Do you remember being afraid of death? I used to run away from thinking about it--I'd do anything to avoid letting my mind wander to the topic. And then I gave my life to Jesus, and the fear just melted away. How amazing!
I was reminded of that old, gnawing fear today at our Easter service. We were singing the third verse of "Because He Lives," which goes like this: "And then one day I'll cross that river, I'll fight life's final war with pain. And then as death gives way to victory, I'll see the lights of glory and I'll know he lives."
And suddenly, I remembered. The nights lying alone in bed, distractions and defenses of the day reduced to nothing, desperately trying to avoid the thoughts--the times, in broad daylight, when something random would remind me of death and I'd struggle to find a different topic, to change the course of my mental ramblings. And never being able, ultimately, to escape.
From June 10, 1970 to this day I've never had another thought like those. I've thought of death, of course, particularly with the two brain tumors, and what it would do to my family, and I've even thought some long thoughts about what I might have to offer Christ, but not once have I ever worried about my own destiny. In fact, in the couple of years preceding my surgery in 1987, I had not one, but two dreams about death. And in both, with death a split-second away, I felt like a baby in a mother's arms. Again--amazing.
And as we sang, I started to cry.
Sometimes it's good to remember from where you've come.
Sunday, April 12, 2009
Sunday, April 5, 2009
April 5
Here's a devotional I wrote for an accountability group a few years ago.
THAT RASCAL IS HEAVY
Matthew 7:5--You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye.
Bless God, Jesus was not afraid to say what needed to be said.
Entirely apart from the comedic value of this statement, which still elicits a few chuckles, Jeus is saying three things we need to hear.
The first thing is simply this: we are sinners.
The second item is worse news yet: even if we admit to a few peccadillos, our sense of scale is badly distorted. We don't consider our sin any large matter. Now that other guy--his sin reeks!
Pardon me, says Jesus, but you've got that backwards. You're the hypocrite, pal. Not the other guy.
These two problems, grievous sin and our inability to name it as such, lead inevitably to a third problem: we're no earthly good to anyone else who struggles with sin.
Now see here, you might be thinking, I can help that other guy. With a two-by-four, I'll help him.
Actually, friend, the two-by-four is stuck in your eye.
And here I've got to get personal. Because, truth be told, it's not just stuck in your eye, it's stuck in mine too. And the one in my eye is the one I need to worry about.
You see, I've never been commissioned as someone else's personal Holy Spirit. That's hard for me to comprehend, but it's true.
Once I quit obsessing about someone else's sin, however, I'm free to start dealing with my own. And that's exactly what Jesus wants me to do; has, in fact, promised to help me do.
It is true that when I really engage my sin God's way, i.e., with a group of similar sinners, there may be a few times when God calls me to confront another person. But I must always do this in humility, and once the Holy Spirit has accomplished his task through me, I need to let the matter rest.
Because my own sin is still the big-ticket item.
But praise God, he's helping me to get a grip on that two by four.
Man, that rascal is heavy!
THAT RASCAL IS HEAVY
Matthew 7:5--You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye.
Bless God, Jesus was not afraid to say what needed to be said.
Entirely apart from the comedic value of this statement, which still elicits a few chuckles, Jeus is saying three things we need to hear.
The first thing is simply this: we are sinners.
The second item is worse news yet: even if we admit to a few peccadillos, our sense of scale is badly distorted. We don't consider our sin any large matter. Now that other guy--his sin reeks!
Pardon me, says Jesus, but you've got that backwards. You're the hypocrite, pal. Not the other guy.
These two problems, grievous sin and our inability to name it as such, lead inevitably to a third problem: we're no earthly good to anyone else who struggles with sin.
Now see here, you might be thinking, I can help that other guy. With a two-by-four, I'll help him.
Actually, friend, the two-by-four is stuck in your eye.
And here I've got to get personal. Because, truth be told, it's not just stuck in your eye, it's stuck in mine too. And the one in my eye is the one I need to worry about.
You see, I've never been commissioned as someone else's personal Holy Spirit. That's hard for me to comprehend, but it's true.
Once I quit obsessing about someone else's sin, however, I'm free to start dealing with my own. And that's exactly what Jesus wants me to do; has, in fact, promised to help me do.
It is true that when I really engage my sin God's way, i.e., with a group of similar sinners, there may be a few times when God calls me to confront another person. But I must always do this in humility, and once the Holy Spirit has accomplished his task through me, I need to let the matter rest.
Because my own sin is still the big-ticket item.
But praise God, he's helping me to get a grip on that two by four.
Man, that rascal is heavy!
Monday, March 23, 2009
March 23
I sent the March 16 blog post to the guys in an accountability group I attend. Afterward, a friend commented to me on the imagery of a bug splattered on a windshield locomotive. Well, it just seemed natural, given the large number of locomotives in the world and the even larger number of bugs.
I finished my third chemotherapy treatment six days ago. (I've got three more to go.) I've been pretty washed out since then, but hopefully things are turning around. This post may not be long, as I've got to go upstairs and catch a nap.
Paul Rudy's surgery, which I mentioned in the March 10 post, was successful in removing all the cancer. That is a huge blessing! But just a day before he underwent surgery, a family in his church with an eight-year old son named Jacob got very bad news. Jacob had been diagnosed more than a year earlier with a very aggressive cancer, neuroblastoma, but treatment had apparently gotten rid of it. However--recent tests showed it's come back. We need to pray for him and his family. His Mom and Dad are named Florita and Harry, and he has two younger siblings.
My church is beginning a small-group ministry in just a couple of weeks. I am heading a men's accountability group modeled on Ouija Sink's group at Redeemer Presbyterian in Winston-Salem. Ouija's group, called simply TMAG (Tuesday Men's Accountability Group) has worked tremendous progress in the lives of a number of men struggling with both heterosexual and homosexual sin. I was a charter member in July of 2003, and it has enabled me to get a handle on an addiction to heterosexual pornography and lust. I am praying very hard that we will be able to pass that blessing on to others in a new setting, while at the same time mourning the pending loss of some friendships I hold very dear.
Time to sign off. See you later!
I finished my third chemotherapy treatment six days ago. (I've got three more to go.) I've been pretty washed out since then, but hopefully things are turning around. This post may not be long, as I've got to go upstairs and catch a nap.
Paul Rudy's surgery, which I mentioned in the March 10 post, was successful in removing all the cancer. That is a huge blessing! But just a day before he underwent surgery, a family in his church with an eight-year old son named Jacob got very bad news. Jacob had been diagnosed more than a year earlier with a very aggressive cancer, neuroblastoma, but treatment had apparently gotten rid of it. However--recent tests showed it's come back. We need to pray for him and his family. His Mom and Dad are named Florita and Harry, and he has two younger siblings.
My church is beginning a small-group ministry in just a couple of weeks. I am heading a men's accountability group modeled on Ouija Sink's group at Redeemer Presbyterian in Winston-Salem. Ouija's group, called simply TMAG (Tuesday Men's Accountability Group) has worked tremendous progress in the lives of a number of men struggling with both heterosexual and homosexual sin. I was a charter member in July of 2003, and it has enabled me to get a handle on an addiction to heterosexual pornography and lust. I am praying very hard that we will be able to pass that blessing on to others in a new setting, while at the same time mourning the pending loss of some friendships I hold very dear.
Time to sign off. See you later!
Monday, March 16, 2009
March 16
Okay, that's more like it. Six days from the last post. If you recall, I gave myself permission to write. Now I'm using it.
Two updates. Rhonda Dering, whom many of you know, went home last week. Sometimes I am conflicted about how to pray, but in her case, it became obvious that God was not going to prolong her time on earth. And so I prayed that she would have grace to cross the river. God answered that prayer, and today she is with Jesus, seeing unimaginable sights. Her funeral is Saturday, March 21.
The other update has to do with my brother-in-law, Paul Rudy, a minister in southeastern Wisconsin. I and a lot of other people prayed very hard for him during his surgery last Friday, and it appears God has given us the answer we were looking for, though we won't know for sure until the pathology reports come back this week. He was full of quips afterwards. When my sister told him they had to take part of his colon along with everything else, he said "Well, now I've got a semi-colon."
One more update. It does look as though God is working out the schedule change conundrum I referred to last week, where I was getting shortchanged by not being able to take a nap in the morning. Last week I really did do better on getting by with, say, nine hours sleep at night and no naps. It is problematical, though, when you have to pee four times a night, which I do, because if your mind runs off on some tangent when you lie back down, you might not go back to sleep. That actually happened, Friday night, costing me at least four hours sleep, and impacting me right into Sunday. (It was a little embarrassing to have to tell my pastor that I fell asleep during his sermon and could he please repeat the main points, but retrieving one of his sermons is worth some embarrassment.)
Now for a little more from the quiet time "research lab." As you might remember, a few months ago on this blog I posted a devotional I had written about quiet times in which I suggested we stop having them. Actually, I suggested we stop having them just to show off. I didn't really mean we shouldn't have quiet time. After all, God's children need to grow, and you won't grow if you don't eat.
But even if we are committed to "doing" time with God for the right reasons, as I mentioned last week, it's still very easy to slip back into the wrong motivation. That is part of our struggle as humans. Satan is always sliding that noxious vapor of self-righteousness under our bedroom door, and we need the gas mask of the gospel to filter out his poison.
But the more you humbly and conscientiously persist at quiet time, the more things begin to change. God slowly but consistently forms your character with every step you take in the right direction, and eventually you find yourself playing in a higher league. You move closer to the place where you actually enjoy getting out of bed because you know whom you'll find when you do get your lazy bones moving--none other than God himself.
In my case, when I first consciously dedicated myself to quiet time, I would begin by dressing, then going downstairs and doing a couple of little things that really needed doing, i.e., feeding the dogs and changing the cat litter box. Then I would sit down and read my Bible. But by that point, to use Will Rogers' memorable phrase, the "new had already gotten rubbed off" the day, and though I still could get caught up in the Biblical narrative, by the time I got around to praying, things were getting a little arid.
So now I simply drop to my knees the minute I get out of bed. I've got a prayer list I keep on my bedstand, and moving that the two feet to my bed is all I've got to do to start. After fifteen minutes of praying, it's time to do the chores, quickly; and then I read. That's my routine, anyway. I'm sure yours might be different.
All this, by the way, from a man who is definitely not a morning person. But I do quiet time first thing in the morning for one simple reason--my mind is still uncluttered. The minute you eat breakfast and start thinking about what you have to do next, the day roars into your brain like a mile-long Union Pacific freight train. And then, of course, any hope of having quiet time is splattered like a dead bug all over the windshield of the locomotive.
So there you have it--our weekly "Quiet Time Research Lab 101." Let me know if you've got some research you'd like to share with me. Have a good week!
Two updates. Rhonda Dering, whom many of you know, went home last week. Sometimes I am conflicted about how to pray, but in her case, it became obvious that God was not going to prolong her time on earth. And so I prayed that she would have grace to cross the river. God answered that prayer, and today she is with Jesus, seeing unimaginable sights. Her funeral is Saturday, March 21.
The other update has to do with my brother-in-law, Paul Rudy, a minister in southeastern Wisconsin. I and a lot of other people prayed very hard for him during his surgery last Friday, and it appears God has given us the answer we were looking for, though we won't know for sure until the pathology reports come back this week. He was full of quips afterwards. When my sister told him they had to take part of his colon along with everything else, he said "Well, now I've got a semi-colon."
One more update. It does look as though God is working out the schedule change conundrum I referred to last week, where I was getting shortchanged by not being able to take a nap in the morning. Last week I really did do better on getting by with, say, nine hours sleep at night and no naps. It is problematical, though, when you have to pee four times a night, which I do, because if your mind runs off on some tangent when you lie back down, you might not go back to sleep. That actually happened, Friday night, costing me at least four hours sleep, and impacting me right into Sunday. (It was a little embarrassing to have to tell my pastor that I fell asleep during his sermon and could he please repeat the main points, but retrieving one of his sermons is worth some embarrassment.)
Now for a little more from the quiet time "research lab." As you might remember, a few months ago on this blog I posted a devotional I had written about quiet times in which I suggested we stop having them. Actually, I suggested we stop having them just to show off. I didn't really mean we shouldn't have quiet time. After all, God's children need to grow, and you won't grow if you don't eat.
But even if we are committed to "doing" time with God for the right reasons, as I mentioned last week, it's still very easy to slip back into the wrong motivation. That is part of our struggle as humans. Satan is always sliding that noxious vapor of self-righteousness under our bedroom door, and we need the gas mask of the gospel to filter out his poison.
