My Post from the Year I Survived Cancer…

Four days before Christmas, 2001. I should be talking with my son and his wife about their life, their dreams, and the joy of the holidays. That’s what we usually do when they fly home from their military duty station from somewhere in the world. Any other year our conversation this morning would revolve around the soon arrival of his sister’s family from Oregon and how great it’s going to be to spend Christmas just being together with the extended family

But not this year.

This Christmas, all we’re talking about is my deadly disease–my rash, the test results, the next specialist, what we’re discovering on the Web about chronic lymphoma, and the gloomy prognosis. I’m sick of talking about me and this disease. And it feels like Christmas will never be the same.

A family member passed a note along to me after having given her neighbor a copy of When God Breaks Your Heart.

This blog is to all the “anonymous” readers of When God Breaks Your Heart. Please know that all of your comments are forwarded to my personal email account and I do pray for you. I try to filter the remarks on this blog so your pain isn’t becoming a curiosity piece for casual readers. But this blog is the only way I can communicate back to you, to assure you of our prayers, and to let you know someone is listening.

My primary lesson for you is this:

God isn’t as distant as you think!

As you know from reading the book, I believe Jesus’ is screaming against your pain as tears flow down His holy face.

Trying to be as much a part of your life as a blog allows.

Has God Broken Your Heart, or the Heart of Someone You Love?

I titled my first book “When God Breaks Your Heart” because God broke my heart. I live with a chronic leukemia that almost took my life in 200o. I wish someone else could have written this book, but God chose me to suffer deeply so that I could help you trust Him, even when you feel He has broken your heart.

This is a book to help you or someone you love through the darkest days and nights.

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A few years ago Judy and I visited a friend, Jon Campbell, during his last week on earth. His faith in Christ and hope of heaven encouraged all who watched him go home. As his body began to fail him, he referred to it as his “container”. He was in deep pain the day Judy and I were privileged to come to the side of our friend and his bride. We read Scripture, prayed for healing and comfort, and then had to say goodbye. We knew that unless the Lord intervened, we had probably talked with our dear friend for the last time and that the next time we talked to the love of his life, it would be at his memorial service.

Yet, as we were leaving, our friend demonstrated a life-lesson I’ve “lived” myself—he told us that he was going to mow the lawn!

Judy insisted that I intervene. “You can’t let him mow that lawn. Tell him you will do it for him!”

“No,” I told her, “you have no idea how much he needs to mow that lawn. If he collapses dead mowing that lawn, he will be happier than if I did it for him.”

This is one of the primary lessons I learned during my bout with lymphoma. The routine means more to those of us who feel we have been “set aside” and that we are losing our grip on our life. Some of the greatest moments in recovery are those when we suddenly find that we can do something we use to take in stride.

I remember the first day I was able to begin helping Judy around the house after my last battle with this disease. I brought in the trash bins, weeded the front lawn a little, and pulled Judy’s car into the garage from the street!

“YES,” I said to myself, “I’m coming back.”

Do you know someone who is struggling through a life-threatening or life-devastating heartbreak? Ask the Lord to make you sensitive to their need to be useful. Those of us dealing with debilitating diseases or emotional trauma don’t want to be defined by our pain. The encourager should endeavor to encourage the discouraged on their terms. Let them do for themselves and others whenever they want. It may seem small to you, but to them it’s huge…in their journey, there is immeasurable joy in what we consider mundane.

“This is the day the Lord has made; we will rejoice and be glad in it” (Psalm 118:24).

This is a great post by our friend, Lee Ann Jackson. Lee Ann has been a part of Church of the Open Door since  before Judy and I arrived in 1996. She’s a single mom and an important part of Judy’s cherished group–her courageous His Alone community. Lee Ann is a part of the team at Ambassador Advertising, and wrote this encouraging piece for their insightful website.

Thanks, Lee Ann.

Pinky Promise

I made my first pinky promise last night.  I made it with a 6 year old girl.  She made me pinky promise she could lead prayer in AWANA.

