Elizabeth Moll Stalcup

The last days of Ralph Oliver Moll

Last night we were told that my dad has days or weeks to live. He is in a nursing home in West Covina, 20 miles east of Los Angeles.  For the last week, I have been trying to move him to Virgina so he will not be alone but my inquiries only brought bad news. He has been refusing medical care so the doctor had not been to see him in three and a half weeks, so my question, “Can he safely be moved to Virginia?” resulted in a blood test that show nearly every component in his body is badly out of whack.  His creatin levels which should be in the teens are 180. His blood has become toxic.

It is hard to lose both parents in a month. This weekend for the first time since my mother died on August 26, I began to feel almost okay, the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach had eased and I could think of my mom without a visceral reaction.  But now that “kicked in the stomach” feeling has come back and with the yawning fatigue that seems to swallow me.

I was always so proud of my fit, healthy parents. Trim, athletic.  In the last decade our family vacations revolved around horseback riding or hiking and I wonder, when did they start to decline? With them on the west coast and me on the east, it seems I missed some crucial turning point. I wonder, was it the accident?

Less than two years ago my mother plowed into a stopped car in the middle of the freeway. I scroll through my journal and find this entry from November 25: In two days it will be two weeks since my parent’s car accident.  They were on the last leg of a thousand mile journey up to northern California to see my Aunt Barbara and Uncle Chuck, then home to L.A.  Just seven miles from home my mom noticed something funny: the tail lights of the car ahead of her were an odd color, no, the car was stopped.

Later she realized that the tail lights were not on and that the faint pink was the color of her headlights reflecting off the dark red surface of the taillights in front of her. She hit the brakes, and slide beautifully into the back of the stopped car, which then clobbered the car ahead of her. The airbags hit Mom in the face, arms and chest.

She is tiny.  At her tallest she measured five feet, two inches, and now she can’t measure five feet. She was bruised by the air bags.  Dad, in the backseat, was hurt more badly. Herein lies the rub.

We have no idea how badly he was hurt, or even what is wrong.

My father is a Christian Scientist and he not only refused medical help–or even evaluation–at the scene of the accident, he has bravely? stubbornly? continued to refuse medical help.  In his world seeing a doctor is cheating. It invalidates your prayers, pulls back the healing that was on its way. My mom was too shocked, too bruised to disoriented to call at first, but three days after the accident, she called to say that she was sore, but that Dad was in bed most of the day, eating little and in great pain.  I am 3000 miles away and found it almost impossible to picture my dad in bed. Although he has not seen a doctor in over 40 years, he seems to be the picture of health, espescialy for someone who will be 80 in March. He plays, or should I say played? tennis every morning, returning the ball with such vigor that I only see a florescent green blur zip by my field of vision before I can move my racket to the right side of my body.  He has not been out since the accident. We children, long past middle age ourselves, wonder, What is wrong? Ruptured spleen? If so, he has survived it. Broken bones? He told my sister on the phone that his arm, “Does not work.” Broken collarbone? That would make sense.

He says that right before the collision, he moved forward in the seat–probably an attempt to grab the wheel, a reflex from years of teaching people how to drive–and so was thrown around quite a bit even because his seat belt was extended. When I first learned of the accident, I called several times a day, wanting to talk to him, but he was always asleep and when I asked my mom to rouse him, he waved her impatiently off and wanted to know why I was “bugging” him. Sigh.

Ever since the rest of the family decided to follow Jesus, and my dad trundled off to the Christian Science Church, it has always felt a bit like a competition.  His faith versus ours. At first he said he became a Christian Scientist because it was “demonstrable” meaning that he could see it work because he got better when he thought the “right” thoughts. When I became a rabid Chrismatic and began to see people healed dramatically, he got very quiet. I do not want to compete, but the thought of my dad in such pain, makes it hard to carry on as usual.

I wonder how he pictures God and suspects that his god must be harsh to stand at a distance and make people suffer until they can get it “right.”  Several days after the accident, he called with help from my mom. His voice did not sound familiar, it has that strained lower pitch of one in great pain. He said, simply, “I am suffering.” I was too stunned at this admission to respond. His religion has always struck me as codified denial: You never admit what you really feel, in the hopes that what you want to feel will gradually replace your true feelings. I am all about emotional honesty, owning your feeling.  I believe that my feelings reveal what I believe, if not with my whole heart, at some level, so I listen to mine and try to process any beliefs that do not ring true. I may not like what I feel; my feelings often reveal the least favorite part of my heart, that part that I wish eviscerate and cast aside, but I believe the way out is through, like diving into a wave instead turning your back and vainly hoping that it will not clobber you.

On Thanksgiving he got in the car determined to drive to his church.  My mom ran for the phone and called, breathless. She was terrified he would hurt himself or someone else.  ”He can’t turn his head much, in either direction,” she worried. “And neither arm works very well.” We prayed on the phone and within five minutes he was back, impatiently wanting my mom to help him get undressed and back in bed.  

“That was a quick answer to prayer,” my mom reported, almost giddy with relief, when she called me back.  ”He said it was ‘a dumb idea.’ Dumb indeed!”

Now we wait.

This is not a movie where some loved one will warn me, “This has a happy, or sad, ending.”  Today is day 12 with no end in sight. He has always been thin, he eats little now. I do not know what to wish for, how to pray.  Pray that he be healed and have him boast that he healed himself?  I cry out to God for divine revelation.

If God could knock Saul off his horse and blind him with brilliant light, why not my dad?  ”Please God, I pray, Show him yourself.” Maybe he already has.  Perhaps this is where my faith and my dad’s free will intersect. Not knowing what to wish for made me anxious. I pressed in close to God, got quiet so I could hear him. I began to sense that he is up to something wonderful, something that I cannot imagine, nomatter how hard I try. My siblings and I have prayed for my dad for 43 years. Recently my sisters and I began to fast and pray. Could this be the answer to our prayers?  I do not believe God would arrange a car accident so as to reach my dad. God is good. All the time. I do not believe he wants my dad to suffer. But I do think God is a master at turning everything into a greater good. The master redeemer.  Satan seemed to win when Jesus was nailed to the cross, but God had an ace in his back pocket and Jesus rose again. No, I do not think that God arranged a car on the road so my mom would run into it but I do think he may turn this to his advantage.  The enemy is not so creative.  He comes to kill, steal and destroy.  He is bad.  All the time.  His plans are more obvious.  I am praying, in a place of quiet waiting to see how God will turn this around.  Come quickly Lord.In Jesus name, Amen

A tribute to my mother

Written on September 2, 2009

In the days before my mother died, I would sit on her bed and rub her arms from shoulder to elbow, where she was often cold, and then from elbow to wrist, ending by holding hands, fingers entwined.  We would sit, hands clasps and smile at each other so glad to be together.