But the more you humbly and conscientiously persist at quiet time, the more things begin to change. God slowly but consistently forms your character with every step you take in the right direction, and eventually you find yourself playing in a higher league. You move closer to the place where you actually enjoy getting out of bed because you know whom you'll find when you do get your lazy bones moving--none other than God himself.
In my case, when I first consciously dedicated myself to quiet time, I would begin by dressing, then going downstairs and doing a couple of little things that really needed doing, i.e., feeding the dogs and changing the cat litter box. Then I would sit down and read my Bible. But by that point, to use Will Rogers' memorable phrase, the "new had already gotten rubbed off" the day, and though I still could get caught up in the Biblical narrative, by the time I got around to praying, things were getting a little arid.
So now I simply drop to my knees the minute I get out of bed. I've got a prayer list I keep on my bedstand, and moving that the two feet to my bed is all I've got to do to start. After fifteen minutes of praying, it's time to do the chores, quickly; and then I read. That's my routine, anyway. I'm sure yours might be different.
All this, by the way, from a man who is definitely not a morning person. But I do quiet time first thing in the morning for one simple reason--my mind is still uncluttered. The minute you eat breakfast and start thinking about what you have to do next, the day roars into your brain like a mile-long Union Pacific freight train. And then, of course, any hope of having quiet time is splattered like a dead bug all over the windshield of the locomotive.
So there you have it--our weekly "Quiet Time Research Lab 101." Let me know if you've got some research you'd like to share with me. Have a good week!
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
March 10
February 17 to March 10--I've really got to get with the program. I keep thinking about all these other things I've got to do--that's a recipe for disaster. I am covenanting with myself and with God, right now, to write more often. Writing is one of my gifts, part of my mission in life. So I give myself permission to do it.
I have been having my quiet times and have been learning many things, among them how easy it is to be with the program and yet not with it. That is to say, to have your mouth and your body in the right place but for your heart to be somewhere far away. That can happen without even knowing it.
But the lesson of the Scripture I've been reading is that even when your heart is in the wrong place, God is still faithful. I've been reading about Abraham, the father of the faithful, and it strikes me that there were times his heart was definitely not in the right place, times where his heart was depressed and fearful and weak and foolish and totally out of joint. And yet God worked in his life, and not only in his life but in the life of every believer since then. God has his purposes and he will accomplish them, no matter how weak and sinful the vessels he is using.
I was lying in bed this morning struggling with many things, and it occurred to me the only answer is to believe--that God is alive and is working and will accomplish what he wants to accomplish in my life. And so I made a conscious commitment to believe that. (And I got out of bed.!)
As regards the medical situation, the five hours of light duty continue, but at a different venue and at different hours. I've moved from Archdale back to High Point, and my hours have changed from morning to afternoon. On a morning schedule, I could come home and nap in the afternoon. An afternoon schedule, however, is more challenging, since when I get home, at six, it is too late to nap. And when I do get home, Alison often has homework she needs help with, and I am generally too tired to be of much use. I am still looking for a way around this conundrum, but I know God has one.
I am getting ready to start my third month's worth of chemotherapy--one week a month, from January till June, is the schedule. I still fatigue easily. I got up yesterday at 7:30, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and was out of gas by 12:45. That's typical, which makes me wonder when I will ever be able to work fulltime. At the rate I'm using it, I run out of sick leave near the end of April. I do have a bunch of annual leave, but I don't really want to use that.
But those are all questions God can deal with. He has not let me down yet, and I don't expect him to do it anytime soon.
I hope you will excuse me--I just got back from watching the north-bound Cotton Grove local on the Winston-Salem Southbound Railroad, which runs about two hundred yards from my house. This economy has really affected traffic, but they still need an engine to pull the thing, and locomotives have always fascinated me. This one was an SD 60, which packs 3600 horsepower. Quite a bit more than was needed for seven cars, I might add.
One last item--please pray for my brother-in-law, Paul Rudy, a loving minister of the gospel in SE Wisconsin. He is having surgery on Friday to remove a tumor that is growing in four different internal organs, including his stomach, and if this surgery does not work he won't live long. He has a wife (my sister) and three daughters, college-aged to junior high. The surgery starts at 9:30 EDT.
You know what I'll be doing then!
I have been having my quiet times and have been learning many things, among them how easy it is to be with the program and yet not with it. That is to say, to have your mouth and your body in the right place but for your heart to be somewhere far away. That can happen without even knowing it.
But the lesson of the Scripture I've been reading is that even when your heart is in the wrong place, God is still faithful. I've been reading about Abraham, the father of the faithful, and it strikes me that there were times his heart was definitely not in the right place, times where his heart was depressed and fearful and weak and foolish and totally out of joint. And yet God worked in his life, and not only in his life but in the life of every believer since then. God has his purposes and he will accomplish them, no matter how weak and sinful the vessels he is using.
I was lying in bed this morning struggling with many things, and it occurred to me the only answer is to believe--that God is alive and is working and will accomplish what he wants to accomplish in my life. And so I made a conscious commitment to believe that. (And I got out of bed.!)
As regards the medical situation, the five hours of light duty continue, but at a different venue and at different hours. I've moved from Archdale back to High Point, and my hours have changed from morning to afternoon. On a morning schedule, I could come home and nap in the afternoon. An afternoon schedule, however, is more challenging, since when I get home, at six, it is too late to nap. And when I do get home, Alison often has homework she needs help with, and I am generally too tired to be of much use. I am still looking for a way around this conundrum, but I know God has one.
I am getting ready to start my third month's worth of chemotherapy--one week a month, from January till June, is the schedule. I still fatigue easily. I got up yesterday at 7:30, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and was out of gas by 12:45. That's typical, which makes me wonder when I will ever be able to work fulltime. At the rate I'm using it, I run out of sick leave near the end of April. I do have a bunch of annual leave, but I don't really want to use that.
But those are all questions God can deal with. He has not let me down yet, and I don't expect him to do it anytime soon.
I hope you will excuse me--I just got back from watching the north-bound Cotton Grove local on the Winston-Salem Southbound Railroad, which runs about two hundred yards from my house. This economy has really affected traffic, but they still need an engine to pull the thing, and locomotives have always fascinated me. This one was an SD 60, which packs 3600 horsepower. Quite a bit more than was needed for seven cars, I might add.
One last item--please pray for my brother-in-law, Paul Rudy, a loving minister of the gospel in SE Wisconsin. He is having surgery on Friday to remove a tumor that is growing in four different internal organs, including his stomach, and if this surgery does not work he won't live long. He has a wife (my sister) and three daughters, college-aged to junior high. The surgery starts at 9:30 EDT.
You know what I'll be doing then!
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
February 17
I may be wrong, but I could almost swear I heard a demon open my bedroom door, just before 10 PM last night, and whisper the following: "Yoo-hoo, Mr. 'captivating, lovely discipline of drawing near to God,' have we got a surprise for you. " And then the hourly beep of my watch on the bedstand, catapulting me into a waking condition that lasted for three hours.
At least, I think the demons were behind that beep. Or maybe I just forgot to shut off the hourly alarm feature. Anyhoo. Same difference.
Needless to say, my time with God this morning was neither captivating nor lovely. But that's the way it goes.
Take it from someone who's been around the block a couple of times, life has its up's and life has its down's. We live in a broken universe that, according to Romans 8:21, will only be healed when it is brought into the freedom of the glory of God's children. (By the way, there will be no insomnia in that universe.)
Meanwhile, believers experience tragic situations that will never change, no matter how much they pray for relief, and other situations that will change, but oh, so slowly, and only with overwhelming amounts of pain. I think of my friend Robert Dawkins. God never promised anything different.
But he did promise that he will be with us through the situation. And that he will be enough. And that, both here and on the other side, the pain will ultimately bring great glory to God and profound joy to us.
Here are the lyrics to one of my favorite songs, entitled simply "Through."
When I saw what lay before me
"Lord," I cried, "What will you do?"
I thought he would just remove it,
But he gently led me through.
Without fire, there's no refining,
Without pain, no relief.
Without flood, there's no rescue,
Without testing, no belief.
Through the fire, through the flood,
Through the water, through the blood,
Through the dry and barren places,
Through life's dense and maddening mazes,
Through the pain and through the glory,
Through will always tell the story
Of a God whose power and mercy
Will not fail to take us through.
At least, I think the demons were behind that beep. Or maybe I just forgot to shut off the hourly alarm feature. Anyhoo. Same difference.
Needless to say, my time with God this morning was neither captivating nor lovely. But that's the way it goes.
Take it from someone who's been around the block a couple of times, life has its up's and life has its down's. We live in a broken universe that, according to Romans 8:21, will only be healed when it is brought into the freedom of the glory of God's children. (By the way, there will be no insomnia in that universe.)
Meanwhile, believers experience tragic situations that will never change, no matter how much they pray for relief, and other situations that will change, but oh, so slowly, and only with overwhelming amounts of pain. I think of my friend Robert Dawkins. God never promised anything different.
But he did promise that he will be with us through the situation. And that he will be enough. And that, both here and on the other side, the pain will ultimately bring great glory to God and profound joy to us.
Here are the lyrics to one of my favorite songs, entitled simply "Through."
When I saw what lay before me
"Lord," I cried, "What will you do?"
I thought he would just remove it,
But he gently led me through.
Without fire, there's no refining,
Without pain, no relief.
Without flood, there's no rescue,
Without testing, no belief.
Through the fire, through the flood,
Through the water, through the blood,
Through the dry and barren places,
Through life's dense and maddening mazes,
Through the pain and through the glory,
Through will always tell the story
Of a God whose power and mercy
Will not fail to take us through.
Sunday, February 15, 2009
February 15
Two weeks and a day have passed since my last post, and I am here to report that I am presently working the five hour per day light-duty assignment, a custodian's job in Archdale, and will continue to do this for a month or more until I am ready to come back to carrying mail. I putter around, here and there, all at my own sweet pace. God is so very good!
I was sharing with my pastor today that, prior to my surgery, several groups of people had prayed for divine healing of the tumor. I believed with all my heart that this was a possibility, and even asked for one more MRI in case it had happened. It had not, however, and I proceeded with the surgery.
If it had happened, I would have missed one of the great blessings of my life. This whole process has brought me much closer to Jesus and has begun to warm my heart in a way I had longed for but never really thought possible. More specifically, I have been able to spend more time with Jesus and to grow, albeit so slowly, in the captivating, lovely discipline of drawing near to God. I had known beforehand what it meant to be warmed and nurtured by the Word of God, to crawl up on Jesus' lap, so to speak, and pour my heart out, to listen for his voice to me, but these times were much more irregular than they should have been. It occurred to me after the surgery that the time God was giving me was a great gift, and so I began to spend regular periods in the evening reading my Bible and then praying--either lying on my back beside my bed or just kneeling. Sometimes my mind would wander, but I saw a growth in my ability to call it back.
Somewhere along the line, I asked specifically to be able to pray passionately, and, praise God, that is happening more frequently.
And one more thing. I have begun, oh so slowly, to comprehend the amazing love of the triune God for Chuck Eggerth. There was a time when I did not really think I could comprehend it. Now I'm thinking differently--now I believe he wants me to know and experience and live in that tender, overwhelming love.
The challenge now is to transfer the evening time to the morning, which will involve getting up earlier. I'm not sure I'm up to it, but I'm going to try.
Sheldon Van Auken wrote a book entitled "A Severe Mercy." In it he recounts the death of his beloved wife and all the beauty that terrible, terrible grief ultimately worked into his life. My situation is not tragic like his, but the beauty is similar, and it has stirred my soul.
By the way, you don't need a brain tumor to experience this.
But that's what it took for me!
I was sharing with my pastor today that, prior to my surgery, several groups of people had prayed for divine healing of the tumor. I believed with all my heart that this was a possibility, and even asked for one more MRI in case it had happened. It had not, however, and I proceeded with the surgery.
If it had happened, I would have missed one of the great blessings of my life. This whole process has brought me much closer to Jesus and has begun to warm my heart in a way I had longed for but never really thought possible. More specifically, I have been able to spend more time with Jesus and to grow, albeit so slowly, in the captivating, lovely discipline of drawing near to God. I had known beforehand what it meant to be warmed and nurtured by the Word of God, to crawl up on Jesus' lap, so to speak, and pour my heart out, to listen for his voice to me, but these times were much more irregular than they should have been. It occurred to me after the surgery that the time God was giving me was a great gift, and so I began to spend regular periods in the evening reading my Bible and then praying--either lying on my back beside my bed or just kneeling. Sometimes my mind would wander, but I saw a growth in my ability to call it back.
Somewhere along the line, I asked specifically to be able to pray passionately, and, praise God, that is happening more frequently.
And one more thing. I have begun, oh so slowly, to comprehend the amazing love of the triune God for Chuck Eggerth. There was a time when I did not really think I could comprehend it. Now I'm thinking differently--now I believe he wants me to know and experience and live in that tender, overwhelming love.
