by John Creasey
For the remainder of the weekend her doctor’s orders are to rest and wait—and remind ourselves that it is not all the obstacles that are in our way that will define the journey. As with Abraham of old, it is faith in the power and promises of a faithful God that saves the day.
I have set the Lord always before me; because he is at my right hand, I shall not be shaken. Therefore my heart is glad and my whole being rejoices; my flesh also dwells secure. ~ Psalm 16:8,9
9
The Numbers Game
Grade is only a number. We are greater than numbers. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita
Saturday 12 April. Numbers tell stories, sometimes filled with mystery, stories we do not understand. I watch as her numbers decrease, sensing her avoidance, not wanting to answer when I ask what the numbers are as she grows smaller each day right before my eyes. I go to the numbers to remind myself, how long has it been? Seven weeks? Is that all? Seven weeks since Valentine’s Day, when first we heard the words, “We’re ninety-five percent certain it’s pancreatic cancer?” Numbers . . . the rest of that day is blurred over, numbed by that dreaded word, cancer . . . and that awful number . . . ninety-five!
Seven sevens. Surely more numbers on the calendar have passed since that day than these. And the numbers keep changing. It’s not ninety-five percent now. It’s one hundred. It’s Stage II. It’s pancreatic cancer. No lymph node activity detected. A surgery called Whipple. What is that? Five days in the hospital. Pathology reports keep changing. It’s not pancreatic cancer. Then what? A rare carcinoma of the ampulla of vater. What? It’s a rare kind of pancreatic cancer. Very aggressive. We must treat it as such. Four lymph nodes out of twelve show positive. Are we supposed to feel good about the eight that were negative? Home for recovery. Recurring fever. Two more days in the hospital. Another surgical procedure. Home. One more hospital day for a liver biopsy. It’s not Stage II anymore. Now it is Stage IV.
Twenty pounds disappear from her body in a matter of weeks. Am I losing her? It feels that way. I wake up in the night and look for her. Is she still here? In the morning I watch her gaze out the window at the first signs of spring. A lone tulip blossoming. She planted it. The leafing of the trees. All the things she loves about this time of year. Does she wonder if this will be her last spring? This should not be happening, God. Are you listening? Of course you are. Then tell me, why does she suffer so?
We are, not metaphorically but in very truth, a Divine work of art, something that God is making, and therefore something with which He will not be satisfied until it has a certain character. Here again we come up against what I have called the “intolerable compliment.” Over a sketch made idly to amuse a child, an artist may not take much trouble: he may be content to let it go even though it is not exactly as he meant it to be. But over the great picture of his life—the work which he loves, though in a different fashion, as intensely as a man loves a woman or a mother a child—he will take endless trouble—and would doubtless, thereby give endless trouble to the picture if it were sentient. One can imagine a sentient picture, after being rubbed and scraped and re-commenced for the tenth time, wishing that it were only a thumbnail sketch whose making was over in a minute. In the same way, it is natural for us to wish that God had designed for us a less glorious and less arduous destiny; but then we are wishing not for more love but for less.
~ C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain4
It is hard to see . . . to understand things from God’s point of view. Impossible really. Except for what he lets us in on in the Old and New Testaments. And for what we see through glimpses of himself in one another.
I think she is perfect, but obviously, he does not. He’s not satisfied yet. What is the matter with you, God? It’s me who needs more work. I’m the one who’s a mess. Can’t you see what is happening to her?
But hers is not an ordinary sketch, is it? You have been at it, outlining, layering, contrasting colors and shades on the canvas of her life since before she was born.
For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb. ~ Psalm 139:13
This is the kind of work you love, isn’t it, God? Displaying your image in the lives of your children. You choose whom you will choose to share the extraordinary “intolerable compliment” of divine love’s tender touch and terrifying passion. She is one. You knew her before she was known. You had in mind who and what she would be. So I am made to watch as with the intensity of each new color and the artistry of every brush stroke you continue to “rub and scrape and re-commence for the tenth time” your passionate finale, while this living canvas on which you display your omniscient self struggles to hold steady against the unbearable weight of the Artist’s scarred hand.
I long to cry out, to beg you to stop! Yet there is beauty in her struggle. An amazing courage. And a deep longing. She remains silent, uncomplaining beneath your touch.
Is this what it means “to put on the new self, (to be) created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness” (Ephesians 4:24)? It is, isn’t it? It’s what you have been doing all along; your divine work of living art kept secret until now. “For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory” (Colossians 3:3,4). Is she the reason for these terrible scars on your hand? Am I?
I see a sketch of earthly beauty. You see a work of eternal perfection. Made perfect in suffering. Your head. Your hands. Your feet. Your side. Your suffering. The Redeeming Artist and the living canvas. You make possible the successful completion of every person’s sacred journey.
For as we share abundantly in Christ’s sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too. ~ 2 Corinthians 1:5
Oh my God, how deeply you must love!
