A New Cancer: Lymphoma and Faith

So I have cancer one more time.

Based on what my doctor said, it's an easier one this time. I doubt lymphoma is always less dangerous than leukemia, but in my case, it is. This is Little League compared to the Big League version of leukemia I had.

I get to face chemo at home, here in Memphis with my brothers and sisters, though the final authorities on my treatment will be the stem cell transplant team at Vanderbilt in Nashville.

How Should I React?

Hearts are tricky. We have to guard our heart because out of it come the wellsprings of life, but we cannot trust it. Without the daily exhortation of the saints, the craftiness of sin will disguise bad as good and make our hearts unmalleable.

For me, cancer has been the great revealer. Leukemia answered questions about my heart that nothing else could have. Do I believe what I teach, that it is far better to depart and be with the King, or will I shrink in terror when death comes near? As it turns out, physical death came and breathed in my face, and I smiled at him. He found nothing in me, and he went his way.

I told people that if they were faithful in the little things, that if they bit their lip when they wanted to insult, that if they gave way when they wanted to step forward, that if they eschewed glory rather than pursuing it, that all the little acts of faithfulness would give them strength for the big acts of faithfulness.

I repeated Amy Carmichael's words: "In acceptance lieth peace." I repeated Watchman Nee's teaching that the circumstances that come to us are God's chisel, molding us to fit precisely into his eternal temple.

But I had no way of knowing whether I believed those words until I was writhing in pain on a hospital bed, in honest gratefulness that I might be delivered from my soft American ways and be a soldier in God's kingdom.

So here comes the chisel again, shaping the hardness of my heart to the power of his will, making me fit into the stones that surround me in the wall of the temple of God.

Such chiseling, shaping, and smoothing does not come by prayer or discipline. It comes by troubles and suffering.

Mia Hamm, the great women's soccer player, once said that the image of a champion is not holding a trophy aloft, but bent over, gasping for breath, and drenched in sweat long after everyone else has gone home.

The picture of the faithful saint does not consist of the sweat of labor, but of songs through tears and cries of praise in the midst of groaning. It is joy in suffering, and as Paul and Silas proved, that joy and those songs shake the earth and set the captives free.

We don't have to make the best of the suffering that comes our way. It already is the best. We just need to embrace it.

"May all who come behind us find us faithful."—Steve Green.

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The Nature of Inspiration

Some days I write on the blog because it's wise to keep it going. Yesterday was one of those days where it was good to just get a blog post up.

Today I'm writing because of things I'm thinking about, both humorous and profound.

On the humorous side, I saw my blood counts this morning. Those blood-building shots work REALLY well on me.

The Neulasten shot I got Saturday was meant to prevent my white blood cell counts (WBC) from getting too low. Low would be if my WBC dropped below 4,000. Even 4,000 wouldn't be too bad. Keeping it above 1,000 or 2,000 so that my neutrophils wouldn't drop below 500 would be sufficient. (Neutrophils are one of the white blood cells, so the Absolute Neutrophil Count, or ANC, is a portion of the WBC.)

My white blood cell count is 25,300. My neutrophil count is 24,000.

I guess we're okay for now.

Jerry's News

I just got a text from Rayetta, Jerry's wife, letting me know that he's in getting the first dose of his consolidation round of chemo. His meds are a little different than mine were, but the main one, Cytarabine or something close to that, is the same.

It shouldn't affect him for a couple days unless there's an initial reaction.

No news on Dump's heart problem yet. I suspect he's still researching it. On Wednesday, I think I'll visit the infusion center and see if they'll let Jerry have a visit from me.

My News

I was wrong yesterday. They're not trying to undo the effects of last week's chemo. They're really just trying to keep my counts up even while the chemo is working. So there's this battle going on right now between the Cytabarine and whatever else I got last week and the Neulasta shot I got on Saturday.

Since my neutrophil count is 24,000, we're actually waiting for it to go down, not up. Sometime in the next 2-3 weeks, my WBC should stabilize at a much lower number, then go up.

At that point I get switched to "priority" status, and I get a two-day evaluation from the transplant team.

The nurse told me this morning that it's possible to go from the two-day evaluation to the beginning of the transplant treatment in one week.

So I am on the fast track.

Hopefully Going Just a Little Deeper ...

