My song for 2009 Christmas season

Each year, I seem to get some silly Christmas song in my mind.  Last year, it was “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch.”  This year, it’s this little classic. So, I thought I would share it with you. Enjoy.

Home from the hospital

Well, I am home.  I still feel pretty drugged up and everything I wrote in the previous blog still holds.  I am exhausted and simply worn out.  Pray that God will restore my strength at this time.

How does one keep one’s faith when heavily drugged?

Richard Wurmbrand, the founder of The Voice of the Martyrs, readily admitted that of all of the tortures that he faced, it was the use of drugs by his persecutors that he found the most difficult. When I first read that over 12 years ago, I could not grasp the truth of what he was referring to, especially not when I had read of the horrific physical tortures that he had endured.

Now, as I struggle to write each line of this blog, I understand Pastor Wurmbrand’s words far better.

Right now I am in hospital undergoing radiation treatment. My doctor is hoping to shrink cancerous lymph nodes in my lower back and pelvic region that have increased in size and are pressing against nerves, causing a great deal of pain.

To counter this pain, I am taking painkillers that are increasingly hindering my ability to think clearly. Emotionally, these drugs are making me fragile and insecure, and my inability to remember details is only reinforcing this.

Yes, I can understand why Pastor Wurmbrand felt that drugs were the greatest challenge that he had faced in his years of torture. You find yourself in a position when you wonder how successful you are really being in controlling your mind, mouth, or emotions. You simply don’t know. You fear what you might have said but which you cannot remember. You cannot remember Bible verses that were once precious to you. You cannot remember things that you know you should know (right now, for example, I cannot remember how many years Pastor Wurmbrand was in prison. I should know this and I could look it up, but it is good that you know what I am referring to. I simply do not remember if it was 12 or 14 years).

When drugged up, you find it harder to retain one’s confession of faith and truth when you cannot control your tongue. Of course, I am sure of God’s faithfulness at times like this. But drugs make you wonder what is real was real and what was drug-induced. Perhaps your past faithfulness was just a ruse. Guilt becomes a constant companion.

To that end, I ask you to pray for me during this time. More importantly, pray for Christian prisoners who undergo such drug-induced torture daily. For me, there is hope that it will end soon. For many of them, there is no such hope.

Cry for help on a Sunday morning

Woke up at 5:30 this morning when my roommate decided that he needed to have his light on. Thankfully, he obliged when I asked him to turn it off. What amazes me are people who think that it would have have been a good idea to begin with. I could not tell what he as doing that required illumination.

But that kind of ruined my night, especially as the pain in my legs and thighs began to increase in earnest. As I write this, I am trying to supplement my regular pain killers with boluses every 30 minutes. Not helping much. “God help me!” is the only cry that I can utter right now. It is probably all I need to pray. It is sound and honours Him.

I am struck by the people who are trying to help my roommate. It think it is his wife or girlfriend right now. She is literally bombarding him with questions. Not surprisingly, he is not answering most of them. I am sure that deep inside, he is simply saying, “Please be quiet and just be here for me. I will ask if I need something.” I am sure she is well-meaning though. But care-giving is a gift, not a natural talent for fallen human beings, it seems to me. Perhaps it can be training but the best are those who just seem to know how to do it, I’ve met a few people like this and I have to be careful not to measure everyone else against them. That would be grossly unfair, wouldn’t it?

In the hospital

I ended up in the hospital yesterday after I woke up and found that the drugs that I had been given for the pain were far too strong.  Denita took my in for my first radiation treatment but then they checked me into the oncology ward to get my drug regiment until control.  I was also undergoing a lot of pain from the radiation treatment.  Frankly, I don’t remember a lot about yesterday.

So, here I sit.  The pain in my legs is under control, but my head is sill a bit fuzzy. 

On Monday, I pick up with the radiation treatment that they hope will shrink the lymph nodes that are pressing up against my nerves.  I really hope that this gets to the bottom of the problem.  I really do.

Thank you for your prayers.

Prodded, poked, and then zapped

As we are seeking to get to the bottom of what is causing me such pain in my bottom, it would appear that my lymph nodes in my abdomen are pressing in on some nerves causing me the pain that I have been experiencing over the past three weeks. So, starting tomorrow morning at 8:30, I will be beginning a round of radiation treatment that will last for five days. The doctors hope that this will shrink the nodes and ease up the pressure on my nerves, which would sure be nice. I must confess that this constant pain, though it waxes and wanes and is by far the most severe in the mornings, has really been hard on me emotionally.

It is amazing, of course, that we have been able to get these appointments so quickly. God’s hand is certainly at work in this.

But I am growing tired of going from one crisis to another with few breaks in between. I am saddened by changes in my life that I know have needed to be made but which leave me feeling like I will never be able to reach my potential. I watch how all of this wears my wife down and it hurts me to see her so tired and so burdened. Yes, we agreed to be in this “for better or for worse” but I would have liked to have given her more of the “for better.” And every time I start feeling good again and hope rises anew that perhaps I might be able to live out a little more of my life with some degree of normality, then I am struck down again with another affliction.

Yes, I am whining a bit. But is that so wrong from time to time?

It does mean that we need your prayers in the days to come. Please pray that this radiation treatment really will address this pain.

Shakespeare on Twitter

"I cry out to you, O God, but you do not answer."