If she was especially cold, I would heat up her rice bag, a droopy fabric tube filled with heavy rice, in the microwave of the nursing home and put it on her feet or against her upper arms if they still felt cold to the touch.  At eighty-nice pounds and five feet tall, she was often cold.  I remembered her fretting about being overweight when I was a little girl but somewhere in her sixties she had lost 25 pounds and two inches and my recent memories were of a tiny woman who continued to shrink in every possible direction until the day she died.

She was ready to go, there is no doubt about that. The first time I saw her after I returned from Africa on August 10, she told that she was ready to go home. My sister, Kathy had moved her to Virginia on August 8, while I was in Kenya, so I thought she meant Covina, 20 miles east of Los Angeles, the town where she was born and lived almost all of her life save her college years—and the 18 days she lived in Virginia– but she meant heaven, her real home.  One week ago we buried her in Oakdale Cemetery in the nearby town of Glendora just a mile from her earthly home.

Some of my sweetest memories were forged during those eighteen days together. The time she asked, innocently, “Are we on a cruise?”  The time I leaned my head on her chest and she cradled my head with both arms while I prayed for her.  The joy on her face when I read a letter from a friend in California or when she saw the flowers my sister sent from Toronto, complete with pint-sized Muffin bear.  The time she asked shyly for my daughter’s cell phone number.  The time she thank Sarah and me for not tossing her out on the street, and we looked at each other as our eyebrows shot up: “Toss you out on the street! Of course we would never toss you out on the street!” Or the time she insisted that all of her children–including her oldest, Laurie, whose red hair has always drawn remarks–had brown hair and we laughed while she looked from me to Sarah, confused.

We thought we were bringing her to Virginia to rest and recover but she called physical therapy “torture” reducing the physical therapist to near tears.  “My mom is not like this,” I told her. “She’s a trooper. Something must be wrong.”

Something was wrong.  Her body was weak and malnourished not just from the strain of taking care of dad but from the strain of fighting cancer. We knew that two tiny pea-size spots of cancer had shown up on scans but we were told that it could be years before she felt their presence. I wanted to move her because she had been hospitalized with pneumonia and I could not bear the thought of her in the hospital alone.  They released her after drawing a liter of fluid from her lungs but we were soon to realize that she had not had pneumonia; the cancer had spread to her pleural cavity.  ”Cancer of the lungs is okay,” her doctor had said, “cancer of the pleural region is trouble.”

She was so happy to receive absolution from physical therapy. She lay in bed wiggling her toes back and forth from “Pointe” to stretch with a child-like grin, “I am exercising,” she said, proudly and we laughed and remembered the time just a few days before when she suffered from cold feet and my sister and Sarah had rubbed her feet and held her toes until she said with great enthusiasm, “I have fabulous feet!”

We have only been home from the funeral for a few days and as the plane from San Francisco touched down last Monday, and I realized that my mom is not in Virginia, I began to weep. The loss seemed inconsolable.  The next morning, Tuesday, as I drove to work I started to go straight at Fox Mill, then remembered that there was no reason to continue down the Parkway, no need to visit my mother on the way to work because she had left this earthly dwelling place and I again broke down.  Just 18 days had already altered my routines.

For the last two holidays seasons, the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas, I have taught a four-week grief seminar.  Now I watch myself, exhibit A, manifesting all the symptoms my students describe: My body has slowed down.  I often sleep or break into tears then am fine for hours as if I were not absorbing the monumental loss of my mother. The hardest part for me is not letting go of the actual person, my dear little mother, but letting go of my lost hopes and dreams.  I had always wanted my mother to come live with me, to stretch the joy we knew during holidays to the entire year, but that was not to be.

At the funeral a week ago, my sister, Kathy, and I gave the eulogy, which went like this:

Kathy: Our family would like to welcome you to our mother’s funeral, a place to remember, a celebration of her life, and a time to grieve.

Betsy: We are sad that Mom died. Even though she had battled cancer off and on again for more than 20 years, experiencing far more years with health and vigor than seasons of illness, we did not expect her to die when she did and I think all of us did not feel ready to let her go—perhaps I was more ready than my brothers and sisters because I was with Mom every day during the last two and a half weeks of her life because we had moved her to Virginia where I make my home.  My daughter, Sarah and I saw her twice on the day she died and we had no idea when we left her that afternoon that it would be the last time we saw her.

But Mom was ready to go. I dragged her to a world-class pulmonologist a week before she died and in his office she turned to me and said that she did not want to fight the cancer anymore and then, looking straight in my eyes said, “Absent from the body, present with the Lord,” and when at her words, I started to cry, she asked me simply to let her go and I said, “I am trying, but it is hard.”

Then she turned to the doctor and said, not at all unkindly, “This is the hard part . . . my family.”  She knew we were not ready.

Kathy: Mom was an amazing person, as you know, and even though we know that she in heaven where there is no tears or sorrow or pain, we are still here. We will miss her, I’ll miss her.

Betsy: I don’t think we are very good about grieving in our western culture and Christians are probably the worst because we have a hope of heaven, which tempts us to skip over our losses but today we want to take time to acknowledge our grief, to give each other permission to be sad and feel this loss. So one of our ground rules is that no one has to be brave for anyone else. In Hebrews 5:7 it says that even our Lord Jesus, during his life on earth offered up prayers and petitions with loud cries and tears; he knows what we are feeling. And we ask him to draw near, to comfort us and to carry our grief. With a nod to the Jewish side of the family, I would like to say that I think the Jewish culture does this better in that they sit Shiva for a full year, acknowledging the losses that we all experience.

So Kathy and I are going to share some of the things we will miss, some of the things we are grateful for, and some of the things we remember. Then afterwards we will have an open mic time when you can share what you remember, what you are grateful for and what you will miss.

