Month: January 2019

Just yesterday I saw this new sharing from Jeremy Utley at New Covenant Christian Fellowship (San Jose) (see https://youtu.be/8OmA8zPzdFA) (which, to be honest I haven’t actually listened to yet as I’m writing this), but which reminded me of (I think) similar thoughts that have been coming up for me.

So, the main question is: “What makes for a ‘good’ day when I’m grieving?” or maybe easier to spot: “What makes a ‘bad’ day?”. And partly I want to say that mostly I have to answer this question because a lot of people ask how I’m doing, and it always feels like I need to have a quick one-phrase synopsis … But, that doesn’t seem to be easy these days. “I’m fine” is not true, but neither is “I’m horrible”. And so I have found myself trying to encapsulate my days (or weeks) in a few words in a way that can concisely communicate for others just what IS going on with me. And in the process of that I have found myself needing to redefine those terms “good days” and “bad days” as I come to grips with the “new normal” or “life alone” or “grieving with hope”, or whatever you want to call it.

Whew! Not an easy topic!

I used to think of “good days” in terms of (not in any particular order or priority):

• Being productive at work
• Good, warm, loving times with my wife
• No significant financial stress
• No relationship hassles
• Basically no bumps in the road

Then cancer happened.

Then it started to seem like there weren’t a lot of those “good days” anymore. Almost every day brought new challenges, to where I think I stopped thinking about how good the days were, but more about just getting us through the days, and not dropping the ball (at least not too badly) as far as schedules, commitments, bills, doctor visits, etc. were concerned.

Then we moved and it seemed like once that once that was tidied up and we were settled in here that better days had come; a little farther from the noise and traffic and high costs, etc. of living in Silicon Valley. And the cancer seemed to have been conquered (or at least receded) and we could being to plan and explore and “enjoy life” again.

And then the cancer spread. Or at least we were forcibly made aware of the cancer spreading (since it had been doing that right along behind our backs) because she woke up the day after the doctor visit (“See you in six months”) with a ferocious headache, nausea, dizziness and so on, which took about two weeks to figure out that cancer had spread to her brain and lungs.

So then it was more radiation, chemo, tests, losing all her hair for the second and third times, and weakness and the “chemo brain” that was made worse by whole-brain radiation… All overshadowed by the questions of, “How much longer does she have?” and “How should we spend our remaining time together?”

To be honest, I didn’t want to talk about or even think about what would happen when she was gone. But I know I knew there wasn’t much time left. So, I secured a month-long vacation from work. We drove 5,000 miles together in our new truck and trailer. Explored a bunch of new places and some familiar ones. Those were really good days. But I think my definitions had already started to change in the process. Because I soon realized that difficulties and a lot of hard work were part and parcel of the enjoyment we had. I mean, hitching and unhitching the trailer, emptying sewer tanks, just getting fresh water, were challenging most times. Several (not many, but some) LONG days of driving were exhausting, and hey, even getting the new trailer in time to go was a huge problem that was largely out of our control. But, and here’s the key thing, at every difficulty or bump in the road was the opportunity to die to myself and lean harder on God, who was ALWAYS FAITHFUL to help, support, guide, comfort, encourage, and strengthen us. Or not, as in I could just get frustrated and angry and bitter, which did no one any good at all. So, I slowly learned to step back, to put things in His hands and rest. And I began to see even the worst of situations turn into “good days”, no matter what the circumstances originally appeared to be.

And the best part of it was I saw her relax too. Seeing me start to take charge, to “man up” and get through things with God’s help, she was happier, and more content, and able to enjoy the “hard times” herself.

And then she died.

And now things are on a whole new level.

And as I’ve been grieving and learning how to grieve and sharing with others, reading, writing, blogging, and just trying to get through the days without her, I feel like my definitions are changing again. So, what does it mean to have a “good day” when I’m grieving? Well, it feels like a good day when I don’t try to ignore the pain and actually allow myself to grieve, to just cry like a baby until it stops and I can breathe again. I seems good when I can cry out, “I can’t do this, please help me!” because there is a Helper there. And it seems like a bad day when I can go through it without falling apart, and get stuff done, and yet not think about her, and feel “distant” and full of myself and lost by the end of it.

What does all this mean, then?