The challenge now is to transfer the evening time to the morning, which will involve getting up earlier. I'm not sure I'm up to it, but I'm going to try.
Sheldon Van Auken wrote a book entitled "A Severe Mercy." In it he recounts the death of his beloved wife and all the beauty that terrible, terrible grief ultimately worked into his life. My situation is not tragic like his, but the beauty is similar, and it has stirred my soul.
By the way, you don't need a brain tumor to experience this.
But that's what it took for me!
Saturday, January 31, 2009
January 31, 2009
It's been awhile (a long while) since I posted, but something new has happened. I had an incident at work Monday where I nearly fainted and had to be driven home from work. Actually, I had bloodwork scheduled for that afternoon at Baptist Hospital, so my driver graciously took me there, a trifle early, before taking me home.
While I was there I ran into Sherri and Charles (I called him "Edward") Willard, from waiting room days several months ago. Please keep praying for them. Sometimes Charles has very long, uncommunicative days because of his situation, and that is hard on Sherri.
I was thinking the reaction was due to my first round of post-radiation chemo, which I completed on the 18th of January, but Ed Shaw said the bloodwork was normal. I had an MRI scheduled for the 9th of February, which he moved up to this past Wednesday evening. I called him about that last night, and he told me that everything on the MRI was hunky-dory, or better. I couldn't ask for more than that.
Which leaves as our lone culprit the little item of stress, which can pile up when you are working a different route every day and splitting it four or five different ways and when the post office does not take into account the travel time needed for all the subs to travel from their routes to the part of my route they're carrying. (These are at least partially excuses, which I will critique later.) But the Post Office has been very gracious and has offered me a light duty position as a custodian until I get back on my feet.
I have another appointment with Ed this Tuesday, February 2, and Priscilla and I will ask him some questions about further treatment, as well as determine when I might go back to work.
I think ultimately all of our maladies are worship disorders, either our own or perhaps traceable all the way back to Adam and Eve, but I certainly have had time to reflect on some of mine. I am sure that at work, much of the stress lay in my inability to worship God in the circumstances rather than trusting in my own strength for the task. Since I've been home, I've noticed some others, like watching TV basketball. I turned on the Wake game today with 6 minutes to go and watched them lose, which disappointed me greatly until I remembered who made the players and the gymnasium and the ball and the uniforms and everything else I was watching. At that point, I had to repent and beg forgiveness for misplaced worship. God, of course, who is gracious above all things, willingly granted.
I've had a chance to do some reading this week from three books: "What I Think I Did," by Larry Woiwode; "Amish Grace," by three different authors, none of whose names I recall immediately, and "End of America," by Naomi Wolf, sent to me by my sister Shelley Tea in Seattle. The one that grabbed me first was "Amish Grace," a book detailing the reaction of an Old Order Amish community in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, to the murder/wounding of ten young female students in a school in southern Lancaster County. (The killer also killed himself in the process.) This community takes seriously Christ's command to forgive, and they went to work right away, walking the few miles, if necessary, to the homes of the killer's wife and parents to offer condolences for their pain and loss.
The work was not that easily completed, most notably for the relatives of the girls who were attacked, and the writers point out that the Amish will be constantly needing to reforgive. But as daunting as this task was, it is still relatively easy compared to the often laborious work of forgiving fellow Amish within their church districts, a work complicated by the fact that the "culprits" have the nasty habit of continuing to live. This book probed the whole Amish process and culture of forgiveness, editorial reaction to the forgiveness, and many serious questions about the whole forgiveness/pardon/reconciliation process. And it offered an overview on the entire Amish community that would be well worth the time to read, particularly since the book is only 203 pages long .
The Woiwode book is subtitled "A Season of Survival in Two Acts," and revolves around an extremely cold winter in southwestern North Dakota and various glimpses into Woiwode's past. There is an absolutely amazing intermission section in which Woiwode talks about the influence of nature on his outlook, particularly as it relates to English poet W.H. Auden's statement that "time...worships language" and Christ as the ultimate language/revelation of God the Father, in nature and in other ways. (The Gospel of John refers to Christ as the "logos," or "word" of God.)
I've got to leave you with one quote from the book. "I feel a pressure behind and turn and there are the cottonwoods and the willows at the far end of the street, along the edge of the lake, flying the maidenhair faces of their leaves into the wind, and beyond their crowns of trembling insubstantiality, across the lake dotted with cottonwood pollen, the blue and azure plain abuts against the horizon at infinity." In this all he sees Christ.
The Naomi Wolf book has two subtitles, "Letters of Warning to a Young Patriot" and "A Citizen's Call to Action." I've read thirty-five pages so far. Wolf's thesis is that Fascist states follow the same predicatable pathway to repression, and that the Bush/Cheney administration has started us down this pathway. I am not on the same ideological page as Naomi Wolf, but Shelley has asked me to read it with an open mind and I am doing that. I did check out one internet clip where she says she would oppose Obama if he attempted to use the powers that Bush had arrogated to himself. That is certainly admirable.
I have meandered on long enough, so let me bid you all adieu. Will keep you posted, hopefully more often.
While I was there I ran into Sherri and Charles (I called him "Edward") Willard, from waiting room days several months ago. Please keep praying for them. Sometimes Charles has very long, uncommunicative days because of his situation, and that is hard on Sherri.
I was thinking the reaction was due to my first round of post-radiation chemo, which I completed on the 18th of January, but Ed Shaw said the bloodwork was normal. I had an MRI scheduled for the 9th of February, which he moved up to this past Wednesday evening. I called him about that last night, and he told me that everything on the MRI was hunky-dory, or better. I couldn't ask for more than that.
Which leaves as our lone culprit the little item of stress, which can pile up when you are working a different route every day and splitting it four or five different ways and when the post office does not take into account the travel time needed for all the subs to travel from their routes to the part of my route they're carrying. (These are at least partially excuses, which I will critique later.) But the Post Office has been very gracious and has offered me a light duty position as a custodian until I get back on my feet.
I have another appointment with Ed this Tuesday, February 2, and Priscilla and I will ask him some questions about further treatment, as well as determine when I might go back to work.
I think ultimately all of our maladies are worship disorders, either our own or perhaps traceable all the way back to Adam and Eve, but I certainly have had time to reflect on some of mine. I am sure that at work, much of the stress lay in my inability to worship God in the circumstances rather than trusting in my own strength for the task. Since I've been home, I've noticed some others, like watching TV basketball. I turned on the Wake game today with 6 minutes to go and watched them lose, which disappointed me greatly until I remembered who made the players and the gymnasium and the ball and the uniforms and everything else I was watching. At that point, I had to repent and beg forgiveness for misplaced worship. God, of course, who is gracious above all things, willingly granted.
I've had a chance to do some reading this week from three books: "What I Think I Did," by Larry Woiwode; "Amish Grace," by three different authors, none of whose names I recall immediately, and "End of America," by Naomi Wolf, sent to me by my sister Shelley Tea in Seattle. The one that grabbed me first was "Amish Grace," a book detailing the reaction of an Old Order Amish community in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, to the murder/wounding of ten young female students in a school in southern Lancaster County. (The killer also killed himself in the process.) This community takes seriously Christ's command to forgive, and they went to work right away, walking the few miles, if necessary, to the homes of the killer's wife and parents to offer condolences for their pain and loss.
The work was not that easily completed, most notably for the relatives of the girls who were attacked, and the writers point out that the Amish will be constantly needing to reforgive. But as daunting as this task was, it is still relatively easy compared to the often laborious work of forgiving fellow Amish within their church districts, a work complicated by the fact that the "culprits" have the nasty habit of continuing to live. This book probed the whole Amish process and culture of forgiveness, editorial reaction to the forgiveness, and many serious questions about the whole forgiveness/pardon/reconciliation process. And it offered an overview on the entire Amish community that would be well worth the time to read, particularly since the book is only 203 pages long .
The Woiwode book is subtitled "A Season of Survival in Two Acts," and revolves around an extremely cold winter in southwestern North Dakota and various glimpses into Woiwode's past. There is an absolutely amazing intermission section in which Woiwode talks about the influence of nature on his outlook, particularly as it relates to English poet W.H. Auden's statement that "time...worships language" and Christ as the ultimate language/revelation of God the Father, in nature and in other ways. (The Gospel of John refers to Christ as the "logos," or "word" of God.)
I've got to leave you with one quote from the book. "I feel a pressure behind and turn and there are the cottonwoods and the willows at the far end of the street, along the edge of the lake, flying the maidenhair faces of their leaves into the wind, and beyond their crowns of trembling insubstantiality, across the lake dotted with cottonwood pollen, the blue and azure plain abuts against the horizon at infinity." In this all he sees Christ.
The Naomi Wolf book has two subtitles, "Letters of Warning to a Young Patriot" and "A Citizen's Call to Action." I've read thirty-five pages so far. Wolf's thesis is that Fascist states follow the same predicatable pathway to repression, and that the Bush/Cheney administration has started us down this pathway. I am not on the same ideological page as Naomi Wolf, but Shelley has asked me to read it with an open mind and I am doing that. I did check out one internet clip where she says she would oppose Obama if he attempted to use the powers that Bush had arrogated to himself. That is certainly admirable.
I have meandered on long enough, so let me bid you all adieu. Will keep you posted, hopefully more often.
Thursday, January 8, 2009
Jan. 8--Devotional
Folks, this is from a pile of devotionals I wrote a couple years ago for our men's accountability group.
GOSPEL FAITH
Habakkuk 2:4--...the righteous will live by his faith...
Hebrews 10:10 tells us we are made holy by the will of God.
This is foundational. If God hadn't chosen you to be holy, you probably woudn't be reading this, and you certainly wouldn't be comprehending it.
But let me tell you something else. He did not will your holiness in such a way as to render your own will superfluous.
At this point, I need to issue a warning. People have, quite literally, gone straight to hell trying to figure out how God's will and their own will could exist in the same universe.
When they got to hell, they may have arrived at a conclusion. Who knows. But don't bother going there to find out. Just believe they both exist and go from there.
Which is not to say that a few statements can't be made about the situation.
We observe, first of all, that our will exists because God willed it to exist. And we observe, secondly, that God has willed for our will to operate on faith--a faith that he has created, birthed in us, and is now nurturing to fruition. And--we observe that we genuinely have to choose to accept that faith.
In fact, the cardinal truth of sanctification is that the just live by their faith. Habakkuk's statement gets plenty of press in the New Testament.
This is not a life experience for most of us. Most children of God live as if they get into the kingdom by faith and then paddle upstream from there. And we've all tried it. We all keep trying it, from time to time.
But the Bible says we live by faith; that is, our actions derive from the unassailable fact that the Father loves us and has clothed us in the righteousness of Christ.
Let me give you a scenario.
Your boat has hit some rough water. As a matter of fact, it is being tossed thirty and forty feet into the air by waves you had no idea lurked on the little lake of your life. You are in pain; some situation or relationship is lacerating you; a bloody, throbbing wound in your soul is begging for novocaine.
And then you see it--the way out--the anesthetic--the one you've used so many times before, your favorite; the one that works! And you can have it--no-one will know--it's yours for the taking. And the devil fool with the consequences.
(He will, by the way.)
Friends, this is when you need faith--that God loves you, that you are whole, that no Bondo is needed on the car body of your life.
But this is also exactly where faith is hardest to find. Because all this pain that's tearing out your intestines is about some perceived deficiency in your life or soul, and gospel faith, of course, tells you that your soul is as safe and healthy in the arms of Jesus as a nursing baby. But you can't see this. The two strands of your life, actual and experiential, have diverged, and you're like a kid on roller skates with one leg careening south and the other racing insanely north.
And you might lose this battle. Because faith is better applied steering you away from the city the bordello's in than dragging you out the front door of the durned thing.
If you do lose, make up your mind to go back to faith. Remember who died to forgive you. Practice James 5:16. Figure out who you can call to keep you in the right city, or to go through the wrong one with you if that's where the path really leads.
And then again, you might not lose. Because faith, like a muscle, gets stronger every time you exercise it. And if Satan does manage to get you into a bad place, the child of God who's been around the block a few times remembers how much that last soul hit cost him.
And he remembers something else.
Gospel faith means you don't need painkillers.
GOSPEL FAITH
Habakkuk 2:4--...the righteous will live by his faith...
Hebrews 10:10 tells us we are made holy by the will of God.
This is foundational. If God hadn't chosen you to be holy, you probably woudn't be reading this, and you certainly wouldn't be comprehending it.
But let me tell you something else. He did not will your holiness in such a way as to render your own will superfluous.