As part of my daily devotional practice over the past few months, I have been reading a chapter or two from Mike Mason’s book The Gospel According to Job. This morning’s reading was especially helpful to me in light of my present circumstances. For those of you who have been reading my personal blog, you will have known that I have been experiencing severe pain in my lower torso and left leg for over two weeks. Job’s words in 30:20 have been my cry as well, just as I know that they are the cry of God’s persecuted children worldwide. I hope that you find these words a blessing as I have.

True Prayer
"I cry out to you, O God, but you do not answer." (30:20)

In the Bible we often read of people "crying out to the Lord." But what does it mean to "cry out"? Does it mean to express oneself demurely to God, with polite restraint, using the well-worn, time-honored phrases of the conventional prayer meeting? Or do the words "cry out" suggest more the sort of sound a man might make whose legs have just been caught up in a piece of machinery? "Surely [God] will save you from the fowler's snare;" sings the psalmist (91:3). A snare is a leghold trap, a contrivance designed to catch an animal and hold it until it dies of shock or starvation, condemning it in the meanwhile to hopeless struggle and horror. Is this not the sort of situation that might bring a human being to the point of crying out to God?

There is no true prayer without agony. Perhaps this is the problem in many of our churches. What little prayer we have is shallow, timid, carefully censored, and full of oratorical flourishes and hot air. There is little agony in it, and therefore little honesty or humility. We seem to think that the Lord is like everyone else we know, and that He cannot handle real honesty. So we put on our Sunday best to visit Him, and when we return home and take off our fancy duds we are left alone with what is underneath: the dirty underwear of hypocrisy.

Why do we flatly refuse to bring real emotions to our prayer meetings? Do we think that the public humbling of ourselves before the Lord should always be a pretty and an enjoyable thing? Do we think the Lord is only honored so long as our own public image and personal dignity are in no way compromised? But the truth is just the opposite: only when we ourselves are prepared to lose face can the Lord's face begin to shine through. It is for Him to exalt us; our part is to humble ourselves. "If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land" (2 Chron. 7:14).

Even in our private prayers, let alone in our public ones, we Christians have a way of tiptoeing around the throne of God as if He were an invalid or a doddering old man. But who do we think we are kidding? The Lord always knows exactly what we are feeling. He knows all there is to know about us. There is not a shadow of doubt or anger or hate in our hearts but God sees it. So why not just lay all our cards on the table? Real prayer is playing straight with God. If we have never cried out to the Lord, perhaps it is because we have not realized the true horror of our situation. We need to be careful that we do not grow so preoccupied with maintaining our spiritual equilibrium that we regard it as unseemly to cry out to God.

At bottom, probably what we are most afraid of in prayer is that no answer will come, and that then we will be left worse off than before. But true prayer has two parts: first there is the crying out, and then there is the waiting for an answer. If we are the sort of people who insist on having instant answers, then we shall certainly lack the courage to cry out. Though we might continue to go through the motions of prayer, we will have given up on the real thing.

Towards the end of the book of Jeremiah, the nation of Judah was on its last legs. It had been conquered by the Babylonians, and most of its people had been led away into captivity. Only a small remnant was left under the puppet governor Gedaliah. But when Gedaliah was assassinated by a rebel, suddenly even these survivors were in peril, for everyone knew that a brutal reprisal could be expected from the Babylonians. So what were they to do? What they did, surprisingly, was to go to the prophet Jeremiah and beg him to consult the Lord for them. Furthermore they bound themselves to obey God's Word no matter what. Their situation was desperate. They were crying out. Jeremiah agreed to pray for them.

At this point, we read one of the most astounding understatements in the Bible: "Ten days later the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah" (42:7). Imagine! Ten days later! Who could possibly wait ten days under such circumstances? Did the Lord not understand that this was a dire emergency? After ten days, naturally, the people had already made up their minds to ignore God's answer and to do exactly what they felt like doing: run like crazy down to Egypt. When the pressure was on, they performed the first requirement of prayer admirably: they cried out to the Lord. But for the second half of prayer they had no stomach. They could not wait for an answer.

[Mike Mason, The Gospel According to Job. Crossway, 1994: 309-310. Available to order from The Voice of the Martyrs]

The latest news

It’s been a while since we did a thorough update on my health and that’s not because things have been uneventful.  So here goes….

While my haemoglobin and energy levels have been excellent, I have been experiencing a great deal of pain in my left hip and leg for the past two weeks.  We wondered if perhaps it was unrelated to my cancer and just a matter of something being out in my back. However, Dr. Sauls, our main doctor, suspects that lymph nodes in my torso are pushing and pinching a nerve that is sending this shooting pain down my leg.  Hence, he has increased my prednisone levels to see if the nodes will shrink down and next week we will be perhaps looking at radiation treatment.  He has ordered an MRI for next week as well to see if he can see where the problem really is. 

In the meantime, I am on increased painkillers and daily seeing a chiropractor to deal with the pain.  Mornings are horrendous, I must say. The pain is sometimes almost unbearable.

So, we would very much appreciate your prayers in the coming days.  This has been quite a discouraging turn of events I must confess.  It really feels sometimes like we never get a break for very long and we would like to get off of this rollercoaster.  Pray that the Lord will keep our spirits up and close to His at this time.  He has been faithful and we want to be faithful to Him even when we don’t understand what He is doing.

Riboflavin