Kathy: I’m grateful for the way my Mom –both my parents really — lived out lives of great integrity.  Mom was actively committed in politics, involved in local campaigns, and pounded the streets getting signatures. She was treasurer for the Republican Central Committee, and was recognized as 1992 Woman of the Year by the state senator. She served at church, this church for many years, volunteering, helping with the kids group every Wednesday, holding and changing babies in the nursery for many Sundays.  Many of you present know better than me how she lived out her values, and how she participated and gave of herself in very practical ways, in a way that few do.

Betsy: Mom practiced her integrity every day. I still remember at the age of about ten being sent–by Mom–back to Vons on foot to return five cents the checker gave me in error.

I am grateful that Mom stayed home with her brood of five kids. There were times when we all knew that she was not having fun—she used to threaten to string us up by our thumbs, something I could never picture–but we also remember warm cookies from the oven, hot breakfasts every morning, and the many times she let us know that raising children right was a task worthy of her full attention.

We are grateful for Mom’s sense of humor.  Mom was open, and in some ways, childlike but she was nobody’s fool to parrot my brother’s phrase. As a child, I was proud of my tiny, young-looking mother. I still remember as a child, one time when Mom answered the door and the salesman asked to speak with her mother and she smartly answered, “My mother lives in Baldwin Park,” and slammed the door.

Kathy: She had unerring instincts about people and could assess someone’s character. I miss already her comments on things that are foolish and the silly.

Betsy: I will miss having her at my house for Christmas and am glad she derived so much joy from her time in my home. She once told me that she was more relaxed in my home than anywhere. We always made sure we had a jigsaw puzzle going and gave her a box of chocolates, which she opened on Christmas morning and then passed around.  She liked to help out in the kitchen, chopping vegetables; setting the table  . . . she made loading the dishwasher an art form.

I will miss watching Mom interact with my kids, especially Sarah during the last few weeks of her life.  As we were leaving the nursing home Sarah would tell me, with real excitement in her voice: “Grandma loves me!  It makes me feel so good.”

Kathy: I am grateful that we three sisters went with Mom to France, in May 2007.  She had always wanted to go back the village where her father was born; little did we know that Itxasou in southern France was so picturesque that it was featured on postcards from the region. Thanks Dad for giving us a generous pot of money for that trip that let us stay at posh country inns nestled in tiny villages.  I have never seen Mom happier than she was on that trip; meeting relatives she had only heard of before.

Betsy: I am grateful that my mom came to Grace Baptist Church with Laurie and me, when I was ten. We had been invited to Sunday school by two sisters who got points during a March to Sunday School in March campaign, but we only went a few weeks before Mom started coming to Grace with us because she did not believe parents should drop their kids off at church and not attend themselves. 

We are grateful that she gave her heart to Jesus—you will be hearing more about later.  Mom was busy, but I still remember that every morning she would vanish into her bedroom and shut the door to have her quiet time with God.  Pity the poor child who knocked on the door during Mom’s quiet time!

I am grateful that the Hindus are wrong, that my mother will not return to earth as a cat or a Thai princess or become part of the great consciousness. My mom is in heaven but she is still herself, unique, one of kind–but without any of the pain or sorrow.  She is seeing everything with the eyes of heaven, no doubt the angels who have watched over her since the day she was born are filling her in on the rest of the story and she is marveling at the goodness of God.

Back in March when I was staying with Mom at City of Hope she confessed that she sometimes worried about displeasing God. She wanted to do things right and to not get in God’s way. I am glad that now she is in that place she has a new nature, where as Augustine wrote, “Everyone is free to love God and do as you please,” where we don’t have to fear displeasing God because our whole heart is given over to Him.

Kathy: As Mom grew more frail, we saw a more spontaneous part of her emerge, particularly when she went with me to City of Hope village.  She was more outspoken. A few days after we got her to Virginia, she told Sarah and me that she had composed a poem.  As far as I know it’s the only poem I’ve ever heard she wrote.  She recited it three times and each time it was different.  It is called Grandma and her Kleenex—and here it is.

Grandma and her Kleenex goes with wiping the tears away. 

It goes with wiping the snot away.

It goes with pushing bumblebees away.

Truly Grandma’s Kleenex has miraculous powers.

We can take Grandma’s Kleenex and wipe not only bloody toes away and the tears that go with them;

we can stuff them in shoes that are too big.

Grandma’s Kleenex is absolutely amazing.

I haven’t thought about everything about Grandma’s Kleenex, sometimes Grandma’s memory is not so sharp as it used to be. Anyway, all this is just to show Grandma’s grandkids and kids that she loves them very much and she will always have a Kleenex for them.

Betsy: I will miss Grandma’s Kleenex (I am the family crybaby) but mostly I will miss my dear little mother.

As I watched her weaken and slip away, I realized that we all long for redemption, and justice, and most of us want it now, on earth.  We want to right wrongs and fix things.  Even as a small child I knew that my mother’s life had not been easy, even in childhood.  She was abused, not valued. I was probably eight before I realized that if I had birthday, then Mom must have one too, so we asked her, “When is your birthday?” and my older sister, Laurie, and I began to try to celebrate it but our childish efforts were humorous at best—I remember many attempts at baking ruined cheesecakes, and one that even made it out of the oven in surprisingly good shape only to be dropped on the floor just inches from the oven door.

I realized that I had always wanted to rescue my mom and give her a life of ease.  One of my sweetest memories of these last days was doing her nails while seated on her bed and having her say, “I am going to let you pamper me.”

Kathy:  Yes, before that I was with her at City of Hope, and it was the sweetest time I think I’ve ever had. As has been mentioned, mom was less stoic, more open during the last days, and I loved having times to laugh and cry and be with her.  It was a treasure I’ll always remember. She, who did so much, finally let me help her.

Betsy: I had hoped that if we moved her to Virginia, she would strengthen and maybe even be able to move into our basement suite. The original plan was to move Dad to Virginia, too, but the first time I saw Mom in Virginia, she announced that she was ready to go home to be with Jesus. She had already made up her mind.  She asked me once, “How much more do I have to do before I can go home?” and I said, “You don’t have to do anything more, just let us take care of you.”