• Well, a lot of my prayers in the last few months before she died were, “Help us to depend on You, to lean on You and not on our own strength.” So, that’s part of it. “When I am weak, then I am strong.” (2 Corinthians 12:10)
• And grieving is good, it is “natural”, and a part of the plan; yes, a part of the NECESSITY in this time. “Jesus wept.” (John 11:35) I am following Him in this.
• “Therefore let him that thinks he stands take heed lest he fall.” (I Corinthians 10:12) Pride and SELF-confidence are deadly.
• “We must pass through many tribulations to enter the kingdom of heaven.” (Acts 14:22) It’s not optional.
• And I think most importantly (for me): it’s a good day when I can “bounce back” from a fall and not spend the rest of the day (or the week) wallowing in my stuff. “Come let us reason together, says the Lord; though your sins be as scarlet they shall be as white as snow.” (Isaiah 1:18) “In repentance and rest is your salvation; in quietness and trust is your strength.” (Isaiah 30:15)

So, there you have it. But, I’m not “there” yet (and I for sure need to listen to Jeremy still). I have more words to the new song, “Jesus Wept”, but it’s not complete yet. There is more surrender still, more “digging deep” to do. Bouncing back doesn’t quite come easily yet, and there are more depths of His love to uncover in doing so.

Amen, so be it.

Truly I say to you, unless you are converted and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.

Matthew 19:3 (NASB)

Truly I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child will not enter it at all.

Luke 18:17 (NASB)

Let the children alone, and do not hinder them from coming to Me; for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.

Matthew 19:14 (NASB)

There’s something really counter-intuitive to these things that Jesus said. All our lives we are told to “grow up”, to “mature”, to learn, achieve, and get smarter. And yet, that’s not exactly how Jesus describes it. He seems to be saying there’s almost a retrograde motion needed, to go from being so smart and knowledgeable to being a child. And even Peter says “… like newborn babies …” (I Peter 2:2)

And I saw that in my wife in the days and months before she died. She often quoted Matthew 19:3 about her grandmother who died at the ripe young age of 104 (on her birthday!), and said how she saw this happening with her so that she could enter the kingdom of heaven. And, sure enough, I saw it in Beth too to prepare her.

Some people countered with, “well, she had whole brain radiation and chemotherapy, so you were just seeing the side-effects on her brain.” Which was true to some extent. She was aware of it — she often commented on her “chemo-brain” and how thinking was more difficult and “fuzzier”. Which, if you think about it, is quite interesting self-awareness…. But, I know what happened was more than that — it was a heart change that the Holy Spirit was doing. And here’s why I think that:

• Her voracious appetite for the Word of God. There was not a day went by (and if it did, she made it up the next day) that she didn’t listen to Dr. J. Vernon McGee (“Through the Bible”) on her iPod.
• Practically every morning she would sit in the chair in my office, with her Bible open and her coffee at hand. She was so content just to be with me, even though I was working away, but reading the Word, and I know praying (a lot for me …).
• We went on a long road-trip the whole month of July 2018 (so 2-3 months before she died). Often during the 5,000 miles of driving she would just “be there” with me, without having to say anything, or even have music playing. When I asked her what she was thinking she would say, “Oh nothing, just looking.” Which was really different — she always had to have music playing, and she was a “doer” and a “planner”.
• She gravitated to the children, and they to her. Always. At church she would find the children and end up being with them first. Her grandchildren were always on her mind. There are still a bazillion cards done by the children at church still up on the wall and all around the kitchen, written to her; prayers, “Get Well”, “God loves you” and more.
• There was a contentedness about her in the last few weeks that I had never seen. I mean, going from hiking in the mountains to completely paralyzed from the waist down in the space of 3 weeks, and not a single complaint!! How is that even possible??
• Other people saw it too. One of the elders of our church in San Jose noticed the change. A peace and contentment was there in her eyes, he said, which had not been there before.

So, how does all that translate to “becoming as a child”? I think of Psalm 131, which sums up a lot of the aspects of it:

O Lord, my heart is not proud, nor my eyes haughty;

Nor do I involve myself in great matters,

Or in things too difficult for me.

I have composed and quieted my soul;

Like a weaned child rests against his mother,

My soul is like a weaned child within me.

Psalm 131:1-2

And one of the messages I heard fairly recently was about “wonder”. To me that is a key element in this whole equation. Do I have this sense of awe and wonder when it comes to God, my Father? To think that the Creator of time, space, the stars, planets, trees, fish, cats, grass, bacteria, and me actually wants to know me and me to know Him, should be a WONDERFUL thought! But does it provoke that reaction in me??

I glimpsed these things in my wife. A few hours before she died she sang for us “All the Way My Savior Leads Me” and I heard her voice catch at the words, “Perfect rest to me is promised in my Father’s house above”. She was almost there; I know she caught a glimpse. And pretty much her last words to me were, “I’m tired, I need to rest.” And getting her there provoked the last seizure that took her. Or rather, He took her, through the last seizure.

