The Big "C"
It's time for the Big Reveal. If The Big "C" is not about cancer, then what is the Big "C"?
Well, cancer is a little "c." It's just a circumstance. It has posed some challenges. But it has also been the vehicle of great blessings--and I'm not even done with it yet.
The Big "C" is Christ, the Name above all names, the One who can make and keep cancer a little "c" in my life, in anyone's life.
Many have remarked in the comments, through e-mail, and in person upon "Amy's faith." Something along the lines of "It's so strong. . ."
I know that, universally, all of these comments are meant to encourage and support, and I do receive them gratefully as love. But now it's half-time, and I want to clarify something:
There is nothing about me that has created this faith, that is responsible for this faith, that should be admired for this faith.
There is nothing I know about God that you cannot know.
Nothing I experience with or in God that you cannot experience.
God loves you as much as God loves me, and His desire is for you to know and experience that love.
Some of you already know God and have a relationship with Him such that you've been able to relate to a lot of what I've written.
Some of you are simply not interested. You've got your reasons. Fine.
But some of you, I do believe, are interested. There's curiosity there. Maybe some wonder, some yearning. Maybe there's some pain that could really use the kindness of a Savior. This Half Time post is for you.
*********
The message is this:
God created a perfect world. Then sin entered the world through the sin of one man, and all of creation suffered the consequences. There's no point in being annoyed with that first man because we all know that if he hadn't messed it up, we would have. All fall short of the glory of God--we're all imperfect creatures walking around in an imperfect world.
The worst part about our fallen state is one that we're not even naturally aware of--that our sin interrupts our relationship with God. We can't have unity with a perfect God on this side of Heaven if we are imperfect, and we can't be unified with a perfect God on the other side, either, if we are imperfect.
Cut off from our Creator. Forever. The wage of sin is death, and you and I earn that wage every day.
But there is a free gift offered by God: eternal life through Jesus Christ.
How's that?
Way back, just moments after that first sin, God promised to send a Savior through Whom people could be restored to a relationship with God.
The Bible, among other things, is a series of stories of how God worked in people's lives to communicate His love, and these stories, again and again, presented symbols and pictures of the coming Savior.
God delivered His people out of Egypt, and the symbol He used was lamb's blood.
He gave a ritual law to His people in which He described what their yearly animal sacrifice should look like--to atone for their sins, they were to shed the blood of an innocent lamb. This was a symbol of what Jesus would become.
He spoke through His prophets with specific descriptions of who, what and where the Savior would be.
Then Jesus was born. He lived a quiet life until the age of about 30. He had a public ministry of preaching and miracle working for about 3 years. Then He was crucified by Roman decree and when He died, He completed an earthly life during which He had not sinned. He was that innocent lamb. He was buried in a tomb. Then His body resurrected from the grave and He appeared--to various women, then to His other friends, then to whole crowds of people.
And now there can be "eternal life through Jesus Christ." That is, if you believe that Jesus' death on the cross was the atoning sacrifice for your sins--that He paid the price for your sins with His death--and you believe that God resurrected Him from the dead, then God no longer sees you as an imperfect sinner.
Instead, God sees you as someone whose sins have all been covered, have all been paid for by Jesus' sacrifice. And you can have unity with Him--here on Earth, and after you die, in Heaven, too.
I write all this out because I don't want to assume that everyone knows the basic Christian Gospel. If you are one of those who is interested in the "God stuff," well, there it is. I hope I said enough to lay out the basic story, and I hope I have not said too much. . .
The best place for you to begin from here--for us all to begin, actually--is with 2 steps.
1. Talk to God. The only prayers He listens to are the honest ones. So if your prayer starts with, "I don't even know whether I believe in you or what I believe about you . . ." then that's the prayer to say.
2. Read the Bible. If you don't have one, you can read online at www.biblegateway.com , or you can stop by a bookstore, or you can e-mail me and I'll send you one.
You can start at the beginning and read straight through if you're feeling ambitious.
Or you can start with one of the biographies of Jesus' life: These are Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
If you really like a lot of symbols and poetic language, start with John. If you want a straight-forward, nuts and bolts, Life of Jesus, start with Mark. If you want the accounts that have most of the famous stories of Jesus, including His amazing Sermon on the Mount and most of His parables, read Matthew and Luke.