I realized a few days before Mom died that I was not going to be able to redeem her life; I had to let Jesus finish was I could never do.

We are grateful to have had Anne Marie Robidart Moll as our mother—and friend!

A Way Where There Seems to be No Way

Strategic thinking is one of my strong suits: my mind often ticks through options automatically. But my father’s situation: sick and in a Christian Science nursing home seemed like a block wall at the end of the road. I was afraid that he would worsen and his fellow Christian Scientists would let him languish and even die all the while proclaiming him healed. Yet once he decided to opt for Broadview, the Christian Science home an hour west of my parent’s home in Los Angeles there seemed little I could do . . . but pray. Why does prayer seem so wimpy? The last resort when all my heaving and hoeing has come up empty?
So pray I did. And I heard God whisper to my heart, I am still with him. I am there.  I still love him.
I also heard God say one morning as I rose to consciousness, Buy plane tickets now. I agonized over the dates, praying, God, show me when to go. When you run a busy healing center it is not easy to leave town on short notice. It is not easy to cancel appointments, skip leadership meetings and tell your boss, my rector, that you are headed back to Los Angeles for the second time in a month. The best time seemed to be the week set aside for our family vacation. I asked my daughter if she minded going to Los Angeles and ask my husband if he minded being left behind. He reported that a tight deadline was going to make it impossible for him to go to the beach anyway. He urged me to go to Los Angeles and Sarah said she did not have a preference.

So I booked tickets, then proceeded to be dogged by nagging doubts. Should we go? After all, things seemed to have settled down. Dad was in the nursing home and Mom was sleeping a lot, recovering from months of battling cancer while simultaneously taking care of a husband who could not carry his dirty plate to the sink much less help cook a meal or carry out the trash.

When I was there in early June, I had placed chairs between the hall doorway and the sofa and again between the kitchen doorway and the fridge so he could grab them with both hands as he tottered along unsteadily.  I had also purchased a walker and was at first elated at the speed with which he traveled from the hallway to the fridge until I looked at this face instead of his feet and saw the fear: he was stepping lively to keep from falling and never touched the walker again.

Back home in Virgina, I organized a soaking prayer conference where I sensed the presence of God so powerfully that I repeatedly slid to the floor.  It was soothing, comforting and pleasurable all at once.

The day after the conference Sarah awoke with a burning throat and a fever.  Our housemate, Nathan, commented that she had all the symptoms of swine flu and we all chuckled. The next day, Sam had an emergency root canal.Two days later, Sarah’s fever was gone, but we got an email from her principal stating:

“Some of our students are reporting they have been diagnosed with a strain of H1N1 since the end of the school year and are receiving treatment from a medical professional.  There is not a specific source of the flu, and it is likely spread through face-to-face contact.  

“If your child is showing flu-like symptoms, please see a medical professional.” 

Our flight was due to take off in four hours.  A call to Sarah’s pediatrician only told us that her practice was flooded by kids with swine flu and that they could not see us before morning. The next morning, now Thursday, the doctor said Sarah was not contagious since her fever had abated by Sunday evening so we rushed home, threw Sarah’s sheep pillow and our tooth brushing into our partially packed bags and raced to the airport hoping to catch the flight we had missed the previous day–only to have the lady behind the ticket counter, inform us that Sarah could not fly until a week after the date of her first symptoms. United booked us on a flight for Sunday but now the doubts increased: should we still go–for just five days–what was the point of that? Or head for the beach?

Again I sought the Lord, and sensed we were to go. But why? I wondered.  To keep Mom company? To drive her to Broadview to see Dad? Since an accident in November of 2007, we had asked Mom not to drive on freeways. Or were we going because Dad was going to die? After all the doctor at Foothill Presbyterian had said Dad would not live more than two months if he did not have laser surgery to bore a tunnel through his enlarged prostate.

Or were we going because to accompany Mom to a routine appointment at City of Hope where she was being treated for cancer?  She had an appointment there that Monday, was there a reason for us to be there?  I had no answers, I only knew God had told me to go.

I went to the library and stocked up on novels figuring this would be a relaxing trip. But by the time we arrived in Covina the landscape had shifted. My dad had called my mom to say that Broadview had pronounced him healed and was moving him from the skilled nursing section of the home to the long-term care section. His care would no longer be covered by medicare, the estimated price tag: $10,000 a month.  They were required by law to give him three days warning.  This was day one.

“Come pick me up,” Dad said to Mom. “I am coming home.”

“You’ve told me not to drive on the freeway!” My Mom protested.

It is hard to describe the mental pictures that swirled though our minds at this news. Memories of Dad, his long, bare legs protruding from his diaper as he clung to the furniture for balance, his hands moving crab-like down the long kitchen counter top. Scenes like these had overwhelmed me with an inchoate sadness. Back in early June and I had repeatedly retreated to my room and cried out to God, “Lord, this is too much for me, you are going to have to help me.” And He had, by helping me perceive his presence and assuring me of his love, by reminding me, “I am here. I am taking care of them. I am good.”   At one point God had reminded me of a time when we had inadvertently let our son–who was known to be accident prone– drive a car for six weeks with no car insurance.  I protected you then, He whispered to my heart, and I am protecting them (my parents) now.

Dad was not coming home. No one in the family had seen him since he had entered Broadview but we did not trust their assessment that he was “better”–not because we do not believe in sudden healings, we do–but rather because it did not ring true. When asked if he was still incontinent one nurse told my sister that he was not, then another told her that someone had to help him to the toilet because he dripped urine on the floor as he walked.

By the time Sarah and I got from LAX to the suburban town where I grew up via the Fly-a-Way bus and metrolink train (which we missed by four minutes necessitating a two hour wait for the next train) it was late, too late to visit Dad back in Los Angeles. The next morning the trip to City of Hope left Mom too tired to continue on to Los Angeles. As she slept that afternoon, I worked my way though a list of nursing homes near my parent’s home in the suburbs.  One was less than half a mile away. I called and Sarah and I went to visit but the sight of elderly people who looked as if their bodies had melted into their wheelchairs, like candles in the sun; and faces who did not return our smiles was depressing. If Dad had improved, even a little bit, was he a match for this place?