At this point, I need to issue a warning. People have, quite literally, gone straight to hell trying to figure out how God's will and their own will could exist in the same universe.
When they got to hell, they may have arrived at a conclusion. Who knows. But don't bother going there to find out. Just believe they both exist and go from there.
Which is not to say that a few statements can't be made about the situation.
We observe, first of all, that our will exists because God willed it to exist. And we observe, secondly, that God has willed for our will to operate on faith--a faith that he has created, birthed in us, and is now nurturing to fruition. And--we observe that we genuinely have to choose to accept that faith.
In fact, the cardinal truth of sanctification is that the just live by their faith. Habakkuk's statement gets plenty of press in the New Testament.
This is not a life experience for most of us. Most children of God live as if they get into the kingdom by faith and then paddle upstream from there. And we've all tried it. We all keep trying it, from time to time.
But the Bible says we live by faith; that is, our actions derive from the unassailable fact that the Father loves us and has clothed us in the righteousness of Christ.
Let me give you a scenario.
Your boat has hit some rough water. As a matter of fact, it is being tossed thirty and forty feet into the air by waves you had no idea lurked on the little lake of your life. You are in pain; some situation or relationship is lacerating you; a bloody, throbbing wound in your soul is begging for novocaine.
And then you see it--the way out--the anesthetic--the one you've used so many times before, your favorite; the one that works! And you can have it--no-one will know--it's yours for the taking. And the devil fool with the consequences.
(He will, by the way.)
Friends, this is when you need faith--that God loves you, that you are whole, that no Bondo is needed on the car body of your life.
But this is also exactly where faith is hardest to find. Because all this pain that's tearing out your intestines is about some perceived deficiency in your life or soul, and gospel faith, of course, tells you that your soul is as safe and healthy in the arms of Jesus as a nursing baby. But you can't see this. The two strands of your life, actual and experiential, have diverged, and you're like a kid on roller skates with one leg careening south and the other racing insanely north.
And you might lose this battle. Because faith is better applied steering you away from the city the bordello's in than dragging you out the front door of the durned thing.
If you do lose, make up your mind to go back to faith. Remember who died to forgive you. Practice James 5:16. Figure out who you can call to keep you in the right city, or to go through the wrong one with you if that's where the path really leads.
And then again, you might not lose. Because faith, like a muscle, gets stronger every time you exercise it. And if Satan does manage to get you into a bad place, the child of God who's been around the block a few times remembers how much that last soul hit cost him.
And he remembers something else.
Gospel faith means you don't need painkillers.
Monday, January 5, 2009
1-5-09; Back to Work
Before I start in on the back to work section, let me tell you about the two preceding days. On Saturday, the 3rd, I had my heart set on cleaning out my garage. Alison had her heart set on going ice-skating at the Coliseum Annex. Priscilla (my wife) managed to talk some sense into my head, and the garage is still waiting to be cleaned. I can clean it when Alison goes off to college, if worst comes to worst, but time with one's daughter is simply not something to pass up. We had a wonderful afternoon and evening, and I am very thankful that Priscilla spoke up.
Yesterday, the 4th, we had an amazing adult Bible study from a John Piper book. The teacher ran off copies of one of the chapters, entitled "Faith in Future Grace vs. Anxiety." (Maybe now you know the title of the book, which eludes me.) John Piper related that when he was in high school he had a monstrous fear of public speaking, what he called a "horrible and humiliating disability." This was more than a little stage fright, believe me. He and his mother struggled mightily in prayer, but no breakthroughs came. Finally, John went off to Wheaton College. He knew that in order to graduate, he would have to speak in public.
The first chance came in a Spanish class. Each student was required to give a three-minute speech in Spanish. John memorized his, to eliminate the possibility of losing his place and lapsing into a "paralyzing pause," and he also stood behind a very large lectern which he could hold onto to conceal his shaking. He was obviously frightened. But somehow, he made it through.
A second opportunity came when the school chaplain asked him to lead prayer in chapel. Again terrified, John said "yes" anyway, and once more received grace. From that moment, he vowed never to turn down a speaking engagement because of fear. The rest, of course, is history.
Piper's application was simply that anxiety is lack of faith and often leads to other sins. He said that if you were driving a race car (analagous to our race of life) and someone threw mud onto your windshield, you would turn on the wipers and the windshield washer. He compares the wipers to the Word of God and the washers to the Holy Spirit. He then went on to exposit Matthew 6:25-34, where on four different occasions we are told not to be anxious.
When I went to bed that night, knowing I'd be going back to work in the morning, albeit parttime, I picked up the copy of the article, reread the Scripture passage, and prayed for the Holy Spirit to come. Nothing happened. The harder I struggled, the more fear made a fool out of me. (I know this sounds crazy, but believe me, it happened.) Finally, in desperation, I said simply "Father, I want your name to be glorified."
And then it hit me. That was exactly the same thing Jesus said in John 12:28, a passage my pastor had spoken about that morning. Jesus there was struggling with much more than I was--the huge weight of the cross loomed before him. My struggle was small by comparison, but still very real.
And it occurred to me--there was no way the old Chuck Eggerth could have produced that thought. It obviously came from the Spirit of Christ inside me. Suddenly I realized I had resources to deal with the situation.
Then another image came to me, a picture of myself at the post office with Jesus shining inside me, a light so bright people would have to know who it was . My struggle to that point had been selfish, wondering how I would look to folks who knew the Chuck Eggerth from four months ago. Now I had a reason to go back to work that didn't involve my ego. And the fears left me. I was able to relax and go to sleep.
And when I got up, I went to work. I had a couple of panicky moments, where it oppeared to me that the carriers who were assigned to finish what I didn't carry would be standing around waiting for me to get the mail ready, but I made up my mind to go one step at a time. It worked out, and I was able to finish my job.
Yesterday, the 4th, we had an amazing adult Bible study from a John Piper book. The teacher ran off copies of one of the chapters, entitled "Faith in Future Grace vs. Anxiety." (Maybe now you know the title of the book, which eludes me.) John Piper related that when he was in high school he had a monstrous fear of public speaking, what he called a "horrible and humiliating disability." This was more than a little stage fright, believe me. He and his mother struggled mightily in prayer, but no breakthroughs came. Finally, John went off to Wheaton College. He knew that in order to graduate, he would have to speak in public.
The first chance came in a Spanish class. Each student was required to give a three-minute speech in Spanish. John memorized his, to eliminate the possibility of losing his place and lapsing into a "paralyzing pause," and he also stood behind a very large lectern which he could hold onto to conceal his shaking. He was obviously frightened. But somehow, he made it through.
A second opportunity came when the school chaplain asked him to lead prayer in chapel. Again terrified, John said "yes" anyway, and once more received grace. From that moment, he vowed never to turn down a speaking engagement because of fear. The rest, of course, is history.
Piper's application was simply that anxiety is lack of faith and often leads to other sins. He said that if you were driving a race car (analagous to our race of life) and someone threw mud onto your windshield, you would turn on the wipers and the windshield washer. He compares the wipers to the Word of God and the washers to the Holy Spirit. He then went on to exposit Matthew 6:25-34, where on four different occasions we are told not to be anxious.
When I went to bed that night, knowing I'd be going back to work in the morning, albeit parttime, I picked up the copy of the article, reread the Scripture passage, and prayed for the Holy Spirit to come. Nothing happened. The harder I struggled, the more fear made a fool out of me. (I know this sounds crazy, but believe me, it happened.) Finally, in desperation, I said simply "Father, I want your name to be glorified."
And then it hit me. That was exactly the same thing Jesus said in John 12:28, a passage my pastor had spoken about that morning. Jesus there was struggling with much more than I was--the huge weight of the cross loomed before him. My struggle was small by comparison, but still very real.
And it occurred to me--there was no way the old Chuck Eggerth could have produced that thought. It obviously came from the Spirit of Christ inside me. Suddenly I realized I had resources to deal with the situation.
Then another image came to me, a picture of myself at the post office with Jesus shining inside me, a light so bright people would have to know who it was . My struggle to that point had been selfish, wondering how I would look to folks who knew the Chuck Eggerth from four months ago. Now I had a reason to go back to work that didn't involve my ego. And the fears left me. I was able to relax and go to sleep.
And when I got up, I went to work. I had a couple of panicky moments, where it oppeared to me that the carriers who were assigned to finish what I didn't carry would be standing around waiting for me to get the mail ready, but I made up my mind to go one step at a time. It worked out, and I was able to finish my job.
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
December 30--Devotional--"Quiet Time"
Luke 18:11,12--"God, I thank you that I am not like other men...I have my quiet time daily..." (Helpful Eggerth paraphrase)
Luke 18:21--"All these I have kept from my youth (and my quiet times)"...(HEP)
This "quiet time" thing may be a little over-rated.
Don't get me wrong. I need the Bible--desperately and often.
(Once a day, in fact, is not generally sufficient for a man like myself. I have many holes in my body, from which truth leaks copiously, and consequently need repeated injections.)
But when I have a "quiet time," I eviscerate the Word of God. I downsize it from a mountain to a grain of sand by assuming a position of control. "Word of God," I say, "you are my servant. You will assist me today in my sacred task of compiling a truly stupendous evangelical resume."
So here's my advice. Let the Bible lead you around by the nose, and not vice versa. And for heaven's sake, quit having those stupid "quiet times."
But now I'm preaching.
So let me introduce the rest of my little discourse with a quote from Anne Lamott. "I thought such awful thoughts," says Anne, "that I cannot even say them out loud because they would make Jesus want to drink gin straight out of the cat dish."
This is hyperbole, of course, but Anne has her poetic license escrowed in with her mortgage, so she can get away with it.
And yes, Anne is not the only one thinking those thoughts.
And that's not even the worst part. The worst part is that I forget I ever thought those thoughts, or pretend I never thought those thoughts, or conjure up someone who thinks worse thoughts so that I won't feel so bad that I thought those thoughts.
What do you propose to do with a fellow like me? What do I need? Really?
I need the Word of God to tell me how teetotally screwed up I actually am.
But when I have a "quiet time," it's not the Word of God doing the telling, if you know what I mean.
So what do you suggest?
I think you would propose that I actually read the Bible. You know, like pay attention to the words. And that I swallow the bad news about myself with, by God's grace, a little fortitude.
And then you would tell me to start looking for the good news.
Which, by the way, is in there.
Luke 18:21--"All these I have kept from my youth (and my quiet times)"...(HEP)
This "quiet time" thing may be a little over-rated.
Don't get me wrong. I need the Bible--desperately and often.
(Once a day, in fact, is not generally sufficient for a man like myself. I have many holes in my body, from which truth leaks copiously, and consequently need repeated injections.)
But when I have a "quiet time," I eviscerate the Word of God. I downsize it from a mountain to a grain of sand by assuming a position of control. "Word of God," I say, "you are my servant. You will assist me today in my sacred task of compiling a truly stupendous evangelical resume."
So here's my advice. Let the Bible lead you around by the nose, and not vice versa. And for heaven's sake, quit having those stupid "quiet times."
But now I'm preaching.
So let me introduce the rest of my little discourse with a quote from Anne Lamott. "I thought such awful thoughts," says Anne, "that I cannot even say them out loud because they would make Jesus want to drink gin straight out of the cat dish."
This is hyperbole, of course, but Anne has her poetic license escrowed in with her mortgage, so she can get away with it.
And yes, Anne is not the only one thinking those thoughts.
And that's not even the worst part. The worst part is that I forget I ever thought those thoughts, or pretend I never thought those thoughts, or conjure up someone who thinks worse thoughts so that I won't feel so bad that I thought those thoughts.
What do you propose to do with a fellow like me? What do I need? Really?
I need the Word of God to tell me how teetotally screwed up I actually am.
But when I have a "quiet time," it's not the Word of God doing the telling, if you know what I mean.
So what do you suggest?
I think you would propose that I actually read the Bible. You know, like pay attention to the words. And that I swallow the bad news about myself with, by God's grace, a little fortitude.
And then you would tell me to start looking for the good news.
Which, by the way, is in there.
Sunday, December 28, 2008
Dec. 28--sleepless night
I said on my last blog I'd tell you about the rest of last week, and since time has already warped into another week, I guess I'd better get at it. It is past five in the early morning of December 28, I have been awake since 2:41, and I've pretty well exhausted any means of getting to sleep. I had a classical station playing and was making progress, but then the boring music ended and some piercing soprano got airtime, and that ended that. I've also been reading Larry Woiwode (pronounced "Why-woody"), but his memoir of life in a North Dakota winter is slowly freezing me to death, and I've got to do something else.
(You know what they say about the cold in North Dakota--"It keeps the riff-raff out.")