And as you do these 2 things, be ready to see how God grows faith in you. Be ready to hear His voice. Be ready to get to know your Creator.
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Half Time Remarks: Part 2 of 3
The Difficult Parts
I haven't written too much about the tough spots of this experience because
a) my parents are reading this and the whole thing is hard enough for them already and
b) complaining doesn't make for good art.
But I'm writing a bit about them now because
a) they are part of the experience and I don't want to lose them and
b) you've all been assuming that this has been hard, so why not fill in the details?
1. Chemotherapy
Dr. Science told me, on that first day of chemotherapy, "It's not that bad."
I've seen for myself and can now judge: This is like the OBGYN who tells women that labor doesn't hurt "that much."
I'm going to suggest a different statement for his use. "The physical toll of chemotherapy is not that bad." It's not. I had a drug to manage all the physical side effects with the exception of the hair loss and the styes. (One of which I still have.)
But the hair loss is not a big deal to me, and the styes are not too much to bear.
The difficult part of chemotherapy is the emotional toll. It sent me into menopause, which wrecked havoc with my hormones and my sleep cycle, so already I wasn't going to be managing the emotional content with a whole lot of sanity.
Given all this, undergoing chemotherapy itself was just a sad, sad thing. I have a feeling it's a feminine response to feel this way. The men under 50 in the chemo barn had a completely different countenance about them. They'd sit with their laptops, working away, checking their pagers and cell phones and watches, coming off their drips with a chipper step, on their way back to work as though a stop through the chemo barn was nothing more than an extra-long stop at the Barber shop.
Was it just a brave front for them? Or is this just how men meet the physical challenge?
Because, to me, it mostly felt like a physical assault. And I'd just try to distract myself from what was happening in the chemo barn, and how it left me in the days afterwards.
2. Physical Deformity
I've written a lot about this thus far. On the one hand, it's not a big deal. It doesn't hurt. It doesn't impair any function. If I dress a certain way, no one need even know about it.
But Bryan and I know about it. And there's no escaping that intrusion.
3. A Husband's Helplessness
I've said nearly nothing about Bryan's handling of his wife's cancer. This is partly because he decided to handle it by being stalwart throughout. I would ask him now and again how he was doing and he'd say, with great sincerity, something very reasonable and calm and supportive.
And on those many, many moments when I'd cry at the end of a day, he'd hug me and say, "It won't always be like this." That was always a great comfort to me.
The struggle, for him, leaked out in little ways, harmless ones: He's been doing many projects around the house ever since the diagnosis, and in the last 4 months, he has purchased 3 firearms. . .
This past week, that season for being stalwart ended. Something about the chemo being over with has signaled to us both that the worst parts are finished. And he finally let loose with all he's held onto. We both just cried and cried and cried together. He hates that he wasn't able to "do" anything to save me from these worst parts.
I told him, of course, that his love and support for me and help with the kids was all I needed. That I did not need to be saved from, just helped through. He can believe me with his head, but the man in him can't really believe that in his heart. And that's just his own grief to bear.
Here's the part where a lot of people would say that their marriage is stronger because of the struggle, or somesuch. How the chief Good Thing to come out of the cancer walk is new-found love or commitment or realization of love. I completely believe how that is true of many people's experiences.
But Bryan and I are kind of like, "Eh, we could have done without this."
The chief Good Thing to come out of this cancer walk, I do believe, will be in a different department.
4. The End of Chemotherapy
In all the little booklets about How to do Chemo, no one ever mentioned the deep sadness that comes when it's all over.
But there's grief here, all right.
Something about. . . the excitement waning. Since early June, I have been She Who Has Cancer, and now I'm not. You might think I'm jumping the gun, after all, there's radiation ahead and we wouldn't do that if I didn't have cancer.
But, I really sense somehow that I'm not sick anymore. And we're doing the radiation, in my mind, because it's standard course and I'm a good patient.
So it's time to get back to our life. I cancelled our account with the Merry Maids and we all cleaned our house together yesterday. I had to ask Bryan the other day, "What did I used to do with my time before I was diagnosed?"--because since then, my time has been spent at medical appointments or in recovery or in a state of fatigue.
What does normal feel like?
It's an adjustment. And there were several days there when I felt like I didn't want to go back to being Amy Ponce!, superhero of the Every Day.