I see in me a huge tendency to pride, to religion, to a set of “do”s and “don’t”s, to theological arguments and parsing Greek tenses and … But, “wonder” or “composing and quieting my soul”, not so much. But I want it. If God is anything as WONDERFUL as He says He is, then I really ought to become like a child and rest against Him, and wonder at Him; to rest and wonder at a God who lives in a high and holy place, and who stoops down to regard the humble and contrite of spirit; to marvel at and adore a Father who would sacrifice His only Son to save His enemy, a wretch like me.

Oh that I could also become more like a child to enter the kingdom of heaven!

My wife died on September 28, 2018. There was nothing special about that date, there was no reason for it to be THAT day, except that God had somehow planned her life to that end; had numbered her days and arranged everything for her to come home that particular day, just after 11:00pm, with only me and our cat Mercy with her.

We had known for some time that it was probably going to happen soon. The MRI in March had shown “more than” 30 tumors in her brain, metastasized from the triple-negative breast cancer that we thought we’d gotten, but which is notoriously easy to treat and yet at the same time spreads even more easily, until there is way more than we humans know how to deal with.

It happened very quickly. We hiked at Crater Lake the weekend of Labor Day (September 1st). And then again on Monday, we drove 30 miles up into the mountains and hiked to a waterfall (or I did — she only did about 1.5 miles round trip, and didn’t quite make it to the falls). By the 14th she was in a wheelchair, unable to really walk and by Saturday the 22nd when the grandkids came she needed a catheter because there was no bladder control anymore. Then on Friday night she had another series of seizures (at least two, maybe more) and then she breathed her last and was gone.

That first week I don’t know how I managed. Two of her sisters and their families, another remarkable woman, who was like a daughter to us and her son and fiancee, all came the week she died. Two of the elders from our church in San Jose came 500 miles with their families for her final day with us, along with several others the next day. They sang and prayed with us, talked until late, brought food, did laundry, cleaned up, everything they could. One slept over on Saturday night, just so I wouldn’t be alone. But every step I took that next week seemed to be walking through quicksand, my heart with such a huge empty place, seemingly pushed back at every step by an almost crushing weight of grief. And yet, somehow (it had to be the prayers of 100s of people) I packed up my truck and trailer and drove the 500 miles back to San Jose, organized and was part of her Memorial Service on October 9th, and managed to spend time with many people, with family, to play music, to read, even do laundry, attend church, and take care of business.

But the first week, no two weeks, at least, back in the empty house in Oregon were the hardest. I had to work… from home… alone, after 20 of the best years of my life with my wife. And (try to) sleep. And keep the house, and feed the fish and the cat, and tend to the laundry, and get food into me. My frequent prayer was “Lord, I don’t know how to do this. Help me not to quit too soon, help me to grieve like I should, I don’t know how I’m going to make it.” I told her a couple of days before she was gone that it took 4 of us to do the work she did. The next day I revised it to 6 of us. She was amazing! I wrote a comment on LinkedIn today that she was way more than ½ of our relationship. She did SO much more than I did to support us as a family than I did with a good, high-tech job, pulling in a 6 figure income. And she still is. She taught me how to cook, how to clean, how to fold my t-shirts correctly, how to love and give and have hope and faith, when all I could see was looming disaster. It wasn’t just her, I know that. God was behind it all, and so was His church, praying and pulling and counseling and singing, and a lot more. When I came back home, I came back with two coolers of food; the sisters had cooked and baked and packaged and frozen so much food that I’m still eating it in January. But she was the face of Jesus in my life, mostly; the living, breathing one I could see and touch and kiss and talk to and pray with and sing with, and live life with. And then she wasn’t.

And I’m still grieving. A lot. I think I cried harder than ever a couple of days ago. I finally got up the nerve (out of necessity) to balance the checkbook that had gone undone since before she died. She always wrote the checks and kept it up-to-date. As I faced pages and pages of her handwriting, thinking of the countless hours she labored at that, for me, for us…. And I still can’t quite put back up the pictures of her that I took down from the walls and shelves to take to the memorial service; I’ll cry for days, probably.

But I’m busy now. I can’t even list all the stuff I’m doing these days. The other morning I tried making a list of just the stuff I’d done before noon, and it filled up a whole page of paper, and I think I forgot some of it before I could write it down. The busy-ness helps. Some. Sometimes. One thing I felt the Lord impressed on me in the first couple of weeks was from I Corinthians 7:35 “serving the Lord without distraction”. I think, I hope, some/most/all of what I’m doing is that. Likely I’ve erred in some ways. But if I am doing that, then I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing. But I am also “supposed to be” grieving. Hey, I AM grieving. I miss her really bad! So part of my “doing” is weeping with Jesus. Jesus wept. I know there’s a song there, if I can just get deep enough to hear it. And Anna, a prophetess, as recorded in Luke 2:37, served the Lord night and day in the temple with fasting and prayer. I want to do that too. I’m very much less successful at that than some of the other things so far. Hopefully I’ll grow.