Monday. We leave home in the early dawn to arrive at UWMC before 7 o’clock. First, we go to Blood Draw, then to Admitting, with its endlessly repetitive paper work. A walk to the Pacific Elevators, down one floor to F2 and Radiation. At 9:30 we kiss and say goodbye as Dixie is taken by gurney to the procedure room. An hour later, she is transported to F4 North, where in Room 425 she is placed on a bed and we begin post-op observation. Six hours. Checking for bleeding or any other untoward reaction to the just performed liver needle biopsy.
We know something is there. We’ve looked over the scans with doctors at SCCA. The question is, what? Two tiny spots, both small, one difficult even to discern with the naked eye, but there nonetheless. I wonder what person’s trained eye first caught these tiny abscess cavities? Not knowing could have meant severe illness, even death. I wish I could thank you, whoever you are. Just for doing your ordinary job, but doing it so well. Extraordinary. At the end of the day, this is what we all wish could be said for ourselves on our respective sacred journeys.
Is it an infection, more easily treated, yet necessary to deal with before anything further can be done? Or is it the Enemy Cancer having crept in, after our first major victory, to an area vital to her wellbeing? It is nearing five o’clock on a sunny afternoon as we leave the building. Merging into bumper to bumper traffic we make our way across the SR 520 bridge and home.
Tuesday. We return to UWMC for a routine follow-up appointment. Dr. Park is tracking with Dixie and the various other doctors involved in her wellness. We have known him only a few weeks. Our relationship, albeit a professional one, some might say is the luck of the draw. But we sense the Great Physician’s involvement in the selection of this quiet, dedicated young doctor in his prime. After discussing her progress, the last thing Dr. Park does is check the computer screen again for any biopsy results. He shakes his head slowly. Nothing yet.
Wednesday through Friday. Life seems almost normal. C3 Leaders gather in our living room early today. I spend an hour at CASA 50+ Network’s office. Some additional appointments. A delightful home visit with our pastor, Gary Gulbranson, and his wife, Jorie. These are colleagues in ministry and good friends. Gary reminds me of our first ever get acqu
ainted breakfast at CoCo’s in 1999, when we were then considering a possible role for me in pastoral care at Westminster Chapel.
I had been aware of the tragic death of their recently married daughter and it prompted my first question, one he told me later no one had ever asked. As we shook hands and sat across from each other, I said, “Gary, are you going to make it?” His honest answer let me know this was someone I could work with if he felt the same about me.
Now years later, here in our living room, he reminds me of that day. I am surprised he remembers. He says pointedly, “Now it’s my turn to ask you the same thing.” My answer is just as heartfelt and just as honest.
After a time, Jorie reads a passage of Scripture, then serves the bread and cup that expresses so beautifully the death of our suffering Savior. Gary leads us in receiving holy communion together. A short while later we say goodbye. I close the door and turn to Dixie, “So this is the way people feel when the pastor makes a call. How good was that?” Very, as it turns out. I hope and pray it has been just as good for the countless calls on others whom Jesus loves that Dixie and I have made together through the years.
Numbers. This is Dixie’s best week in seven. She is eating small bits of solid food. Lots of liquids. Only one Tylenol in the last three days. Still, no pathology report. We think of some friends, who like us on a purely human level wish, “after being rubbed and scraped and re-commenced for the tenth time . . . that it were only a thumb-nail sketch whose making was over in a minute.”
But it’s not a minute.
God is taking his time.
Lewis was right: “ . . . it is natural for us to wish that God has designed for us a less glorious and less arduous destiny; but that would be wishing not for more love but for less.”
10
Waiting and Watching
My soul waits for the Lord more than watchmen for the morning,
more than watchmen for the morning. ~ Psalm 130:6
While carrying a full academic load my second year in Bible college, I worked the night shift as a manifest clerk for a large trucking company, from eleven at night until seven the next morning, five days a week. For a few months, I washed cars in a car wash at 75 cents an hour. During my third college year, I worked days part time, hand-setting type in a Seattle print shop owned by two Christian brothers who taught me the skill with great patience.
In my final year of undergraduate studies, it was full time again at night for a music store, offloading crates from train boxcars, delivering pianos and organs to the store and to individual homeowners throughout the greater Seattle and Puget Sound area. I understand firsthand the watchers’ waiting for morning’s first light, signaling an ending to the dark toil of the night, in good weather or bad, grateful for the breaking of another dawn.
Here the psalmist seems to be saying, life is like this for one who is tired and thirsty, who is waiting for an end to what has become, in the words of 16th century monk, St John of the Cross, “the dark night of the soul,” or at the very least, a season of waiting for things to get better.
By instinct, or perhaps it is something we are taught, we in the Western world are impatient. We do not do waiting well. Not for a bus, for dinner, for another person, for much of anything. We do not like to be kept waiting. Yet, in spite of our not liking it much, it is an oft-used word in our vocabulary. “Don’t wait up for me,” “I don’t like waiting in lines,” “Are you our waiter?”