Last night, my aunt put the following on Facebook:

Following my nephew's blog through my gmail has made it possible to keep up with his journey through Leukemia without coming to facebook on a daily basis ~ which was helpful during the last month while spending so much more time on caring for lil JJ and her 'bad bug'. Paul Pavao keeps me inspired, especially when I get to feeling that this 'is all too much for me'

I had a cousin in a dangerous motorcycle wreck recently. My grandmother, age 88, is in ICU right now with pneumonia. My aunt, who's caring for a small child with a "bad bug," is over 70. I wrote recently about a teenage girl with a virus that has paralyzed her from the neck down.

In the meantime, I'm typing blogs, exercising, helping home school my children, meeting new people, and praying about my best role in building the body of Christ in a new city.

Not exactly deep suffering.

Yes, I might have a time bomb inside me waiting to go off and send me to unhindered fellowship with the Spirit of God, but since the grace of God has ensured that we've spent no time worrying about such blessings, there's just not a lot of suffering going on.

But, if my story is going to inspire people doing worthwhile work, like my aunt with her great granddaughter, then I intend to keep writing. This isn't about me overcoming. This is about us overcoming.

A friend visited yesterday and spent some time talking about the care that God has for people. If Jesus Christ was willing to die and suffer for us, then he attached some great importance to us. (I know there's plenty of Americans who don't believe Jesus was God's Son nor that he died for us, but this is addressed to those who do.)

Personally, I believe our potential is very close to unlimited. Most of us just need to know that our efforts have a decent chance of producing results.

They do.

To me, Jesus didn't die because we're so wicked that God's anger had to be appeased by his death. To me, Jesus died because we were hopeless, helpless, and powerless on our own. How many of us don't know how to break our addictions, our laziness, our daily habits, and the feeling that we're just not that important in the great scheme of things?

So we go on and on, not knowing how to change.

Jesus died to turn the sons and daughters of men into the sons and daughters of God.

Jesus died to enable us to do what we thought we couldn't do. He died to make our dreams, wishes, and hopes of being a positive, powerful, life-transforming influence on those who meet us a reality.

So if I can inspire just a few other people to be hopeful, empowered, and influential, then I want to do that. This isn't about me going through some great endeavor and succeeding. This is about us going through whatever the Lord God Almighty has put in front of us, never giving up, and coming out on the other side with the rewards we never dared believe we could get.

We always thought those were for other people.

But they're for us.

July 12: A Proper Outlook on Life

I had a Facebook exchange with a friend of mine who is paralyzed from the waist down. That didn't happen too awful long ago.

He told me about a guy who went through what we both went through. He was in a car accident on the way to chemotherapy!!!

Wow.

I thought about it because I, of course, am thinking about writing some books. I still want to write Thrilled to Death as a book (don't steal my title; God will judge you).

This has nothing to do with this
post, but it's cute! My daughter Leilani.
Yeah, she's double-jointed.

Anyway, I was thinking about writing about dealing with "tragedy," and I pictured someone asking, "That's fine for you to say, who merely had to deal with leukemia and chemotherapy, but what about some really terrible tragedies like some horrific child abuse stories I've heard or child sex trafficking?"

I know a kid who was burned over most of his body. What he went through and is going through cannot be compared to my light affliction.

Does my advice apply to them?

I don't know. I don't think good advice should be set aside because of the cases where I have no room to talk or any business saying anything. I'll give that young boy with burns the floor any day of the week, and I will let God Almighty give his own explanations for why there's occasionally horrific suffering in the world.

But if you've merely been laid off or are feeling bad about your life, then I do have advice: There's a better way to live.

Sure, it involves losing your current life and actually following Christ (rather than merely saying nice things about him), but isn't the complaint that most sad, disappointed, and angry people have ... isn't their complaint that their life has gone wrong, anyway?

I recommend giving you life to Jesus even if nothing's gone wrong. He's the maker of all things, including your life. How can it possibly not be right to trust him?

Richard Dawkins, Used with permission

If you're an atheist who doesn't believe Jesus is the maker of all things, I'm not talking to you. There will be other posts, I'm sure, in which you're the audience, but I don't expect an atheist to believe anything I just said.

Though God expects atheists to heed that feeling inside that causes you to want to bow down and worship when you see the majesty of creation. Richard Dawkins, a current leading atheist bulldog, said he and everyone else feels that.

That's because there's a real "heaven" from which such feelings come.