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Ever feel like everything is going wrong? You know what I mean, you find yourself asking God if He really has any idea of what’s going on in your life. I’m in the middle of one of those times right now. Snow in the Midwest turned my flights from New York into an adventure, my truck’s in the shop, and now my computer’s acting weird.

Fortunately I’m working on a new book about discipleship and writing about Jesus’ words, “And whoever does not carry their cross and follow me cannot be my disciple (Luke 14:27).

It helped me so much as I sat exhausted, stuffed into the last plane leaving Philadelphia, that I wanted to highlight two points for you:

Take up your cross has more to do with agendas than it has to do with specific burdens of suffering. When that Roman soldier jerked you out of your home and strapped that cross on your shoulder, whatever you had in mind for that day, that week, or the rest of your life just changed. His agenda for your life was all that mattered.

Sometimes the hardest part of crossbearing is daily. I’m pretty good with the big agenda items. I’ve gone through relational, health, and financial crises and accepted it as Jesus’ agenda. But when my flight is cancelled or my truck needs a new engine or…. I don’t know why, but it’s often the little things that cause me to cling to my agenda with a sin-clenched grip.

Question: Is it the big things or the little things that flip you out and give you an attitude toward Jesus’ agenda for your life?

A very real dynamic in writing a book on suffering is that my heart hurts for so many who write me about their hopeless situations and deep pain. One recent comment is signed simply, Anonymous:

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Nazi Germany, 1940

Did you know that in 1940 more than 80% of the prisoners in German concentration camps were not Jews, but Christians?

A friend loaned me his costly December 23, 1940 edition of Time Magazine. An article, German Martyrs, begins on page 38. It’s a fascinating report of the courageous Christians Hitler imprisoned, tortured, and martyred.

My first reaction as I read the piece is, I wonder why I never heard of this in my history courses in the public schools of California–including one of its prestigious universities. All I remember being taught about church history was the bad stuff, like the Crusades.

Naming the resisters by name, the author documents their courageous opposition to injustice. “Behind the barbed wire of the frozen Nazi concentration camps,” Time reports, “men bear mute witness that the Christ—whose birth the outside world celebrates unthinkingly at Christmas—can still inspire a living faith for which men and women even now endure imprisonment, torture and death as bravely as in centuries past.”

Einstein’s Tribute

The writer continues, emphasizing the impact of these German believers: “The best tribute to the spirit of Germany’s Christians comes from a Jew and agnostic (TIME, Sept. 23) — the world’s most famous scientist, Albert Einstein. Says he: ’Being a lover of freedom, when the revolution came in Germany, I looked to the universities to defend it, knowing that they had always boasted of their devotion to the cause of truth; but, no, the universities immediately were silenced. Then I looked to the great editors of the newspapers whose flaming editorials in days gone by had proclaimed their love of freedom; but they, like the universities, were silenced in a few short weeks. . . .

“Only the Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler’s campaign for suppressing truth. I never had any special interest in the Church before, but now I feel a great affection and admiration because the Church alone has had the courage and persistence to stand for intellectual truth and moral freedom. I am forced thus to confess that what I once despised I now praise unreservedly.’”

Social Justice and Jesus

This is a big debate in Christian circles today. I think both sides of the debate can learn from these German Martyrs. Followers of Christ are for social justice, but it’s more than theology and theory. It’s not what you think you would do if standing for justice in the name of Christ that matters most. It’s what you would do in the name of Christ that counts.

And the only way I know to produce the type of Christian who would stand is to make disciples to Him.

How do you feel about Christians and social justice? Should it be a priority?

If you’re a Christian and you’re honest, there are times when you feel like Jesus has let you down.

We all do. I sure felt like He had let me down when I almost died from this leukemia.

It’s been a number of years since people gathered around my hospital bed with troubled faces and self-conscious words, but I can still feel the desperate sense of betrayal. I can still picture the IV drips plugged into both arms. I can still hear the incessant beeping of the medical apparatus. I can still smell the place. I can still feel the helpless confusion of the moment—too weak to speak, too sad to smile. I can still remember the haunting question, “Why don’t you do something, Lord?”

What I wish I would have known then is what I’m telling you now.

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