From my reading on the internet I knew that there were many levels of care but I did not have a clear grasp of where the boundaries lay. “If,” I asked the woman giving us the tour, “my dad is stronger and more alert than the people here, where would you put him? Where would you put your father?”

She walked me to the foyer and handed me a pamphlet for assisted living. “This is a nice place,” she said. “A very nice place.” I glanced at the map on the back. It was near my old elementary school. “Let’s go,” Sarah said.

The foyer looked like a hotel, complete with coffee service near the front door and a smiling receptionist behind the desk. I saw bright faces, smiling, alert, engaged walking about, some using walkers but most were ambulatory.  See, I was already catching on the lingo.

After a tour of the facilities the director urged, “Bring your mom back for lunch.”

But when we got in the car, Sarah said, “I think we need to go see Grandpa tomorrow. That has to be our top priority.”  I nodded.  He had now been at Broadview for nine days and no one had seen him since the day he entered in acute renal failure due to a constricted urinary tract.

Then it hit us: take Grandma to breakfast at the assisted living place, Atria, and then go see Grandpa.  Grandma was willing to visit and brightened when they served French toast–a family favorite–for breakfast.

After breakfast and a tour, we convinced my mom, Grandma, to put $500 down on a two room apartment at Atria, then sped out to Broadview on some the oldest, narrowest freeways on the planet. If someone had described on-ramps only 30 feet long, I would not have believed them, but here I was, standing on the brakes in a desperate attempt to stop before we ended up in someone’s front yard. I was grateful I was driving my parent’s Acura and not my Honda Fit which takes a bit more than thirty feet to reach freeway speeds!

Dad, quite sadly, thought we were coming to get him, to take him home, but at least we were able to reassured him, “We have found a place that is quite nice, where you can live with Mom!”

“I”ve missed you,” he said to us all as his eyes grew glassy with unshed tears.

We hugged him and explain that he had to have a physical and a TB test before he could move into Atria, then held our breath. He nodded, and my mom and I glanced at each other our eyes full of the unspoken: had my father, a man who had not had a physical in more than forty years just agreed to go to a doctor?  Yes! He had!

That afternoon the nurse from Atria visited him in his nursing home to evaluate his suitability for assisted living and gave him an a-okay so the process could move forward.  But where now to find a doctor who could see him with the Fourth of July just a day away?

I called doctor after doctor. If they were open the next day, there were not going to be open on the fourth to read the TB test.  As the minutes ticked to hours, I realized the minute hand was moving toward five; most of the medical offices were closing.  I was leaving in less than 48 hours.

Finally I called my sister in Toronto and she deftly managed to find a doctor who could see my dad the next day and the fourth of July.

The next morning we borrowed a wheelchair and got him to the doctor then back to Broadview to wait for the TB results.  My sister, Kathy, flew in the next evening and on Friday, the fourth of July the three of us–Kathy, me and my daughter, Sarah, drove to Broadview to fetch my dad for his TB test.

As we drove to the doctors my dad, said, “You are rescuing me.”

“That is because we love you Dad!”

“You sure know how to show it!”

My heart swelled. It often felt like a rescue to me too!

Kind words between my dad and me were few and far between, so this was a sweet moment.

We celebrated the negative TB results with a burger at In-and-Out in Glendale then I drove to LAX where Sarah and I would catch our plane to Virginia and home. 

As Kathy slid behind the wheel, my dad looked up at me smiling with the satisfaction of a small child. The roles had reversed, I was the parent, he was the little one trusting in our care.

Letters from Africa to my intercessors

July 26th, 2009

Dear Ones,
I want to thank each and every one of you for being willing to cover
us in  prayer.  We leave at 6:10 PM today on KLM flying first to
Amsterdam and then, at 11 AM  tomorrow on to Entebbe, the
airport in southern Uganda made famous by the rescue of hijacked hostages by Israeli paratroopers in 1976.

Entebbe is on a peninsula that extends southward into Lake Victoria, Africa’s largest lake.

Three days ago I learned that my mother has cancer in the
pleural cavity which surrounds her lungs. We have not told her yet, so she believes she has pneumonia and congestive heart failure. This particular cancer is even more insidious than most because it produces large amounts of fluid which keep her lungs from expanding. The doctors drew a liter of fluid from her plural cavity a week ago.

According to her favorite doctor, Dr. Salihian at City of Hope, the plural effusion, or excess liquid showed up on X-rays in May, so my dear little mother has four to ten months to live.

But we are going to doctor Jesus for a second opinion. Cancer is not too much to Him as he reminded me about a week ago. In the last year we have not lost anyone to cancer. None of the people that we have prayed for have died. We’ve had some amazing miracles including the healing of my sister-in-law whose cancer markers dropped faster than her doctor had ever seen before. She recovered from advanced ovarian cancer; Joe K. who many of
you know is healed, along with Jeanette T. and many others.  We are grateful.

My sister plans to fly to Los Angeles from Toronto this morning so as
to be with my mom when she is discharged from the local hospital where she was admitted on an emergency basis. I ask you to bathe this
situation in prayer. There are so many complications!  My mom can’t go
back to assisted living where we moved my parents in early July, but instead needs to be in a nursing home. The City of Hope, one of the top cancer treatment centers in the world, has promised to see her the day after she is discharged.
She is feeling temporarily stronger because the fluid is gone; the
doctors at City of Hope want to install a tube in her lungs which will
drain off the fluid.  If all goes well, my sister will move my mom to
Fairfax Nursing Center, a mere 2700 miles away from Covina, where she has lived all of her life except her college years at Oregon State.

I can’t go into all the complexity of this move, let’s just say that without divine
intervention moving her across the country seems daunting at best, it almost seems that we cannot succeed, so we look to God and to Him alone to
help us.
We are uncertain as to what to do with my dad who was told on June
18th that he had two more months to live.  We need wisdom. We may try
to move him also to assisted living in Virginia as well.
Then is also their house to deal with, clean out, repair, and put on the market.
I will be gone two weeks but know that there will still be a lot of work to do when I get back.

The Lord has told me, that I am in grief going to a nation–Uganda–that is grieving and has been grieving ever since Idi Amin wrought such devastation during his despotic reign from 1971-1979. The dark history of Uganda has continued through the tyranny of Joseph Kony, head of the ironically named “Lord Resistance Army”, who is known for kidnapping children and tramatizing them and turning them into gun toting souldiers.