Waiting suggests an interval of time, “I have a long wait between connecting flights.” Or to supplying the wants and needs of someone as in, “Do you serve a meal on this flight?” Something several friends have done for us of late. Mercy meals on wheels. Homemade delicacies left hanging on our doorknob by neighbors. Beautiful acts of being waited on.
Recent days have been days of waiting. Waiting for change, for information, for answers. Waiting in lines at grocery stores, in banks, the post office, the pharmacy, and of course, the never ending lines at Starbucks. Days filled waiting for visitors from our church family, for relatives, for three women who live out of state, with whom Dixie has met every other year for many years, renewing relationships and listening to how each has grown spiritually during the interim.
Three women, married to a fireman, an engineer, and a scientist, respectively. All retired. Young mothers when first they met. Two were followers of Jesus, one an avowed agnostic. And Dixie, around whom their relationship formed. “Dixie explained the good news to me and nurtured my heart until my soul was ready to embrace Jesus,” says one. “She challenged us toward higher goals, winsomely beckoning us forward by casting the vision of a God-honoring life. She became our spiritual mother, mentor and friend.”
4 Fun and faithful: Nancy (behind), L-R Bev, Carolyn, Dixie
Over the years, each growing in true faith and understanding.
Waiting.
And watching
In a strange, yet beautiful way, these three disparate friends symbolize the many others who through the years have been waiting and watching with Dixie, this woman who welcomes everyone into her world of deep, transforming faith and a passion to know her Father God; a world ever more real and inviting, not just by what she says or teaches, but by the manner in which she lives out her faith each day. Natural. Flawed. Beautiful. Breakable. Touchable. Believable. Stirring within those she touches the desire to be and do the same.
Stacks of cards from these last two months continue piling up on the counter in the library, each sharing someone’s personal note, telling stories of life change, of relationships restored. Thanking Dixie for the ways she reached out to them, loved and cared for them. Cards from people who may not remember exactly what she said to them, but who with clarity do remember what they felt and saw while with her that helped them overcome all the obstacles that were in the way.
Watchers with whom she took part in a new day dawning, and in doing so experienced new light on her own journey. Just the way it’s supposed to work.
She hears from those who are in her present day and all the way back to the very beginnings of our ministry over fifty-five years ago. The detail can be amazingly vivid and unexpected. Like one who was a teenager in our first pastorate, now a missionary, who recently suffered the death of her husband. She writes: “I was thinking back to the first time I met you and Dixie. It was in Forks and you had just been voted in as our pastor. Leave it to me, but I remember what Dixie was wearing. A periwinkle blue dress with a periwinkle blue pill box hat. She was gorgeous! I remember something about you, too . . . it was your hair. A Princeton crew cut on top and long on the sides, combed back. Very handsome! You have blessed my life for many years! You are loved and I’m praying for you as you walk this latest adventure/journey in your lives.”
The things young minds absorb!
We were, in fact, the youngest pastors ever in this church and have fond memories of good times with those teens, not being that many years older than them ourselves. They babysat our children. We did Fort Flagler kids camps and teen camps every summer. We grew up together and that is the most wonderful thing anyone can say, really. We grew up in faith and trust in our Lord Jesus. Together. Pill box hat, Princeton haircut and all.
In some way or another we are all watchers, aren’t we?
No one is sure who first said, “All good things come to those who wait,” though it is generally attributed to President Abraham Lincoln. We do know the Scripture says, “The Lord is good to those who wait for him, to the soul who seeks him” (Lamentations 3:25).
And so we wait.
We wait to hear an official word from SCCA regarding the results of Dixie’s liver biopsy. Unofficially, we’ve been informed the spots being evaluated are not cancer. Instead, they appear to be abscesses, usually treatable with antibiotics or surgical drainage, depending on their size, number, and complexity. She is taking antibiotics which, hopefully, are helping. What additional steps, if any, are unkno
wn to us.
Dixie is having a good week, gaining strength and energy, though not regaining any of her lost weight. She says, with a smile, that shopping is in the near term because she has nothing to wear that fits. For once, shopping actually sounds good to me.
Our son, Stephen, flew in from Hong Kong yesterday. He and Nancy and their son, Jesse, now officially a teenager, have been living and working there as part of the administrative staff of Savannah College of Art and Design HK. He says you are never too old for a “Mommy fix,” but is bunking at home with his sister and her husband, Michele and Mark, rather than on a floor in our apartment.
We are learning to live one day at a time, each day being precious in God’s hands. We are goal-oriented people and, as such, we’ve accomplished a good deal in life, investing ourselves in our children and in thousands of others along our journey. And we are not done yet. But we also know we have missed some things along the way. We’ve at times been so focused on the next person or the next project that we’ve misplaced some of the amazing people and precious times in our past. Reminders come daily now of just how important we all are, to our Lord Jesus Christ, and to one another.
With our Creator, at the end of the day we can say, “We are pleased.”
Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me. You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; you anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows. ~ Psalm 23:4,5