Facebook Memories

At the top of my Facebook newsfeed this morning was one of those reminders of something posted on this date in the past. The one for today went back ten years to New Year’s Day, 2010. Most of these reminders are interesting, but this one especially caught my attention.

Ten years ago I was in the hospital. If I said I was hanging onto life by a thread, it would sound overly dramatic but it’s true. After spending nearly two weeks in the hospital, these are the words I posted on Facebook that will probably show up under my memories sometime later this month.

“After twelve days in the hospital, I am finally at home – feeling well, weak, and grateful. I have spent the past few hours reading your messages, wiping away tears, and amazed at what happened. This is my report to my family and friends, who I discovered in greater legion than I anticipated.

No one should really care about all the messy details, but just let me say, I was lying in a hospital bed, diagnosed with CHF, being told that my kidneys might have already applied for retirement, and my doctors decided the best course of action was to insert about twelve feet of Goodyear bicycle inner tube down my throat in order to help me breathe.

A time when my family felt most helpless (not quite hopeless). My own feelings of hopelessness did not really matter because I was too far away mentally to understand either hope or hopeless. Nearly three full days of the experience have been expunged from my memory with the precision of a Hoover. We were desperate for God to do something. 

Although I was only semi-conscious during the worst part of the ordeal, I still had my own low point. It was when I was aroused enough to recognize portions of the experience and I remember staring at the off-white sheetrock wall of my hospital room, containing nothing more than a red light switch and an orange decorated hazmat storage box. At that moment, I honestly believed that I had died and gone to heaven. However, the encumbrance of the ventilator and the uncomfortableness of the entire situation caused me great disappointment – I had higher expectations of heaven. We all needed God to do something. 

The doctor called the house early on Monday morning to speak with Sharon. He asked if we had a “Living Will.” That kind of question in that particular scenario grabs your attention. He explained how the lung problem was leading to a kidney problem, and the knee bone is connected to the thigh bone, and that inserting the tube was the best (or perhaps only) solution. I don’t think any of us felt desperate, but this is one of those sandy places in life where you do not want to erect a foundation.

Then a miracle happened!

The ventilator was inserted, and the vigil begun to see what God would do. And, God did not disappoint anyone. It was an amazing week of answered prayer, physical feats, and unmistakable encounters. I will not even attempt to explain what happened in this short thanksgiving missive but let me encourage you to stay tuned. The book has already been titled and outlined.

As I said earlier, I am home gaining strength. I would love to speak to each of you individually, but there were so many friends and family prayer warriors that the number is inestimable. There must have been at least fifty people on the hospital staff that came by my bed to complement me on my wonderful family. I felt like a preacher at the conclusion of an especially good sermon having to accept all the accolades. If the sermon was really that good, then you need to give God the credit. I kept saying to these complementors, “God has really blessed my life.”

You are one of those who have been used by God to bless my life. Thank you.

I hope you will allow me to share the “rest of the story” over the next few months. I am coming off one of the lowest and one of the highest times of my life at the same time. Through your prayers and support, you allowed me to see a miracle – an amazing sight.”

So, when I saw this today, it caused me to reflect on the past ten years, a complete decade of my life has passed since this happened. I have long considered this borrowed time anyway, but it has proven to be much more. I had polio as a very young boy. I remember calculating that since I was born in 1950, by the year 2000, I would be 50 years old and that’s all I ever expected from my weak body. I’m highly pleased for the extra 20 years and certainly would not object to another 20. But much has happened in the past ten, since my hospital ordeal.

The following is the list of major events in my life since the calendar has read twenty-teens.

• The greatest man I ever knew or will ever know, my father, died. He taught me everything I needed to know about living.
• I changed occupations, from church consultation to writer and book publisher. In 10 years, I have been able to build a business that pays the bills and keeps me challenged and growing.
• After more than 40 years and probably close to a half-a-million miles, I gave up driving. The last drive was a Sunday trip to preach at a small church west of town. I no longer felt comfortable that I had enough strength in my arms to control the car. When I arrived at home, I told Sharon that I was done. (Sharon will tell you that I still have much to learn about being a “back-seat-driver.”)
• My son Matthew married in one of the most fun weddings I have attended. It was a great evening, and he hit the jackpot with Tina.
• We picked up nine grandkids to add to our first, Noah, who is now in college.
• Our youngest son Andrew was deployed by the Army to Afghanistan. I checked for casualty reports every day for nine months and finally rested when he came back home to his family.
• After visiting nearly every church within a reasonable distance from our house, Sharon and I decided to leave the institutional church with the conviction that there must be a better way. Along those same lines, I no longer identify myself as an “evangelical,” not because my theology or behavior has changed, but because the word doesn’t mean much any longer.
• Sharon and I celebrated our 40^th and 45^th anniversary during the past decade.

