some news.

Last weekend we went out to the Santhouses for the weekend. It was harvest season and we watched the tractors work late into the night in the field behind their house. It is always so refreshing being with them. The wisdom and good questions of Mr. Santhouse, the joy and peace of Mrs. Santhouse and the warmth of the kids make their house a wonderful place to be.

On Monday I found out mom has cancer. Lewis said, "I never knew grief felt so like fear." I feel a lot of this recently. its a learning experience. We still don’t know a whole lot, but it came as a shock to my family. Life really is fragile; I feel it in the dryness of my eyes. When faced with such a terrible reality there are many doctrines and ideas which fail and fall away. Yet we are assured of God’s fidelity every morning we wake up. With that assurance I ask for prayer, that God’s presence would be sensed in the midst of this, and that he would grant patience until it is. This snatched the breath right out of me. I’ve experienced a tightening of my chest, a pit in my gut, a wince of my eyes, and an ache in the depths of my being. To be honest, its all rather confusing. Some things just age you.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading about this whole thing. somewhere I read that all a cancer patient wanted was someone to “walk with me to the head of that lonesome valley.” But that’s just it, he wanted the humanly impossible. It seems that one of the horrors of cancer is that its an individualistic disease, a diverging road, a separation which cannot be fully understood.

How do you pray for what is a part of your own heart? Mom is such a part of me that I am not afforded the comfort of having a perspective of distance. Lewis says, “One never meets just Cancer, or War, or Unhappiness. One only meets each hour or moment that comes… One never gets the impact of what we call ‘the thing itself.’ But we call it wrongly. The thing itself is simply all these ups and down. The rest is a name or idea.”

The fact is, “the thing itself” is exactly what I feel in my bones. It’s the glaring word which is imprinted in my mind, the concept which dries my eyes, the ambiguous magnitude which follows me to bed and prohibits rest. Its not the many possible outcomes that I fear, nor the weight of grief, rather it is the memories of years which seem to be swallowed up in the vacuum of “the thing itself.”

Mom said she felt “called” or “chosen” to bear this severe mercy. What a strange and unlooked for reminder. When faced with our mortality it seems that the quandary draws one closer to God, closer to those you love, closer to the issues that matter and drags into insignificance the banal concerns that occupy our “normal time.” It seems the afflicted are granted the faith of two people while the few surrounding loved ones are given the worries and fears of two people. Nevertheless, disease and tragedy are doorways into which the suffering God can enter in the fullness of His being.

We have known since the day of our birth
that our primal task is to grow in basic trust to you.
To rely on You in every circumstance,
to know that you would return when you are away,
to trust that in your absence you will soon be present,
to be assured that your silence bespeaks attentiveness and not neglect,
to know that in your abiding faithfulness,
“all will be well and all will be well.”

It is at times like this that we remember that Jesus is not simply all we need, Jesus is all we have. And we are thankful.