The week was pretty slow for four days after last Sunday. I burned a lot of energy on Sunday, including watching a doomded football game ("doomded" a phrase from a semi-literate baseball player in a novel called "Bang the Drum Slowly"), and I was lethargic, fatigued; and so I just puttered around the house working on cleaning projects. Friday I got some energy back, and I went after a big project--cleaning out a closet full of magazines, most of them train magazines. Thirty years accumulation is a bit much, but I got the job done--weeded out about two-thirds of them, hauled them off to the landfill. I ran across some other magazines, notably "Books and Culture," and saved most of them. But the closet is considerably cleaner than it was.
Back to Woiwode, whose mother died when he was nine. He sealed off a childhood's worth of memories, which it took him a decade or better to recover, and now he recalls years by specific ages from each of four different children. I have one child and am not capable of that.
It seems to me that time fades rapidly into some huge, black mist, that the only access I have to it is now and maybe a three-month window backwards, and that beyond that it's simply gone. Of course, I remember things from my childhood and young adulthood quite clearly, but once you get to 1986, my only signposts are years at the post office and what I was doing there. (Maybe I was born to be a mailcarrier!)
So all I have is God, and me, and a few months. I'm sure the memories are safe with him.
I am going back to work, parttime, on the fifth of January. I'm ready for that.
Back to Woiwode again--he's set up this huge outside wood-burning furnace, and hasn't even gotten it completely installed when the worst winter in years descends on him. I am intimidated, first of all, by the mechanical tasks he performs, and secondly, by the winter itself and the lack of electricity, which is going to kill them all if the co-op doesn't get it turned back on. But the co-op itself could get some people killed trying to fix it in the blizzard. Which takes me back to the middle of Romans 8 and the messed-up universe we're living in. But Paul says creation itself is waiting for the "freedom of the glory of the sons of God," and I believe that with all my heart.
It is now 5:52--I'm going to proof this, then go back to bed, get up, worship, eat Korean food, drive my daughter to a winter retreat on the southeastern side of Greensboro, and (hopefully!) go look at a used pickup in Advance.
The big word in that whole sentence is this--worship!
--Sayonara, Chuck Eggerth
P.S.--I was going to tell you about one of my favorite Psalms, Psalm 73. I call it "confessions of a knucklehead", but a real knucklehead wouldn't have told us about it. Asaph gets himself freaked out by looking at wicked people who prosper. But then he goes to the sanctuary (remember what I said about worship?) and God shows him the truth, and he starts telling it to us, about how he was a brute beast in God's presence as long as his delusion persisted. And here are the verses I've memorized: "Yet I am always with you; you hold me by my right hand. You guide me with your counsel, and afterward you will receive me into glory. Whom have I in heaven but you? And earth has nothing I desire besides you. My heart and my flesh may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever."
Amen.
P.P.S.--I forgot to tell you something God taught me this week. It was Thursday and I had been dithering all week about figuring out the computer stuff--e-mails to word documents, creating a blog, etc., and then Alison and I spent nearly three hours and got it all done. But when I reviewed the day that evening in bed, I was still stressed--this time about some other foolish item. And I realized I needed to repent of this blamed worrying, that worrying had actually become an idol. And I did, which hooked me up to the Holy Spirit again and got me out of my "brute beast" condition. Today, of course, it was something else to worry about; but I'm making progress.
(You know what they say about the cold in North Dakota--"It keeps the riff-raff out.")
The week was pretty slow for four days after last Sunday. I burned a lot of energy on Sunday, including watching a doomded football game ("doomded" a phrase from a semi-literate baseball player in a novel called "Bang the Drum Slowly"), and I was lethargic, fatigued; and so I just puttered around the house working on cleaning projects. Friday I got some energy back, and I went after a big project--cleaning out a closet full of magazines, most of them train magazines. Thirty years accumulation is a bit much, but I got the job done--weeded out about two-thirds of them, hauled them off to the landfill. I ran across some other magazines, notably "Books and Culture," and saved most of them. But the closet is considerably cleaner than it was.
Back to Woiwode, whose mother died when he was nine. He sealed off a childhood's worth of memories, which it took him a decade or better to recover, and now he recalls years by specific ages from each of four different children. I have one child and am not capable of that.
It seems to me that time fades rapidly into some huge, black mist, that the only access I have to it is now and maybe a three-month window backwards, and that beyond that it's simply gone. Of course, I remember things from my childhood and young adulthood quite clearly, but once you get to 1986, my only signposts are years at the post office and what I was doing there. (Maybe I was born to be a mailcarrier!)
So all I have is God, and me, and a few months. I'm sure the memories are safe with him.
I am going back to work, parttime, on the fifth of January. I'm ready for that.
Back to Woiwode again--he's set up this huge outside wood-burning furnace, and hasn't even gotten it completely installed when the worst winter in years descends on him. I am intimidated, first of all, by the mechanical tasks he performs, and secondly, by the winter itself and the lack of electricity, which is going to kill them all if the co-op doesn't get it turned back on. But the co-op itself could get some people killed trying to fix it in the blizzard. Which takes me back to the middle of Romans 8 and the messed-up universe we're living in. But Paul says creation itself is waiting for the "freedom of the glory of the sons of God," and I believe that with all my heart.
It is now 5:52--I'm going to proof this, then go back to bed, get up, worship, eat Korean food, drive my daughter to a winter retreat on the southeastern side of Greensboro, and (hopefully!) go look at a used pickup in Advance.
The big word in that whole sentence is this--worship!
--Sayonara, Chuck Eggerth
P.S.--I was going to tell you about one of my favorite Psalms, Psalm 73. I call it "confessions of a knucklehead", but a real knucklehead wouldn't have told us about it. Asaph gets himself freaked out by looking at wicked people who prosper. But then he goes to the sanctuary (remember what I said about worship?) and God shows him the truth, and he starts telling it to us, about how he was a brute beast in God's presence as long as his delusion persisted. And here are the verses I've memorized: "Yet I am always with you; you hold me by my right hand. You guide me with your counsel, and afterward you will receive me into glory. Whom have I in heaven but you? And earth has nothing I desire besides you. My heart and my flesh may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever."
Amen.
P.P.S.--I forgot to tell you something God taught me this week. It was Thursday and I had been dithering all week about figuring out the computer stuff--e-mails to word documents, creating a blog, etc., and then Alison and I spent nearly three hours and got it all done. But when I reviewed the day that evening in bed, I was still stressed--this time about some other foolish item. And I realized I needed to repent of this blamed worrying, that worrying had actually become an idol. And I did, which hooked me up to the Holy Spirit again and got me out of my "brute beast" condition. Today, of course, it was something else to worry about; but I'm making progress.
Thursday, December 25, 2008
Before I start in about myself, let me remind you of a couple of folks who are in considerably worse condition than I am. One of them is my brother-in-law, Paul Rudy, from SE Wisconsin. He has finished a successful stem cell transplant therapy, to cure B-cell lymphoma, but they won't know until February if it killed the cancer. I was reading his blog the other day, and he quoted something he read in A.W. Tozer.
"To the child of God, there is no such thing as accident. He travels an appointed way. The path he treads was chosen for him when as yet he was not, when as yet he had existence only in the mind of God.
"Accidents may indeed appear to befall him and misfortune stalk his way; but these evils will be so in appearance only and will seem evils only because we cannot read the secret script of God's hidden providence and so cannot discover the ends at which He aims....
"The man of true faith may live in the absolute assurance that his steps are ordered by the Lord. For him, misfortune is outside the bounds of possibility. He cannot be torn from this earth one hour ahead of the time which God has appointed, and he cannot be detained on earth one moment after God is done with him here. He is not a waif of the wide world, a foundling of time and space, but a saint of the Lord and the darling of His particular care."
If that last sentence does not set your heart on fire, it's been raining on your kindling wood. And now a C.S. Lewis quote, from an e-mail from Paul's wife (my sister Elaine).
"We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be."
I think that one gets to the heart of it, because deep down, we're all cowards. But we have to believe God will give us courage. And he will, but not until the moment we need it.
Another person I've been praying for a lot is Rhonda Dering, from Redeemer Presbyterian in Winston-Salem. She has leukemia. I've temporarily lost her blog address, but she is in Duke Hospital and the last I heard, the human prognosis was not good.
As to my situation, I am slowly gaining strength. I had a wonderful Sunday, which started at my church in Greensboro, Korean First Presbyterian Church of Greensboro. I think you know I don't speak Korean, but we do have both an English ministry and a Korean ministry. We've recently been blessed with an outstanding pastor for the EM side, a man who prays and a man with a vision. We are in the process of formulating a small group program, about which I am very excited.
From church, I went to a Christmas party at the jail, where we split into four groups, each of which did a half-hour worship service in four different living areas. Part of our worship, as volunteers, was to distribute gifts and candy. We also sang, and prayed, and preached; and just blazed before their eyes, alight with the Holy Spirit.
And then it was on to "Night in December" at Redeemer. This is a talent night where folks from Redeemer let it all hang out. I promise you, if you didn't know better, you wouldn't guess this is a PCA church! The music was scintillating, every bit as good as (but not better than) the KFPC adult choir. And there was even a skit about a place called "Possum Lodge," where one of the fellows was wondering why he got exiled to the porch for buying his wife a silver-plated socket set for their twenty-fifth anniversary.
I really think this is about all you've got time to read, but tune in some time soon when I will tell you about the rest of the week.
See you later, alligators!
--Chuck E.
"To the child of God, there is no such thing as accident. He travels an appointed way. The path he treads was chosen for him when as yet he was not, when as yet he had existence only in the mind of God.
"Accidents may indeed appear to befall him and misfortune stalk his way; but these evils will be so in appearance only and will seem evils only because we cannot read the secret script of God's hidden providence and so cannot discover the ends at which He aims....
"The man of true faith may live in the absolute assurance that his steps are ordered by the Lord. For him, misfortune is outside the bounds of possibility. He cannot be torn from this earth one hour ahead of the time which God has appointed, and he cannot be detained on earth one moment after God is done with him here. He is not a waif of the wide world, a foundling of time and space, but a saint of the Lord and the darling of His particular care."
If that last sentence does not set your heart on fire, it's been raining on your kindling wood. And now a C.S. Lewis quote, from an e-mail from Paul's wife (my sister Elaine).
"We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be."
I think that one gets to the heart of it, because deep down, we're all cowards. But we have to believe God will give us courage. And he will, but not until the moment we need it.
Another person I've been praying for a lot is Rhonda Dering, from Redeemer Presbyterian in Winston-Salem. She has leukemia. I've temporarily lost her blog address, but she is in Duke Hospital and the last I heard, the human prognosis was not good.
As to my situation, I am slowly gaining strength. I had a wonderful Sunday, which started at my church in Greensboro, Korean First Presbyterian Church of Greensboro. I think you know I don't speak Korean, but we do have both an English ministry and a Korean ministry. We've recently been blessed with an outstanding pastor for the EM side, a man who prays and a man with a vision. We are in the process of formulating a small group program, about which I am very excited.
From church, I went to a Christmas party at the jail, where we split into four groups, each of which did a half-hour worship service in four different living areas. Part of our worship, as volunteers, was to distribute gifts and candy. We also sang, and prayed, and preached; and just blazed before their eyes, alight with the Holy Spirit.
And then it was on to "Night in December" at Redeemer. This is a talent night where folks from Redeemer let it all hang out. I promise you, if you didn't know better, you wouldn't guess this is a PCA church! The music was scintillating, every bit as good as (but not better than) the KFPC adult choir. And there was even a skit about a place called "Possum Lodge," where one of the fellows was wondering why he got exiled to the porch for buying his wife a silver-plated socket set for their twenty-fifth anniversary.
I really think this is about all you've got time to read, but tune in some time soon when I will tell you about the rest of the week.
See you later, alligators!
--Chuck E.
December 19, 2008
My doctor said I would still be feeling pretty crummy at least a couple of weeks after the radiation ended. The man was a prophet, but I am beginning to see some improvement. Yesterday I rode my exercise bicycle for fifteen minutes at a fair to middling clip, and was considerably less fatigued than a week earlier, when I rode five minutes, slowly, and was exhausted. I did not sleep well last night, which is typical after a day when the adrenaline runs, but that too is part of a pattern, and I can see improvement.
(At this point in the epistle, Alison came along and wanted to use the computer to download tunes onto her ipod. Because we trust her discernment in matters musical, I was glad to do it. It took all afternoon, and so now I'm writing on the 20th of December. But it was a matter of priorities, and now we'll get back to what I was saying.)
Fear is a terrible thing, and we all have more than our share of it. Fear in the night is even worse. Two nights ago, I was lying on the floor beside my bed with my head on a pillow (my favorite praying posture!) and fighting one after another. Some of you may know how it is--terrible things happening to your family, etc., etc. But I zeroed in on my prayer targets and finally put the fear out of my mind, though it took awhile. It seems the nights you pray the hardest, you get hit the worst. (The nights you don't pray, you go right to sleep!)