I hope this post greets me first thing in the morning on January 1, 2030. I’ll be 79 years old, hopefully married 55 plus years and reminiscing about a long list of great things once again. It’s in God’s hands and if He chooses something else, I’m good with that also.

I mentioned that my father taught me everything I needed to know about life. One of his most frequent lessons occurred when I talked to him about a problem. His solution was always the same and it has always worked. I don’t see any reason to change his advice. No matter what problem I encountered, he always told me to “trust the Lord!” He always did, and I try hard to follow his example.

Advertisement

The Handmaid’s Tale: Is It Fact or Fiction?

I confess. I got hooked on watching “The Handmaid’s Tale” the past two seasons. I’m not sure of the original attraction, especially since it’s a hard show to watch. I don’t mean the acting or production is terrible; what I mean is that the story is painful to accept. For some, it seems like the setting is too far-fetched to suggest the possibility, but it is possible to see strands of realism flowing throughout the setting and plot.

Margaret Atwood who wrote the story that inspired the TV show said that she had a rule in place as she wrote. She did not “include anything that human beings had not already done in some other place or time.” In other words, she wasn’t making this stuff up. She merely rearranged attitudes and events that already exist and bundled them together in a new story.

Perhaps that explains my fascination with the show. To be honest, as I watched, I kept seeing the fringes of fundamentalist Christianity. Listen to how Atwood described the Nation of Gilead which is the setting for the story:

The group-activated hangings, the tearing apart of human beings, the clothing specific to castes and classes, the forced childbearing and the appropriation of the results, the children stolen by regimes and placed for upbringing with high-ranking officials, the forbidding of literacy, the denial of property rights—all had precedents, and many of these were to be found, not in other cultures and religions, but within Western society, and within the “Christian” tradition itself. (I enclose “Christian” in quotation marks, since I believe that much of the Church’s behavior and doctrine during its two-millennia-long existence as a social and political organization would have been abhorrent to the person after whom it is named.)

            It’s almost as if the story is ripped from the headlines as they say. The underlying premise is that men seize control over women. Look at the current issues as they are dealt with in Gilead.

• Abortion – In Gilead, men determine how and when a woman becomes pregnant. A woman does not even have access to birth control without a man’s approval.
• Children – In Gilead, children are separated from their parents and given to those who are more deserving. After watching what our government did recently with immigrant children is it far-fetched to see something like this happening. The Attorney General even defended the practice by quoting Scripture.
• Rape and Sexual Assault – The lot of a Handmaid is to be raped by the man of the house where she has been assigned. If she is fortunate to become pregnant, she is removed from the child once the baby is weaned. There was no “metoo” movement in Gilead.
• Subjugation of Women – The nation of Gilead is divided into various castes, and in each class, the women are subservient to the men in that level. This is not unlike many fundamentalist Christian churches today. They allow the Pastor’s wife to be considered an “equal” with her husband, but she is not equal in the sense of function or authority. A favorite Scripture is that there is “neither male nor female” in Christ except when it comes to function within the church.
• Streets are patrolled by heavily armed guards. Several times they shoot and kill those who step out of line. How often do we hear similar stories today – a man killed by police for being in the wrong place, being somewhere he should not have been.

All this is happening under the guise of God’s Word. When the commander was raping his handmaid (with his wife’s assistance I might add), he quoted Genesis 30, “When Rachel saw that she could not give Jacob children, she became jealous of her sister. She said to Jacob, Give me children or I’ll die!”

When one of the handmaids is being disciplined by holding her hand over a hot stove, an allusion is made to I Peter 5:10, “…but only in suffering will you find grace…”

At a marriage ceremony the words recorded in Genesis, “be fruitful and multiply” are cited as the primary focus of marriage.

As I watch the show, I can’t help but see a possible future for our “Christian” world. I also choose to use the word in quotes like Atwood because I see much of what is happening today under the banner of Christ as being abhorrent to Jesus.

