November 9-15, 2008

Here I am one week further down the road. It has been an uneventful week, which is pretty unusual for me. I have felt no major attack from Satan, which may or may not be a good thing. If you remember, last week Satan came after me very hard, and it was only the community of believers that saved my bacon.

I have not yet started losing my hair, but I will soon. One of Alison's teachers is taking chemo, considerably more virulent than mine, and I talked to him, at Priscilla's prompting (I'm glad she did!), after a school production Thursday night. He is already losing his hair, but his prognosis is good. He is finishing his second round of chemo and has three more. His wife, Alison's first grade teacher, was with him, with tears in her eyes. His name is James Page, and he works with a Christian drug/alcohol recovery program on Friday nights. His road will not be easy, so please pray for him.

Let me talk a little bit about some other relationships, specifically in the radiation treatment waiting room. I will use pseudonyms, since it is possible that folks might not want to be talked about by name. William Miller is a slim, fortyish gentleman, from the Ardmore neighborhood, undergoing radiation to shrink a stomach tumor to make it operable. Interestingly, he has a connection to someone in my accountability group. When I ascertained the connection, I phoned the brother in the group and asked him if I had permission to talk about his issues. This he readily and joyfully granted, and a couple of days later, I mentioned them to William. The response was favorable, and I gathered William had a high opinion of the guy in the group in spite of the issues in his life. I was really amazed at how readily someone with Christ in his life will admit his sin just to bring glory to Christ, and I was gratified at William's response. Hunter Dockery, my preacher at Redeemer, has mentioned many times that Christ has carried our shame so that we can be free of it, and the brother in the group has obviously assimilated that concept.

Lester Platt is a gentleman in his late 60's who is undergoing radiation for advanced prostate cancer. After a week or two, Lester opened up to a drinking problem, a problem with which he has dealt successfully in the last year. I am not sure if he is a believer, but he may well be. He openly shared about an eight-day detox stint at Forsyth General, and about a later connection to an AA group in Yadkinville. Prior to this week, he had been making the drive from Mount Airy with his wife, Helen. This week, for some reason, she could not make it, and so his brother Howard brought him. Lester has been a truck driver for over forty years. I mentioned the other day that it is good that Christ can forgive us because I really want him to grab onto that, if he hasn't already. You can pray that the topic will come up again, and that the scars his alcoholism inflicted on his marriage and family will be healed.

And lastly, we had been seeing a woman named Billie Douglass, but this week she has not been there. She had mentioned last week that she might not be there on Friday because she was beginning chemotherapy in addition to the radiation. She has had cancer before, and really looks like she is on her last legs. She is a genuine, strong-hearted and strong-opinioned woman, not afraid to share about her past, and we learned some personal things about her. She is from Mocksville, her husband died in an industrial accident over twenty years ago, she is a crack marksman, and she has two sons, one of whom is an engineer in a well-to-do firm in the Raleigh area. I ran into her Monday this week on a different floor, where we both had an appointment. We were in the middle of another good conversation when she was called away by a nurse. Please pray that I will see her again and that I will have courage to talk to her about Jesus. She may not be around much longer.

All these contacts, of course, are purely accidental. (If you could see me at this moment, you would notice my tongue planted firmly in my cheek!) The God who planned my history and the histories of billions of other people had this all written in his book before eternity; it is now coming to light. How amazing is that?

And last (but not least), please pray for two people: Rhonda Dering, a Redeemerite with leukemia, and my brother-in-law, Paul Rudy, a minister in SE Wisconsin, who is fighting b-cell lymphoma. Pray specifically that God will bring glory to his name by healing both of them.

In His Love, Chuck Eggerth