But grief HURTS! And it doesn’t just “go away” and time doesn’t always heal everything. I think tears heal. I think they start to fill in the huge empty place where she used to be, so that it doesn’t feel so big and empty. Maybe this is the bottle God has that He is filling with my tears.

Anyway, I need to sleep. The 4 necessities of life during grief: D = drink, E = eat, E = exercise, R = rest. Oh dear. Can’t even do that right without His help. And it’s “only” been 3 ½ months… When will I feel “normal” again? What is “normal”? When will I laugh again? I have already. When will I love again? I think I do already, in some ways more than ever. Now more than ever I NEED to love; I need to live, for Him. So I will see Him. And then I will see her again too. And then the grieving will be over.

I was thinking about activity and forests today. The Bible says that God gives perfect peace to those whose mind is stayed on Him. I was thinking about forests in connection with that peace, because to me forests are almost like the perfect, earthly embodiment of peace. Unless, of course, you’re there in a wind / lightning storm. But I’m talking about walking through a lush forest with tall trees above you, the ferns beside and below you, flowers and shrubs dotted here and there, or maybe wide stands of lush blossoms, peeking through the tall trunks, small rustlings of forest creatures at times, and the call of birds from somewhere high overhead. And yet, if you think about the biology of a forest, and even more so, the microbiology and chemistry of the living things in the forest, there is a TON of activity going on there. There are furious chemical factories breaking down and reassembling proteins and huge molecules out of simple sugars and water and minerals. Cells grow, divide, change, die, move. Buds and branches, twigs and leaves, fruit and seeds sprout out, grow and mature. There are bacteria, fungi, and microbes of every description multiplying, dividing, moving, and working in every little nook and cranny. Plants and trees are moving huge volumes of water, minerals and nutrients from the soil, extracting them and moving them upward and outward to every leaf and tiny twig. Then there are the animals, from the worms and decomposers and bugs, insects, rodents, snakes, squirrels, foxes, raccoons, coyotes, birds, hawks, and on and on. Most are silent, some make those rustling noises, some are more vocal, but all busy (even if they are just watching, waiting, biding their time).

So, what’s my point? I started wondering about God’s peace in the midst of a flurry of activity, of TODO lists, and multi-tasking, of appointments and meetings and shopping and chores and … and … and wondering, “Am I abiding in God’s peace in all this?” or am I deceiving myself and just frantically doing my own will, trying to find peace and satisfaction in the multitude of my doings?

I’m not sure I know for sure (yet). But reflecting on the forest helped me, because I think I/we often have a confused picture of what “peace” really is. Peace is not the same as tranquility. Jesus was at peace with His Father always. And yet there was often furious activity around Him. He was likely often working quite actively in His carpentry shop. The press of ministry to thousands and multitudes around Him. Not to mention the Roman soldiers mocking, spitting, beating, torturing Him. And yet He had peace in all of that.

And the forest has peace as well. Every piece of that vast puzzle is in its right place; each living thing is doing what it was designed to do; responding to the innate Will of its Creator, given from the beginning. Even though marred by our sin, subject to decay and futility, yet God’s purposes remain and are being carried out, day by day.

So, what about MY life? Am I in that perfect peace of the forest, of Jesus, of being in my Father’s Will? I can’t judge by my level of activity (or not). I can’t judge by the thoughts going through my head, as I whirl around through my responsibilities. I can only judge by that still, small voice, nudging me this way and that way, guiding me, IF I’ll pay attention, into the perfect path of His Will. I can’t even judge by “success” or “failure”, because often my greatest failure will (finally) form a new piece of Jesus’ character in my flawed and broken heart, as I get up and return to Him, with fervent pleas for forgiveness and restoration.

And, so, finally, it has to be my earnest plea, and my honest and deepest faith, that only God can judge, that only He can do that work in me, that only His very life within me results in that perfect peace, because only He is the Prince of Peace.

Scriptures:

1. Romans 5:1 Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ:
2. Isaiah 26:3 Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee: because he trusteth in thee.
3. Ephesians 2:14 For he is our peace, who hath made both one, and hath broken down the middle wall of partition between us;
4. Isaiah 9:6 For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.