This morning I was lying in bed alternating between a nameless sense of dread and listening to my stomach growl, when I thought I heard the air horn on a Winston-Salem Southbound freight train. Believe me, that galvanized me! (If you've seen some of my train t-shirts, you know I'm looney on this topic.) I was out of bed in a heartbeat. Turned out to be a false alarm, but it got me up.
I fed the dogs, took care of the cat litter, and finally got around to feeding the birds. The tray had been empty for a couple of days, but the little rascals throw out a certain kind of seed they don't like, and I was waiting for them to break down and clean it up. You know who won on that deal.
I had to sweep my way up the stairs, on a wet morning, and sweep the discarded seed off the side of the deck, another chore, but it was worth it. English sparrows constitute eighty percent of what congregates on the railing, but the chickadees and cardinals and titmouses (or is that titmice?) and juncoes and occasional red-bellied woodpeckers make up for the nuisance. And I get to praise God for the deck. When my father-in-law helped us build the house in 1991, he built a deck that will be standing fifty years from now. (The house is not too bad either! One of our neighbors at the time, a contractor himself, gave us quite a compliment--"You've got a lot of nails in this house.")
Speaking of the house, I was thirty-nine when we built it, and the weight of the whole project lay on me like a cement slab. I would have had to read the directions to nail my sister's shoes to the floor, but between Priscilla and her father, the job concluded successfully in three and a half months. Believe me, I did a lot of the hammering and sawing and carrying shingles, but when it came time to think things through, it was not me doing the thinking.
Which is a picture of the kingdom--we all have different gifts for different jobs.
But I really don't think God put anyone in charge of worrying!
Auf Wiedersehen--Chuck E.
P.S.--Alison has been teaching me how to convert e-mail to word documents, and I would like to compile an entire collection of these little epistles I've sent out. If any one has been keeping them, could you e-mail them back to me? Thanks!
(At this point in the epistle, Alison came along and wanted to use the computer to download tunes onto her ipod. Because we trust her discernment in matters musical, I was glad to do it. It took all afternoon, and so now I'm writing on the 20th of December. But it was a matter of priorities, and now we'll get back to what I was saying.)
Fear is a terrible thing, and we all have more than our share of it. Fear in the night is even worse. Two nights ago, I was lying on the floor beside my bed with my head on a pillow (my favorite praying posture!) and fighting one after another. Some of you may know how it is--terrible things happening to your family, etc., etc. But I zeroed in on my prayer targets and finally put the fear out of my mind, though it took awhile. It seems the nights you pray the hardest, you get hit the worst. (The nights you don't pray, you go right to sleep!)
This morning I was lying in bed alternating between a nameless sense of dread and listening to my stomach growl, when I thought I heard the air horn on a Winston-Salem Southbound freight train. Believe me, that galvanized me! (If you've seen some of my train t-shirts, you know I'm looney on this topic.) I was out of bed in a heartbeat. Turned out to be a false alarm, but it got me up.
I fed the dogs, took care of the cat litter, and finally got around to feeding the birds. The tray had been empty for a couple of days, but the little rascals throw out a certain kind of seed they don't like, and I was waiting for them to break down and clean it up. You know who won on that deal.
I had to sweep my way up the stairs, on a wet morning, and sweep the discarded seed off the side of the deck, another chore, but it was worth it. English sparrows constitute eighty percent of what congregates on the railing, but the chickadees and cardinals and titmouses (or is that titmice?) and juncoes and occasional red-bellied woodpeckers make up for the nuisance. And I get to praise God for the deck. When my father-in-law helped us build the house in 1991, he built a deck that will be standing fifty years from now. (The house is not too bad either! One of our neighbors at the time, a contractor himself, gave us quite a compliment--"You've got a lot of nails in this house.")
Speaking of the house, I was thirty-nine when we built it, and the weight of the whole project lay on me like a cement slab. I would have had to read the directions to nail my sister's shoes to the floor, but between Priscilla and her father, the job concluded successfully in three and a half months. Believe me, I did a lot of the hammering and sawing and carrying shingles, but when it came time to think things through, it was not me doing the thinking.
Which is a picture of the kingdom--we all have different gifts for different jobs.
But I really don't think God put anyone in charge of worrying!
Auf Wiedersehen--Chuck E.
P.S.--Alison has been teaching me how to convert e-mail to word documents, and I would like to compile an entire collection of these little epistles I've sent out. If any one has been keeping them, could you e-mail them back to me? Thanks!
December 11, 2008 [It's Been Awhile]
So it has. The long-awaited fatigue has arrived, and with it lots and lots of reasons to lie in bed and read. (I haven't got much energy for anything else.) Well, at least I've discovered a good book, which I will probably finish tomorrow--"Watership Down", by Richard Adams. And when I get through with that, I'm going to start in again on "Brothers Karamazov", by Dostoyevsky. I've read halfway through that one twice, three years apart, taking copious notes as I went. So I'll reread it from the start and, hopefully, finish it this time.
It is raining while I'm writing this, and my daughter is out in a driver's education car somewhere. I should be more worried than I am. Maybe that's one of the benefits of this depleted condition--not having enough strength to worry about things you can't control.
Before I tell you about my leavetaking at the waiting room on Monday, let me talk briefly about something that happened to me Sunday. I went to church carrying an emotional load. I was stressed out about our Angel Tree project, with Prison Fellowship. By the end of the worship service, I simply could not function. I was emotionally and physically drained and could not do anything besides ask good friends to pray for me. I went back to adult Bible Study for fifteen minutes, but had to leave that also. I wound up missing a jail worship service and spent the rest of the day vegetating. From then to now there has been some improvement, but it's going to take awhile to get back to where I need to be.
But about the leavetaking--goodbyes are hard to say. Fortunately, I got the e-mail addresses of the people I built relationships with. Oh, and we all got certificates of graduation. That was a nice touch.
William Miller, in particular, began opening up about his condition and prospects. He faces a difficult road. I have prayed for him and will keep doing so. Lester Platt just finished his radiation three hours ago, and I'm sure he's happy to be finished also. He got a 39 treatment plan, unlike the 30 days that William and I got, and his treatments were longer. I am going to pray for him too, as well as Edward from Yadkin County.
It's difficult to describe how the radiation makes you feel, but let's just say that it came to the point where I dreaded getting into the car every day at 12. (Not a big dread, but a dread nonetheless.) If it weren't for the friendships in the waiting room, it could have been quite depressing.
I was reading from Romans chapter 8 the other day, verses 18-27. Paul has great insight, a lot more than I've got, and he sees a universe that is waiting for the glory of the children of God to be revealed. The literal translation of the last part verse 21 is "freedom of the glory of God's children." He goes on to remark again about the travail of the creation, and then our travail, and finally the travail of the Holy Spirit, who intercedes for us with "groans that words cannot express."
It reminds me of C.S. Lewis, who writes of intimations of a home beyond this world of pain. I will sure enough be glad when that home shows up.
Ciao for now--Chuck Eggerth
It is raining while I'm writing this, and my daughter is out in a driver's education car somewhere. I should be more worried than I am. Maybe that's one of the benefits of this depleted condition--not having enough strength to worry about things you can't control.
Before I tell you about my leavetaking at the waiting room on Monday, let me talk briefly about something that happened to me Sunday. I went to church carrying an emotional load. I was stressed out about our Angel Tree project, with Prison Fellowship. By the end of the worship service, I simply could not function. I was emotionally and physically drained and could not do anything besides ask good friends to pray for me. I went back to adult Bible Study for fifteen minutes, but had to leave that also. I wound up missing a jail worship service and spent the rest of the day vegetating. From then to now there has been some improvement, but it's going to take awhile to get back to where I need to be.
But about the leavetaking--goodbyes are hard to say. Fortunately, I got the e-mail addresses of the people I built relationships with. Oh, and we all got certificates of graduation. That was a nice touch.
William Miller, in particular, began opening up about his condition and prospects. He faces a difficult road. I have prayed for him and will keep doing so. Lester Platt just finished his radiation three hours ago, and I'm sure he's happy to be finished also. He got a 39 treatment plan, unlike the 30 days that William and I got, and his treatments were longer. I am going to pray for him too, as well as Edward from Yadkin County.
It's difficult to describe how the radiation makes you feel, but let's just say that it came to the point where I dreaded getting into the car every day at 12. (Not a big dread, but a dread nonetheless.) If it weren't for the friendships in the waiting room, it could have been quite depressing.
I was reading from Romans chapter 8 the other day, verses 18-27. Paul has great insight, a lot more than I've got, and he sees a universe that is waiting for the glory of the children of God to be revealed. The literal translation of the last part verse 21 is "freedom of the glory of God's children." He goes on to remark again about the travail of the creation, and then our travail, and finally the travail of the Holy Spirit, who intercedes for us with "groans that words cannot express."
It reminds me of C.S. Lewis, who writes of intimations of a home beyond this world of pain. I will sure enough be glad when that home shows up.
Ciao for now--Chuck Eggerth
November 28, 2008
Here I am, writing again. You can always delete this, but I've had an incredibly rich day so far, and I have got to write about it.
A good friend, a guy I work with in jail ministry, took me to McDonald's this morning. He bought me two Egg Mcmuffins and--get this--a McDonald's coffee, than which there is none better, including Starbuck's newfangled java. He told me there is some talk of doing a church plant in Yadkin County, and that if it goes through, he would have to stop helping me. I said, "Well, they have got a jail out there in Yadkin County, though they can't seem to figure out where to build a new one. What about you starting a work out there?" It struck him as a very good idea.
Can you imagine that? God gave me this tumor, among other things, so I would give up my iron grip on the jail ministry and let some other folks help carry the load. And now at least one of those other folks might go out to start something new. How's that for the kingdom spreading?
I left McDonald's with time to get to the waiting room an hour early. I sat down in the middle of a conversation between folks who obviously were believers, and the talk resonated with one theme--victory in a broken world. One gentleman had been to Baptist a number of times, including one incredibly difficult time when the doctors, in the course of a heart operation, had to transplant a muscle to protect his rib cage. He stayed in the hospital for more than a month nursing the thing along, but when he went home, the muscle eventually became inflamed with infection. So they brought him back to redo the whole thing, including placing a pump in the area to drain out the infection and promote the flow of blood. The upshot of the whole thing was a miraculous recovery and an egg-shaped cavity in his chest, covered only by skin, where we could actually see his heart pumping. I will tell you right now that this was one grateful human being.
The gentleman sitting next to me was obviously tuned in to the conversation, and after the first man got up to go to radiation, I struck up a conversation with the second man. It turns out he is a retired Baptist minister who lives in Wallburg and who knows a fellow with whom I used to do prison ministry. And who has a heart for the gospel.
When my turn came, I walked into the radiation room and got ready to lie down on the table. A technician asked about the t-shirt I was wearing, one of my favorites, actually, from a Redeemer men's retreat. The front side says "Men Under Construction" and the back says "Free Grace in a Broken World." I reminded the technician of what it didn't say--"Cheap Grace in a Broken World."
One of the blessings, by the way, of radiation therapy, has been the music the technicians play. Today they had a CD of Johnny Mathis doing Christmas music. "Silent Night" and "Silver Bells" were the two I caught. If God ever gave someone a better set of pipes than he gave to Johnny, I don't know about it. Well, maybe Josh Groban. (And, Brian Haskell, I hate to admit this, but Frank Sinatra is on the list too. Right next to Merle Haggard.)
After radiation, I talked awhile with Ed Shaw, my neurologist. It was a laid-back day at the hospital, as half the patients had opted to stay home, and Ed and I had a wonderful conversation. Among other things, I thanked him for just being who he is. It ended with me praying for him, of all things. What a picture of grace that is--the patient praying for the doctor!
It reminded me of another vivid picture of grace I had encountered just forty-five minutes before. Minutes after the gentleman from Wallburg left for radiation, William Miller came in. We started talking about what he had done as a cardiologist, and it turns out he had worked many years in what they call a "cath lab." (Don't confuse that with a "meth lab", by the way.)
For those of you who don't know what a "cath lab" is, let me say that it's a place where a doctor, shielded by fifty pounds of lead, looks at the inner bodily functions of patients. The catch, of course, is that this moving picture is actually being provided courtesy of radiation, and that doctors who do this sort of thing are much more prone than the regular population to get cancer. Now I know why William Miller has a stomach tumor.
So here it is--a doctor voluntarily takes the hit so other people can get healthy. What a picture of Jesus and the gospel! He gets sick, to the point of death, actually; we get healthy! Wow!