God is saying that it is okay for me to be a mess of sadness and tears; that my open, raw grief may help the Ugandans release their grief as well.  They will minister to me as much or perhaps more than I minister to them. It is humbling to go in brokeness and stumbling.

In Samuel it says that when everyone turned against David he strengthened himself in the Lord. I feel His presence now more than ever and I feel him strengthening me.  That is all I need, for him to strengthen me, lead me, guide me, cover me and my family.  I am comforted by the picture of Hudson Taylor leaving England for China as his little mother ran along the pier crying as the boat pulled out to sea. They never saw each other again.  I am only being asked to leave for two short weeks.
I am grateful that everyone in my family–except my dad–knows the Lord and that we are pulling together, loving each other and finding strength in the Lord.
Pray as God leads.  He will put us on your hearts.
We go with God.
Love to you all,
Betsy

Years of pain and grief are drawing to a close as my father entered the hospital last night with acute renal failure. His kidneys have ceased to work.  With a mixture of sadness and gratitude, I have begun to mourn.

I am grateful that I was with him June 3 to 10, grateful that back in May I heard God saying, Go to L.A., your dad needs you. Grateful that I heard His voice and obeyed.  It was a shock to see how he had declined since early March, when I was in L.A. because the doctors had decided my mom was too frail to stay along in the  little bungalow at City of Hope where they sequester patients being treated for thyroid cancer with radioactive iodine.  We enjoyed our time together in the peaked roof cottage with the little garden out front and giggled like school girls at our inability to keep the rules–stay six feet away apart and wear gloves whenever touching anything the other might touch–to avoid my being contiminated by her radioactivity.

I saw little of my dad that visit, as I was only home a day or two. His shuffle made me suspect Parkinsons.  You could head him coming, schurch, schruch, schruch for minutes before he appreared, head forward tortoise-like.

When God said, Your dad needs you.  I was surprized. Then I heard from my sister that he was walking around the house wearing only a diaper. Gulp!

I dreaded going. On the plane as I worshiped God to the latest Hillsong tunes on my iPod, and felt the familair twisted stomach of my childhood.  I tried to own my memories until I heard Him say, You are going to give your dad something; something only you can give.

My time there was alternately sweet and overwhelming.  Time and time again I cried out to God, This is too much for me.  You are going to have to help me, and I would feel his presence as my body became lighter and the tears ran down.  Lord, help me to see your presence, I would cry, and then perceive Him sitting next to my dad. I would join them, sitting next to Dad, putting a hand on his shoulder. He would smile and pat my hand.

As a youngster, I drove him to rage with my ready tears and tender heart. There is a sweetness in connecting now that is stronger for our estranged past. I left home at 17 never to return for more than a brief holiday; now I am going back for the third time since March.

The grim visible reality stands juxaposed to the promises of God. I am certain that my dad will come to know Him. Yet just last week, less than a week after I left on June 10, he fell and because he could not stand, was taken to the hospital and diagonsed with acute renal failure.  He was placid the first few days in the hospital, but when the doctors were adamant about the need for minor surgery to bore a tunnel through his enlarged prostate, he said, simply, “No,” and the doctor replied, “Then there is nothing more we can do, so we will discharge you.”

For a short time we feared he was coming home to my mom, who has shrunk to less than five feet and 105 pounds, the woman who has watched him decline so precipiciously. But then my mother shocked us all by saying, “You can’t come home, I can’t handle it anymore.”

We were hoping he would go into a local nursing home. He trumped us all by insisting on Broadview, a Christian Science nursing home on the far side of L.A.  

“You realize that Mom won’t be able to see you?” my brother queried, and my dad nodded.  ”Are you willing to bankrupt the family?” my mother asked and he responeded, “How else will I be healed?”  

“You will die,” the doctor asserted.  ”Expect a healing,” my dad countered.

My dad has told me before that he believes he can heal himself.  Despite recent expereience he believes he can heal himself if he can focus his thoughts away from his pain racked body.  It sounds like disociation to me.

So now we wait, looking into the face of Jesus who is always with us, not just with those who believe but with every man, woman and child on the face of the earth.  Loving, caring, waiting.

How this will end, I do not know. I hope my dad will chose to move to a nursing home closer to my mom. I hope he will not slip into a coma and die in that place. I hope I will be able to see him again.

Sarah and I were scheduled to fly there yesterday until an email from her principal, Evan Glazer, reported swine flu outbreaks in the Thomas Jefferson community where Sarah is a student. Even though school has been out about a week, kids and teachers were exposed to the virus around the end of school and are now sickening.  I paused. Sarah had had a fever over the weekend and was now quite congested. Could she have had swine flu? And was she still contagious if she had? A call to the doctor got only the nurse who said we needed to talk to the doctor and our plane was leaving in less than three hours. I called United who said, “Don’t get on the plane.”

When the doctor called she said they had see a flood of swine flu cases and that she could not see Sarah until the next morning. That brings us to this morning when we saw Dr. Salvatore.  By now Sarah’s case is resolved so the doctor gave us a note saying it was safe to travel. We rushed home giddy at our reprieve and tossed clothes, books and shampoo into suitcases that were still lying on the floor in my bedroom. A few minutes later we were at the airport hoping to catch the next flight. But at the airport they would not let us board a plane so we came back home and both fell promptly asleep in the middle of the day. 

We have tickets for Sunday.

How to pray?  Please pray that my father will sense the deep abiding love of Jesus for him.

Pray that he will want to live and be willing to have surgery to open his prostate.

Pray that he will be willing to move to a nursing home near my mom so she can see him.

Pray that I will not come down with swine flu so we can travel on the 28th.

We are grateful to God who orders all our steps!

Why I am fasting for my dad

I wrote this article more than seven years ago, when my dad was still playing tennis most mornings and seemed invincible. Now he is dying. On Wednesday I will fly to L.A. to see him, perhaps for the last time. He has not seen a doctor in 45 years, yet it is clear that he has Parkinson’s and maybe something else. He is not well. He is in bed more than 20 hours a day, he  shuffles along using the furniture and walls for balance and he has fallen silent. It is sad to see a man who played tennis so well that I was helpless to return his serves unable to stand upright.

