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.
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
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
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