The TV show has already gone past Atwood’s novel, which I’m also reading. For the sake of my own sanity, I hope the current writers choose to bring in a happy ending. However, I’m not sure how that can happen without a complete revolution taking place in Gilead. Perhaps there’s also a lesson for our nation about what has to happen before we can expect everything to be fine in the end.

Breathe

My daughter-in-law, Jaclyn, recommended that Sharon and I watch a movie last weekend. I usually take her recommendations with a grain of salt because she’s a big fan of “Grey’s Anatomy” but it sounded like a good story, so Saturday afternoon we took the plunge. The movie is titled “Breathe” and is the story of Robin Cavendish.

He’s not a well-known historical character but was of interest to me for obvious reasons. He was paralyzed by polio from the neck down at the age of 28 and required the assistance of a respirator for every breath for the remainder of his life. His experience resonated with mine in significant ways and it was a painful movie to watch.

He was a pioneer in many ways in dealing with his condition. He lived outside the hospital against his doctor’s wishes. He developed a means of getting out of bed and traveling with a breathing machine. He accomplished a great deal against all expectations and odds.

I had polio as an infant, age one. I avoided an iron lung by a matter of a few days when my condition leveled out. I was almost paralyzed entirely, but I was able to regain the use of my body to a limited extent. I always relied on a wheelchair and crutches to get around. As I’ve aged, my strength and mobility have decreased.

One of the qualities of Cavendish was his refusal to let others discourage him. Everything he wanted to do he was told that it was not possible. I frequently faced the same. Every school I ever attended, from grade school through graduate school, I was the first student they had ever had in a wheelchair. When I sensed God’s call to be a church pastor, I was told countless times it would never happen.

However, I was taught that anything was possible. I remember my father forbid me from using the word “can’t.” He always insisted that I try with the promise that he would pick me up if I fell. One of the few times I remember Daddy being angry was when a man from the Cub Scouts sat in our living room and told my parents I couldn’t be a cub scout because of the wheelchair.

When I was a pastor, we had a man make a presentation to our church and ask people to join him on a mission trip to Brazil. As I thanked him for coming, I expressed that I thought some of our folks would go with him. He quickly asked if I was going. When I told him that I couldn’t go, he asked if I had prayed about it. Not until then. We did, and a few months later Sharon and I found ourselves in Rio de Janerio. I had to keep learning not to say, “I can’t.”

Falling In Love

I wrote the following words several years ago and included them in my book “Intermission.” I share them again on the occasion of my 42nd anniversary. As you read these words you will better understand how 42 years is possible. 

A wife of noble character who can find? She is worth far more than rubies.  Her husband has full confidence in her and lacks nothing of value.  She brings him good, not harm, all the days of her life.  (Proverbs 31:10-12)

Finding the right person to marry can be one of the most foreboding tasks in all of life.  In fact, it is such a difficult decision that many young people give up and settle for less than the best.  The acceptable approach to marriage today is to try it for a short time and if the relationship fails, bail out and try someone else.

Fortunately, I was spared the difficult process of striving to locate the perfect mate.  I sometimes wonder if God knew I did not have enough sense to make a good choice so He made it easy for me.  I share how I found a wife with some apprehension.  It is an experience that is not normative for most people.  In fact, I would discourage anyone who thinks they might have a similar experience.

Sharon and I met at church.  Although I was already a freshman in college, I still participated in the youth group.  The youth program was led by Sharon’s parents and was built around a musical group called the “Proclaimers.”  We traveled to churches around the state of Colorado and even a couple of trips to churches in Texas.

It was a grand experience for all of us involved.  I knew a little music and played a couple of instruments, but it was in this singing group that I learned how to harmonize.  Sharon’s mother played the piano in the style of Jerry Lee Lewis.  She developed the skill as a very young girl as she played for church.  Elva assigned everyone in the group a part to sing on each song.  During practice, if you could not find your note, she would beat it out extra loudly on the piano until everyone was back on key.  She could lead an entire congregation in singing without ever saying a word or leaving the piano bench.

We learned how to sing from the heart.  Although the music might not have been award winning caliber, the presentation was always meaningful and many people were moved by the sight and sound of committed young people singing about the love of God.  We all developed some great friendships within the group.

When Sharon graduated from High School she moved across the state to attend college.  Although we were friends, we did not date nor did we consider any type of long-term relationship.

In the providence of God, Sharon and I both transferred to Wayland Baptist College in Plainview, Texas, at the beginning of the spring semester in 1973.  We arrived at the Texas campus in the middle of January and neither of us knew anyone else.