Although he has not left the house for a month or more, he holds fast to his hope that he will be healed by Christian Science.  I believe he is dying and am praying that he will come to the end of himself and cry out to Jesus.

Please pray for me as I travel, June 3 to 10, and enjoy this piece which was originally published in Virtue.  It seems especially poignant to me now and was never more true.

 

I wasn’t raised in a Christian home.  I was ten before I heard the gospel for the first time when a school chum invited me to her Sunday school.  I’d been to Sunday school a handful of times before, but this Sunday school was different. It was held in a small garage behind an old house–a relic from the days before the church owned the property.  My friend and I sat in the old garage, carpet at our feet but the garage door still visible straight ahead.  I remember listening to the thin, gray-haired lady who led the singing up front.  She talks about God like she knows Him, I thought.  I had never heard anyone speak of God in this way.  How  could this be?  I wondered.  Could anyone really know God the way they knew their mother or father? Their brothers or sisters?

After that first Sunday, my older sister, Laurie, and I attended Sunday school in the garage every week.  But it was some time before any of it began to make sense. 

Laurie gave her life to Jesus first.  By that time, my mother and my younger siblings were coming to church, too.  One Sunday after church we were waiting for Patricia in the car, when suddenly she appeared, her face streaked with tears.  As she climbed into the back seat, I asked her why she was crying.  She told me that she had asked Jesus into her heart.  To me it was another mystery and when she tried to explain it, I couldn’t understand.  Although I’d been coming to Sunday school with her all these months, it still seemed to me as if I stepped through Alice’s looking glass each Sunday, entering a strange and exciting, but bewildering world.

It wasn’t long after my sister’s conversion, that my Sunday school teacher led me to the Lord, too.  Eventually, my entire family:  my mom, my younger brothers, and my younger sister gave their lives to Jesus.  Everyone that is, except my father.  While the rest of us went to church he stayed home Sunday after Sunday.  When we asked him to go with us, he politely declined.

After my mother’s conversion, life at home changed dramatically.  My mom stopped drinking and smoking, and my parents no longer held parties that kept me awake half the night.  Dad was undoubtedly convicted by my mother’s life-changing encounter with Jesus, because he stopped drinking and smoking, too.  But as the rest of the family grew closer to God, he pulled away.  His final step away from us was one we never expected–he joined the Christian Science Church.

The rest of us were dismayed.  We were confident in our new faith.  And quite certain that he was wrong and we were right!  Why couldn’t he see that?  We argued with him, we badgered, and we begged.  He responded by becoming more and more involved with the Christian Science Church.

A widening rift divided our family–Mom and the five kids against Dad.  My parents’ relationship had never been harmonious.  Both were deeply wounded.  My dad expressed his fears by dominating us with his rage.  My mother was the victim, quietly bearing his rage–and slamming cupboard doors. 

When my parents became church-goers the raging war settled into a simmering truce.  Our home life was outwardly more peaceful, but we lived separated from each other in a demilitarized zone filled with land mines–that could explode at any moment.

It was easy for me to make Dad the villain and to dream of the day when he would come to know the Lord.  From my childish point of view, I was certain that his anger would magically, pouf! disappear the moment he gave his life to Jesus.  I blamed my father for everything that went wrong.  Wasn’t he the one who made our lives miserable?

Within a few years of my conversion, we stopped arguing with Dad about his religion and stopped inviting him to church–except when my sister sang a solo or we performed in a musical.  My father became less hostile, and there were only occasional flare-ups that ravaged the wounds in all of us. 

When I was seventeen I left home, never to return again, except for short visits.  Years passed and I grew up, married, and had a family of my own.  My faith in Jesus also grew and with that growth came a deeper call to obedience.  I began to forgive my dad and to see my anger toward him from God’s perspective.  It was grotesquely ugly, and there were times that I was ashamed of the way I raged at my own husband and children. 

One night in particular, I had one of those moments of sharp insight that I believe only comes from the Holy Spirit.  I had just raged at my own family.  As soon as the angry words were out, I was overwhelmed with shame.  I ran upstairs and threw myself across the bed crying.  Suddenly I saw my father in a new light.  How isolated and alone he must feel!  I began to grieve the agony of his separation from his family and from God.  I cried for several hours knowing that I was feeling the pain God feels when we harden our hearts toward Him.

It was humbling to realize I could be just as brutal as Dad–even though I was a Christian.  My anger was something only the blood of Jesus could heal and redeem. 

Slowly, my relationship with Dad began to improve.  Part of it was my growth, but part of it was Dad.  He was kinder, gentler, more in control of his temper than he’d been when I was young.  With God’s help, I began to accept him–not just an uneasy truce, but a genuine acceptance that springs out of love, forgiveness, and humility.  When my parents came to see us in Virginia we tried to respect Dad’s desire to be faithful to his church by letting him use our car to get to the local Christian Science Church. 

Last year, God began calling me to pray for my father again.  I had stopped praying years before when I found it impossible to sustain prayer without hope.  From my point of view, it seemed like nothing had happened no matter how hard I had prayed.

Now God was whispering to my heart, calling me to pray again.  Could I find fresh hope thirty years after I had first come to Jesus?  This time I knew the call was from God.  It was His sovereign work, not mine.

I began to pray earnestly each night during our family prayer time. I was asking God to deliver my father from the strongholds of the enemy, to open his eyes to see his need for a savior, and to bring him to faith in Jesus. 

Two months after I began praying, reports about Dad began to filter in from my brothers and sisters.  Dad was struggling with his temper again.  At Christmas he repeatedly lashed out at my brother’s wife.  The situation became so tense that my parents cut short their visit and returned home.

Mom was too loyal to complain, but when I asked her, she confided that Dad had been difficult lately. 

Then my father began calling me to discuss my recent career change.  Although he’d never voiced it, I knew it was hard for him to understand why I would I give up a career that had money, power, and status to be a struggling freelance writer.

“With your background as a scientist, you really should be writing science fiction,” he told me on the phone. 

“But Dad,” I said surprised, “I don’t even like to read science fiction!” 