God has been showing me what our new old life should look like. It's exciting to have new plans. By the time my hair grows back in, I'm sure I'll be just fine with the Every Day.
I haven't written too much about the tough spots of this experience because
a) my parents are reading this and the whole thing is hard enough for them already and
b) complaining doesn't make for good art.
But I'm writing a bit about them now because
a) they are part of the experience and I don't want to lose them and
b) you've all been assuming that this has been hard, so why not fill in the details?
1. Chemotherapy
Dr. Science told me, on that first day of chemotherapy, "It's not that bad."
I've seen for myself and can now judge: This is like the OBGYN who tells women that labor doesn't hurt "that much."
I'm going to suggest a different statement for his use. "The physical toll of chemotherapy is not that bad." It's not. I had a drug to manage all the physical side effects with the exception of the hair loss and the styes. (One of which I still have.)
But the hair loss is not a big deal to me, and the styes are not too much to bear.
The difficult part of chemotherapy is the emotional toll. It sent me into menopause, which wrecked havoc with my hormones and my sleep cycle, so already I wasn't going to be managing the emotional content with a whole lot of sanity.
Given all this, undergoing chemotherapy itself was just a sad, sad thing. I have a feeling it's a feminine response to feel this way. The men under 50 in the chemo barn had a completely different countenance about them. They'd sit with their laptops, working away, checking their pagers and cell phones and watches, coming off their drips with a chipper step, on their way back to work as though a stop through the chemo barn was nothing more than an extra-long stop at the Barber shop.
Was it just a brave front for them? Or is this just how men meet the physical challenge?
Because, to me, it mostly felt like a physical assault. And I'd just try to distract myself from what was happening in the chemo barn, and how it left me in the days afterwards.
2. Physical Deformity
I've written a lot about this thus far. On the one hand, it's not a big deal. It doesn't hurt. It doesn't impair any function. If I dress a certain way, no one need even know about it.
But Bryan and I know about it. And there's no escaping that intrusion.
3. A Husband's Helplessness
I've said nearly nothing about Bryan's handling of his wife's cancer. This is partly because he decided to handle it by being stalwart throughout. I would ask him now and again how he was doing and he'd say, with great sincerity, something very reasonable and calm and supportive.
And on those many, many moments when I'd cry at the end of a day, he'd hug me and say, "It won't always be like this." That was always a great comfort to me.
The struggle, for him, leaked out in little ways, harmless ones: He's been doing many projects around the house ever since the diagnosis, and in the last 4 months, he has purchased 3 firearms. . .
This past week, that season for being stalwart ended. Something about the chemo being over with has signaled to us both that the worst parts are finished. And he finally let loose with all he's held onto. We both just cried and cried and cried together. He hates that he wasn't able to "do" anything to save me from these worst parts.
I told him, of course, that his love and support for me and help with the kids was all I needed. That I did not need to be saved from, just helped through. He can believe me with his head, but the man in him can't really believe that in his heart. And that's just his own grief to bear.
Here's the part where a lot of people would say that their marriage is stronger because of the struggle, or somesuch. How the chief Good Thing to come out of the cancer walk is new-found love or commitment or realization of love. I completely believe how that is true of many people's experiences.
But Bryan and I are kind of like, "Eh, we could have done without this."
The chief Good Thing to come out of this cancer walk, I do believe, will be in a different department.
4. The End of Chemotherapy
In all the little booklets about How to do Chemo, no one ever mentioned the deep sadness that comes when it's all over.
But there's grief here, all right.
Something about. . . the excitement waning. Since early June, I have been She Who Has Cancer, and now I'm not. You might think I'm jumping the gun, after all, there's radiation ahead and we wouldn't do that if I didn't have cancer.
But, I really sense somehow that I'm not sick anymore. And we're doing the radiation, in my mind, because it's standard course and I'm a good patient.
So it's time to get back to our life. I cancelled our account with the Merry Maids and we all cleaned our house together yesterday. I had to ask Bryan the other day, "What did I used to do with my time before I was diagnosed?"--because since then, my time has been spent at medical appointments or in recovery or in a state of fatigue.
What does normal feel like?
It's an adjustment. And there were several days there when I felt like I didn't want to go back to being Amy Ponce!, superhero of the Every Day.
God has been showing me what our new old life should look like. It's exciting to have new plans. By the time my hair grows back in, I'm sure I'll be just fine with the Every Day.
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