biopsy came back badly, I would likely be dead by Christmas. If they didn’t put the shunt in I wouldn’t live long enough to care about the biopsy.
At sixteen I had a plan for salvation. I was going to become more and more holy and eventually become perfect as my father in heaven is perfect.
How could I have come up with such a doomed plan?
Hurt, pride and determination–they were what moved me from being a failing dyslexic in the 4th Grade to a thriving dyslexic at one of the best schools in the state by the10th grade. The lesson I had learned was that any problem could be overcome with hard work and uncompromising determination. Why should salvation be any different?
The problem I had lying in that hospital bed was that I’d run out of time. I could no more become spiritually perfect than I could write a book in a single night. I didn’t know if I would wake up from the surgery with brain damage. I didn’t know if the biopsy would come out malignant. I was in a hard place. I didn’t have any more wiggle room. I was scared and I needed a savior.
“Dear Lord, I always planned to become more holy and a better Christian. I’ve run out of time. Could you please just take me as I am?”
As far as salvation prayers go it was pretty pathetic. I didn’t even mention Jesus or even ask for my sins to be forgiven, but the Lord reckoned even my pathetic prayer as righteousness and I could feel the warmth of the Holy Spirit flowing into me. It hadn’t taken surgery or brain damage to change me. The Holy Spirit made me a new person. Since that day I’ve worried about many things: pain, incapacitation, isolation, and what would happen to my wife and children if I died. But I’ve never worried about death.
Everyone comes to hard places. Sometimes they are dramatic, like the night before brain surgery. Sometimes they are in the middle of sustained challenges, like depression or addiction. Other times they are awakenings to the fact that our salvation plans, like most human plans, are wholly insufficient. What are the hard places you have experienced in your life? What spiritual fruit has grown out of those experiences?