One last note--my conversation with Ed confirmed that the "physics gentleman" to whom I alluded in my last e-mail had actually sought me out on purpose. I thought so. If you'll have it, there's another picture of the gospel.
Sayonara--Chuck Eggerth
A good friend, a guy I work with in jail ministry, took me to McDonald's this morning. He bought me two Egg Mcmuffins and--get this--a McDonald's coffee, than which there is none better, including Starbuck's newfangled java. He told me there is some talk of doing a church plant in Yadkin County, and that if it goes through, he would have to stop helping me. I said, "Well, they have got a jail out there in Yadkin County, though they can't seem to figure out where to build a new one. What about you starting a work out there?" It struck him as a very good idea.
Can you imagine that? God gave me this tumor, among other things, so I would give up my iron grip on the jail ministry and let some other folks help carry the load. And now at least one of those other folks might go out to start something new. How's that for the kingdom spreading?
I left McDonald's with time to get to the waiting room an hour early. I sat down in the middle of a conversation between folks who obviously were believers, and the talk resonated with one theme--victory in a broken world. One gentleman had been to Baptist a number of times, including one incredibly difficult time when the doctors, in the course of a heart operation, had to transplant a muscle to protect his rib cage. He stayed in the hospital for more than a month nursing the thing along, but when he went home, the muscle eventually became inflamed with infection. So they brought him back to redo the whole thing, including placing a pump in the area to drain out the infection and promote the flow of blood. The upshot of the whole thing was a miraculous recovery and an egg-shaped cavity in his chest, covered only by skin, where we could actually see his heart pumping. I will tell you right now that this was one grateful human being.
The gentleman sitting next to me was obviously tuned in to the conversation, and after the first man got up to go to radiation, I struck up a conversation with the second man. It turns out he is a retired Baptist minister who lives in Wallburg and who knows a fellow with whom I used to do prison ministry. And who has a heart for the gospel.
When my turn came, I walked into the radiation room and got ready to lie down on the table. A technician asked about the t-shirt I was wearing, one of my favorites, actually, from a Redeemer men's retreat. The front side says "Men Under Construction" and the back says "Free Grace in a Broken World." I reminded the technician of what it didn't say--"Cheap Grace in a Broken World."
One of the blessings, by the way, of radiation therapy, has been the music the technicians play. Today they had a CD of Johnny Mathis doing Christmas music. "Silent Night" and "Silver Bells" were the two I caught. If God ever gave someone a better set of pipes than he gave to Johnny, I don't know about it. Well, maybe Josh Groban. (And, Brian Haskell, I hate to admit this, but Frank Sinatra is on the list too. Right next to Merle Haggard.)
After radiation, I talked awhile with Ed Shaw, my neurologist. It was a laid-back day at the hospital, as half the patients had opted to stay home, and Ed and I had a wonderful conversation. Among other things, I thanked him for just being who he is. It ended with me praying for him, of all things. What a picture of grace that is--the patient praying for the doctor!
It reminded me of another vivid picture of grace I had encountered just forty-five minutes before. Minutes after the gentleman from Wallburg left for radiation, William Miller came in. We started talking about what he had done as a cardiologist, and it turns out he had worked many years in what they call a "cath lab." (Don't confuse that with a "meth lab", by the way.)
For those of you who don't know what a "cath lab" is, let me say that it's a place where a doctor, shielded by fifty pounds of lead, looks at the inner bodily functions of patients. The catch, of course, is that this moving picture is actually being provided courtesy of radiation, and that doctors who do this sort of thing are much more prone than the regular population to get cancer. Now I know why William Miller has a stomach tumor.
So here it is--a doctor voluntarily takes the hit so other people can get healthy. What a picture of Jesus and the gospel! He gets sick, to the point of death, actually; we get healthy! Wow!
One last note--my conversation with Ed confirmed that the "physics gentleman" to whom I alluded in my last e-mail had actually sought me out on purpose. I thought so. If you'll have it, there's another picture of the gospel.
Sayonara--Chuck Eggerth
Novemer 22-27, 2008
I normally write on Saturday, but today is Thanksgiving, and with my wife and daughter in western Massachusetts, I have some time on my hands.
If you don't want to be on this e-mail list, by the way, just send your copy back to me and I will get the hint.
I just finished day 23 (out of 30) yesterday, and am going for day 24 tomorrow. They gave me the option of coming in Friday, and believe me, I really want to get this thing out of the way. Though I have not experienced too many side effects yet, the radiation is really kind of sickening. (I upchucked last night, but that may have been related as much to a salad I ate at Little Italy in Welcome as to the radiation and chemo.) I'll be glad to be done with it and mending, so to speak.
I wrote last week that I hadn't seen Billie Douglass in the waiting room and that I hoped to see her on the third floor. You may remember me saying that Billie was fighting cancer for the third or fourth time. Yesterday Helen Platt handed me Billie's obituary. At the time I was writing about her last week, Billie had been dead three days. When Helen handed me the obituary, I remembered some things Billie had talked about the last couple of days we saw her--specifically, about her brother, who also had cancer and who struggled mightily for twelve hours just to accomplish one bodily function. "Is it really worth it?" Betty recalled him asking, "Do I really have to live this way?" She was making the point that sometimes people get to a place where dying is better than living. I think Billie got to that place.
William Miller looked a little pale this week, but he has been quite an uplift for the rest of us. He has an upbeat approach to life, and though he is a doctor himself, he does not act like that makes him special. I do not know what his prognosis is, but I have a feeling it involves more risk than mine.
We had several newcomers to the waiting room last week, including a gentleman who drives all the way from Anderson, South Carolina to bring his wife, a frail-looking woman, for treatment. William and I started talking to him about the movie Radio, and it turns out that he has a brother who had played for the team on which Radio was an unofficial member. (By the way, that movie really seemed to resonate with William, which tells me something very good about him.)
Let me introduce another member of the regular cast, Edward from Yadkin County, whose time slot is forty-five mintes after mine. That's another way of saying I don't see him unless the radiation units are running behind. (They're repairing one of the four machines right now, which means they do sometimes run behind.) When I first met him, his wife was pushing him in a wheelchair, but the last few days he has been walking on his own, albeit a bit unsteadily. I have never seen that man without a smile on his face, and he particularly seems to connect with me. He has a brain tumor, which, I am assuming, could not be removed surgically. My neighbor, Johnny Burke, is living proof that radiation for non-accessible tumors can restore folks to a regular life.
I never did get to look at the rest of Lester's dogs. I'll try to remember to ask him to bring in the scrapbook one more time.
I ran into another acquaintance last week, a physics fellow, for lack of a better term, whose son I once taught in Sunday School. He really seemed to enjoy talking to me, and in fact, I think, had timed his lunch break specifically to catch me. He is an amazingly intelligent person who designs and calibrates the radiation equipment on which I'm being treated, and I enjoyed talking to him very much. By the way, his daughter is in med school and is thinking about following in her dad's footsteps. How's that for a compliment?
We have added another doctor to the list, and I need to correct a mistaken impression I may have given last week. I seem to recall intimating that some doctors were good people. Actually, my opinion is that all doctors are shiftless deadbeats who pretend to know something esoteric just to make a few bucks.
And if you believe I believe that, I've got a bridge in Brooklyn I'd like to sell you. There is nothing in the world better than a good doctor. (Well, I can think of one thing better--a good malted milkshake is just pretty darn hard to beat. But a good doctor is a close second.)
Death is a fact of living. Some of you may think I am dealing with that prospect nobly, but I hope you know my prognosis contains nothing of the sort. In point of fact, I am a walking advertisement for the existence of a God who intervenes in human affairs. I've had two tumors removed surgically, both in a position in my brain that facilitated removal and minimized risks to my regular functioning. And the discovery of both of those tumors was also amazingly scripted. (If you've heard this story before, bear with me.)
Both discoveries involved perfectly situated seizures, the first one while driving a pickup. I had just gotten stopped at the only traffic light for miles in any direction when I had the seizure; my wife was in the car in back of me, and an offduty EMT was in the car behind her. Luck can't begin to describe that.
The second one was every bit as miraculous, and to tell you about it I'll have to describe a couple of classes of tumors. An astrocytoma will typically recur within five to seven years, and an oligodendroglioma within twenty years. But sometimes those little rascals grow together, and can be downright difficult to differentiate. (Seve Ballesteros, the golfer, recently had an oligoastrocytoma removed.) The team that operated on me in 1987 diagnosed my original tumor as an astrocytoma. Based on that diagnosis, my doctor figured I was out of the woods, and accordingly, had scheduled an MRI for January 2008 and the next one for January 2010. Had we gone by that schedule, I would not be writing this little epistle because my tumor would still be waiting to be discovered. But God intervened, with a perfectly awful event (I thought)--a seizure in August of 2007, which necessitated an MRI. (And knocked me off my mail routes for three months, I might add.) Because I'd had that MRI, the doctor rescheduled from January, 2008 to August, 2008 for the next one. And that was when they found the little booger, just recently grown big enough to detect.
(I'm not saying I'm out of the woods--I may well die from one of these. But it will be in God's timing. And I'll know it's time to go.)
So there it is--empirical evidence for the existence of God. It may not convince you, but it sure convinces me. And yes, there are times when I doubt, when I wonder what God is up to, when the world does not look so bright. But I keep coming back to this quartet of "co-incidental" occurrences and to the bedrock truth that everything in my life has come to me straight from the hand of a God who loves me. And that makes some things easier to take.
Till next time, Chuck Eggerth
If you don't want to be on this e-mail list, by the way, just send your copy back to me and I will get the hint.
I just finished day 23 (out of 30) yesterday, and am going for day 24 tomorrow. They gave me the option of coming in Friday, and believe me, I really want to get this thing out of the way. Though I have not experienced too many side effects yet, the radiation is really kind of sickening. (I upchucked last night, but that may have been related as much to a salad I ate at Little Italy in Welcome as to the radiation and chemo.) I'll be glad to be done with it and mending, so to speak.
I wrote last week that I hadn't seen Billie Douglass in the waiting room and that I hoped to see her on the third floor. You may remember me saying that Billie was fighting cancer for the third or fourth time. Yesterday Helen Platt handed me Billie's obituary. At the time I was writing about her last week, Billie had been dead three days. When Helen handed me the obituary, I remembered some things Billie had talked about the last couple of days we saw her--specifically, about her brother, who also had cancer and who struggled mightily for twelve hours just to accomplish one bodily function. "Is it really worth it?" Betty recalled him asking, "Do I really have to live this way?" She was making the point that sometimes people get to a place where dying is better than living. I think Billie got to that place.
William Miller looked a little pale this week, but he has been quite an uplift for the rest of us. He has an upbeat approach to life, and though he is a doctor himself, he does not act like that makes him special. I do not know what his prognosis is, but I have a feeling it involves more risk than mine.
We had several newcomers to the waiting room last week, including a gentleman who drives all the way from Anderson, South Carolina to bring his wife, a frail-looking woman, for treatment. William and I started talking to him about the movie Radio, and it turns out that he has a brother who had played for the team on which Radio was an unofficial member. (By the way, that movie really seemed to resonate with William, which tells me something very good about him.)
Let me introduce another member of the regular cast, Edward from Yadkin County, whose time slot is forty-five mintes after mine. That's another way of saying I don't see him unless the radiation units are running behind. (They're repairing one of the four machines right now, which means they do sometimes run behind.) When I first met him, his wife was pushing him in a wheelchair, but the last few days he has been walking on his own, albeit a bit unsteadily. I have never seen that man without a smile on his face, and he particularly seems to connect with me. He has a brain tumor, which, I am assuming, could not be removed surgically. My neighbor, Johnny Burke, is living proof that radiation for non-accessible tumors can restore folks to a regular life.
I never did get to look at the rest of Lester's dogs. I'll try to remember to ask him to bring in the scrapbook one more time.
I ran into another acquaintance last week, a physics fellow, for lack of a better term, whose son I once taught in Sunday School. He really seemed to enjoy talking to me, and in fact, I think, had timed his lunch break specifically to catch me. He is an amazingly intelligent person who designs and calibrates the radiation equipment on which I'm being treated, and I enjoyed talking to him very much. By the way, his daughter is in med school and is thinking about following in her dad's footsteps. How's that for a compliment?
We have added another doctor to the list, and I need to correct a mistaken impression I may have given last week. I seem to recall intimating that some doctors were good people. Actually, my opinion is that all doctors are shiftless deadbeats who pretend to know something esoteric just to make a few bucks.
And if you believe I believe that, I've got a bridge in Brooklyn I'd like to sell you. There is nothing in the world better than a good doctor. (Well, I can think of one thing better--a good malted milkshake is just pretty darn hard to beat. But a good doctor is a close second.)
Death is a fact of living. Some of you may think I am dealing with that prospect nobly, but I hope you know my prognosis contains nothing of the sort. In point of fact, I am a walking advertisement for the existence of a God who intervenes in human affairs. I've had two tumors removed surgically, both in a position in my brain that facilitated removal and minimized risks to my regular functioning. And the discovery of both of those tumors was also amazingly scripted. (If you've heard this story before, bear with me.)
Both discoveries involved perfectly situated seizures, the first one while driving a pickup. I had just gotten stopped at the only traffic light for miles in any direction when I had the seizure; my wife was in the car in back of me, and an offduty EMT was in the car behind her. Luck can't begin to describe that.
The second one was every bit as miraculous, and to tell you about it I'll have to describe a couple of classes of tumors. An astrocytoma will typically recur within five to seven years, and an oligodendroglioma within twenty years. But sometimes those little rascals grow together, and can be downright difficult to differentiate. (Seve Ballesteros, the golfer, recently had an oligoastrocytoma removed.) The team that operated on me in 1987 diagnosed my original tumor as an astrocytoma. Based on that diagnosis, my doctor figured I was out of the woods, and accordingly, had scheduled an MRI for January 2008 and the next one for January 2010. Had we gone by that schedule, I would not be writing this little epistle because my tumor would still be waiting to be discovered. But God intervened, with a perfectly awful event (I thought)--a seizure in August of 2007, which necessitated an MRI. (And knocked me off my mail routes for three months, I might add.) Because I'd had that MRI, the doctor rescheduled from January, 2008 to August, 2008 for the next one. And that was when they found the little booger, just recently grown big enough to detect.
(I'm not saying I'm out of the woods--I may well die from one of these. But it will be in God's timing. And I'll know it's time to go.)
So there it is--empirical evidence for the existence of God. It may not convince you, but it sure convinces me. And yes, there are times when I doubt, when I wonder what God is up to, when the world does not look so bright. But I keep coming back to this quartet of "co-incidental" occurrences and to the bedrock truth that everything in my life has come to me straight from the hand of a God who loves me. And that makes some things easier to take.
Till next time, Chuck Eggerth
November 16-22, 2008
For those of you who may be new to this little epistle, let me just say that I am keeping a journal of my passage through precautionary radiation and chemotherapy, the consequence of the removal of a brain tumor. Lest those two words make you think I am in excruciating pain, let me say that the only effect I've experienced from the radiation is a slight decrease in energy. And the chemotherapy, by pill, has produced no side effects whatsoever. (So you wonder why I'm writing this letter, right?)
My neighbor, Johnny Burke, took this same radiation four years ago, and he reports the only side effects were some pretty serious fatigue the last few days of the treatment.
But, as I reported last week, I am getting an inside look at the lives of some other people for whom cancer is something to be feared. I did not get to talk to Billie Douglass this week. She is no longer coming to our waiting room, I guess because she has started chemotherapy along with her radiation. I hope I will see her on the third floor next week, as I have a couple of appointments up there. I did see William Miller this week, and he is doing well. We had some long talks this week. He has a very talented family--a boy going into architecture in Chicago and a daughter studying Chinese in Beijing being at the top of the list.
Lester Platt was brought this week, once more, by his wife Helen. (His brother Howard brought him last week.) They also have some talented children, including a dentist in Mount Airy and a daughter in Hawaii who does special events for a very ritzy hotel. And they have a bunch of well-loved dogs, some of whom I saw in a photo album this week.
Oh! I almost forgot! I got a buzz cut this week! I couldn't bear to ask them to shave it completely, but they did the next best thing. My hair was beginning to get a little loose in some places, so I took the plunge. With it as short as it is, it doesn't seem to be falling out just yet, but I'm sure that could change.
My doctor told me this week I will be back to work in February. He had been talking January. You know how these guys are. I'm just picking, because he's on the list for this e-mail. If he makes any serious mistakes, I'll just take him off the list. He really is an amazing friend, by the way.
Speaking of amazing, who would have thought that I'd wind up in Winston-Salem with this doctor, the world's leading authority on the kind of tumor I've got? Or next door to a neighbor who had the same kind of tumor, and whom I referred to my doctor? Little co-incidences? Not likely!
Let me just tell you about the conclusion to my week. With some folks from my church, I drove to Troy this morning, an hour south of Greensboro, to help deliver Thanksgiving hams to residents in the Troy Housing Authority. Libby Dawkins, a good friend, is the director of the housing authority, and she put me onto this project about a month ago. Seven of us went down, and on the way back, we stopped at the Dawkin's house to see Libby's husband, Robert. I have been knowing Robert since 1990, and since 1996 he has had a rare blood disease called vasculitis. He's been in emergency rooms 65 times since then, and financially they've simply been strapped--the same physically. He sits in a wheel chair with an oxygen tube, taking 400 milligrams of morphine a day to dull the pain, but spiritually he is as alive as anyone I have ever met.
He told us his story today of how he came to know Jesus. He was a drug dealer and a pimp, and he had a convenience store to front for his operations. One day a young man walked into that store, when Robert was in the middle of a drug deal, and asked Robert "Do you know Jesus?" Robert cursed him first, then jumped across the counter and started to pull a pistol out of his back pocket. Just before leaving the store, the young man stopped and said, "I don't mean do you know about him--I mean, do you know him.?" That started a long chain of events, and a couple months later, Robert was a Christian.
And eventually he became a prison chaplain, which is where I met him, working for and spreading love to everyone, regardless of their faith. And what a blessing he has been in my life, not to mention hundreds of others. Our visit to him really was a fitting conclusion to the week.
So there you have it. So long till next time!
--Chuck E.
My neighbor, Johnny Burke, took this same radiation four years ago, and he reports the only side effects were some pretty serious fatigue the last few days of the treatment.
But, as I reported last week, I am getting an inside look at the lives of some other people for whom cancer is something to be feared. I did not get to talk to Billie Douglass this week. She is no longer coming to our waiting room, I guess because she has started chemotherapy along with her radiation. I hope I will see her on the third floor next week, as I have a couple of appointments up there. I did see William Miller this week, and he is doing well. We had some long talks this week. He has a very talented family--a boy going into architecture in Chicago and a daughter studying Chinese in Beijing being at the top of the list.
Lester Platt was brought this week, once more, by his wife Helen. (His brother Howard brought him last week.) They also have some talented children, including a dentist in Mount Airy and a daughter in Hawaii who does special events for a very ritzy hotel. And they have a bunch of well-loved dogs, some of whom I saw in a photo album this week.
Oh! I almost forgot! I got a buzz cut this week! I couldn't bear to ask them to shave it completely, but they did the next best thing. My hair was beginning to get a little loose in some places, so I took the plunge. With it as short as it is, it doesn't seem to be falling out just yet, but I'm sure that could change.
My doctor told me this week I will be back to work in February. He had been talking January. You know how these guys are. I'm just picking, because he's on the list for this e-mail. If he makes any serious mistakes, I'll just take him off the list. He really is an amazing friend, by the way.
Speaking of amazing, who would have thought that I'd wind up in Winston-Salem with this doctor, the world's leading authority on the kind of tumor I've got? Or next door to a neighbor who had the same kind of tumor, and whom I referred to my doctor? Little co-incidences? Not likely!
Let me just tell you about the conclusion to my week. With some folks from my church, I drove to Troy this morning, an hour south of Greensboro, to help deliver Thanksgiving hams to residents in the Troy Housing Authority. Libby Dawkins, a good friend, is the director of the housing authority, and she put me onto this project about a month ago. Seven of us went down, and on the way back, we stopped at the Dawkin's house to see Libby's husband, Robert. I have been knowing Robert since 1990, and since 1996 he has had a rare blood disease called vasculitis. He's been in emergency rooms 65 times since then, and financially they've simply been strapped--the same physically. He sits in a wheel chair with an oxygen tube, taking 400 milligrams of morphine a day to dull the pain, but spiritually he is as alive as anyone I have ever met.
He told us his story today of how he came to know Jesus. He was a drug dealer and a pimp, and he had a convenience store to front for his operations. One day a young man walked into that store, when Robert was in the middle of a drug deal, and asked Robert "Do you know Jesus?" Robert cursed him first, then jumped across the counter and started to pull a pistol out of his back pocket. Just before leaving the store, the young man stopped and said, "I don't mean do you know about him--I mean, do you know him.?" That started a long chain of events, and a couple months later, Robert was a Christian.
And eventually he became a prison chaplain, which is where I met him, working for and spreading love to everyone, regardless of their faith. And what a blessing he has been in my life, not to mention hundreds of others. Our visit to him really was a fitting conclusion to the week.
So there you have it. So long till next time!
--Chuck E.
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
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
November 8, 2008
I completed week two of the radiation yesterday, and day 7 of the chemotherapy. For those of you whom I may have just added to the list, I am taking six consecutive 5-day weeks of radiation and six consecutive 7-day weeks of chemo-therapy, by tablet. The chemo got delayed three days by human snafus, but it is not a big deal.
My week was up and down, to say the least. Let me give you the two low points, and show how God pulled me out of the doldrums, to his glory.
On Monday I was contemplating what my pastor said about loving Christ before I loved the work I was doing for him, and it occurred to me that I really did love the work more than I loved Christ. Or maybe I should say, what I derived from the work--praise, etc. And before long, Satan was accusing me of not being on the team at all--that is to say, of simply not belonging to Christ. I called a guy in my Tuesday night men's accountability group and told him what was going on. He spoke sanity into my perturbed soul, prayed for me, and called some other guys to pray for me. Afterwards, it occurred to me that folks on Satan's team really don't get that kind of support. "Devil take the hindermost" is the phrase that comes to mind. It was really pretty laughable when I got the big picture.
On Thursday, I had similar feelings. Carol Hall, a missionary to Germany, was visiting me in the morning and I asked her to pray for me. She did, quite passionately, I might add. After she left, I sat down, again, with the Word of God and reminded myself of all that I am in Christ. That righted the ship temporarily, till the afternoon, when the feelings came back. I struggled with them during the evening, and while calling some folks on another matter, I came across a woman who herself struggles with depression. She asked me how I was doing, and I gave her an honest answer. She proceeded to build me up with what she had seen in me in the past, and I did the same for her. And when the call was over, the emergency was over also, hopefully for both of us.
Moral: God's grace often comes through his people.
Aftermath: I talked with my doctor on Friday, related the two events, and we agreed there is likely some kind of temporary chemical change in my brain, for which he prescribed a medication. That is not to minimize the impact of lack of faith on my part, but faith might be a little easier to come by when the seratonin level in my brain is normalized.
Prayer Requests: Pray for sanity to reign in my heart and mind, and for peace, which comes from knowing how very much Christ loves me. It really seems to me that much of our emotional struggle results from just that--losing sight of God's great compassion and mercy. So pray I'll remember it!
--Chuck Eggerth
My week was up and down, to say the least. Let me give you the two low points, and show how God pulled me out of the doldrums, to his glory.
On Monday I was contemplating what my pastor said about loving Christ before I loved the work I was doing for him, and it occurred to me that I really did love the work more than I loved Christ. Or maybe I should say, what I derived from the work--praise, etc. And before long, Satan was accusing me of not being on the team at all--that is to say, of simply not belonging to Christ. I called a guy in my Tuesday night men's accountability group and told him what was going on. He spoke sanity into my perturbed soul, prayed for me, and called some other guys to pray for me. Afterwards, it occurred to me that folks on Satan's team really don't get that kind of support. "Devil take the hindermost" is the phrase that comes to mind. It was really pretty laughable when I got the big picture.
On Thursday, I had similar feelings. Carol Hall, a missionary to Germany, was visiting me in the morning and I asked her to pray for me. She did, quite passionately, I might add. After she left, I sat down, again, with the Word of God and reminded myself of all that I am in Christ. That righted the ship temporarily, till the afternoon, when the feelings came back. I struggled with them during the evening, and while calling some folks on another matter, I came across a woman who herself struggles with depression. She asked me how I was doing, and I gave her an honest answer. She proceeded to build me up with what she had seen in me in the past, and I did the same for her. And when the call was over, the emergency was over also, hopefully for both of us.
Moral: God's grace often comes through his people.
Aftermath: I talked with my doctor on Friday, related the two events, and we agreed there is likely some kind of temporary chemical change in my brain, for which he prescribed a medication. That is not to minimize the impact of lack of faith on my part, but faith might be a little easier to come by when the seratonin level in my brain is normalized.
Prayer Requests: Pray for sanity to reign in my heart and mind, and for peace, which comes from knowing how very much Christ loves me. It really seems to me that much of our emotional struggle results from just that--losing sight of God's great compassion and mercy. So pray I'll remember it!
--Chuck Eggerth
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