When I told him I believed that God was calling me to write, he became angry.  “You’re too self-willed, too stubborn to ever recognize the will of God!” he insisted.  After a few minutes, we both hung up, but he called back almost immediately to read me a section from the Christian Science book, Science and Health..  “People become blind to the will of God when they are stubborn,” the passage proclaimed. 

The spiritual battle was heating up.  But this time, I knew that battle wasn’t against my dad.  He wasn’t my enemy (Ephesians 6:12).  I wasn’t going to stop loving him and praying for him when he was difficult.  I was going to persevere in prayer even if it wasn’t easy. 

Finally, I called Laurie and asked her to fast with me one day a week.  We are asking God to free our father from spiritual bondage and draw him “out of the kingdom of darkness into His marvelous light.” 1 Peter 2:9 

As we fast, God has given me a picture of what is happening.  I see a large concrete cistern, stark gray, and completely enclosed.  I am kneeling before the cistern hammering at the rough gray surface with a small hammer.  When I fast, the blows make cracks in the cistern.  With each blow, black vapor wafts out of the cracks. 

As the weeks of fasting stretch into months, I am seeing the hammer of prayer break first a small, then a larger hole.  Dense black smoke continues to seep out.  I believe that God in His mercy is using our fasting and prayer to break down the walls of the cistern so that the light of Jesus can shine into my father’s soul. 

Today as I write, my stomach is growling.  But when I am tempted to eat, I think of my dad.  God has replaced the resentment, judgment, and bitterness I felt for so many years with a burning love.  I want him to know the love of Jesus, the freedom of God’s forgiveness, and the peace that only God can give.  That’s why today, I am fasting for my dad.

And now from Buddy!

Today Le Monde Magazine is going to interview the family dog, Buddy.

Buddy we understand that you live with the Stalcup family in Reston.

Buddy: Yes, I am their only pet. There was another dog when I arrived but I got rid of him!

Always on the job, or the lap!

 

 

Le Monde: You got rid of him?

Buddy: Yes. Buster was okay, as dogs go but he lacked the essential charm of a miniature poodle; he was too calm, too aloof, too . . . big.

Le Monde: How did you manage to get rid of him?

Buddy: Oh, little things. It wasn’t hard. I pranced on my hind legs, and hopped onto empty laps and looked fetching. The next things I knew, he was gone. Rumor is, he is buried in the back yard under a pile of white rocks.

Le Monde: How did you come to live with the Stalcups?

Buddy: I was rescued. It was quite dramatic. My first home was with a family of Jack Russells. A despicable breed. While the Madame was home, she carried me everywhere and I was a happy pup. Then she began leaving the house for hours at a time and the Jack Russells refused to follow my instructions. Those dogs made my life miserable. I really don’t want to talk about it. Poodles rule!

Le Monde: So you were happy when the Stalcups brought you home?
Not at first. I growled at them and tried to bite Monsieur. I thought they were a bit odd. I am convinced that Monsieur believes he is a dog. It is most unsettling. He gets on all fours, barks and tries to take my bone. I try to humor him. Poor Madame! I do not know how such a kind lady married such an imbecile. But I gradually warmed up to them. I have my own sofa now in their bedroom and am loved by all. All for very little work!

Le Monde: Work?

Buddy: Yes. I work hard. I have to guard Madame and the entire estate. She is not very discerning and invites all sorts of people onto the property. It is a big responsibility for a little dog but I take it very seriously.

Le Monde: Estate?

Buddy: Yes, when I arrived the family was living in a typical suburban neighborhood but I have considerably expanded their holdings. We now have extensive property.

Le Monde: Expanded their holdings? What do you mean? You don’t mean to say that you, a dog, have purchased property?

Buddy: No, in the canine world you simply annexed property by marking it. It is a boundary anyone with a decent nose would recognize. I have worked very hard leaving markings of both types, if you catch my drift. We now own many acres.

Le Monde: I see. How have the neighbors reacted?

Buddy: Neighbors? We have no near neighbors. Just this morning I was out with Madame and Monsieur while they worked in the yard. They are so careless. There was an intruder just 20 feet from Madame and she did not see the danger. But I barked valiantly and he went away. Madame is so fortunate to have me protecting her.

Le Monde: Wasn’t that your next-door neighbor, Steven?

Buddy: Neighbor? No, I am quite certain it was an intruder. We get them occasionally but I always take quick action and they leave. Some try to pet me which insults my dignity but I always let them know that I mean business. I want Madame to know she can count on me. I will not betray her for chew toys and tasty snacks. Even though they smell wonderful, and they taste . . . I mean I am sure they would taste delicious. If I took them, which I don’t. I mean . . .

Le Monde: Speaking of chew toys, I understand that a very sweet little girl brings you toys and treats.

Buddy: I am afraid you mean Jayden, since she is the only young child who frequents our estate. Yes. She does bring me toys, but she likes to give me baths and sometimes lifts me in the most awkward ways: hands tight around my tummy. I am not amused. The tugging and pulling is hard to bear. I do not understand why Madame and Monsieur let Jayden eat at the table while I am relegated to the floor.

Fortunately there are others who see my plight. A lovely woman named Miriam lives on our estate, she sneaks me food under the table when Madame is not looking. I adore Miss Miriam. Once she cooked liver and the smell of the delectable morsels on her breath was enough to make me swoon.

Occasionally the Stalcup are out and I sleep downstairs with Miriam and her husband (I cannot recall his name). Sometimes her husband even warms up the bed for me before I hop up on my side. Bliss! They know how to treat a dog.

The Stalcups do not let me sleep on their bed, though sometimes Monsieur lets me up behind his rather broad back. If Madame sees me, off I go. I do not understand why she is so unsympathetic about sleeping arrangements since she is otherwise tres sympatico.

Le Monde: Spanish! You’ve learned to speak Spanish?

Buddy: Yes, well there are many languages spoken in our home. Italian, Hindi, Spanish, French. To be quite frank I don’t understand the attraction. All this yammering is enough to make a dog’s head hurt.

And the resident who speaks Italian, Daniele, is a wicked man. I am so grateful that he was eventually banished for stinking up the home with dehydrated spinach. For a shot time Madame blamed me for the awful stench, but a quick search revealed my innocence. Daniele did not appreciate my efforts to guard the family and even took to rapping me sharply on the nose for barking. I was pierced to the heart. Does he not see the danger? All day long people walk through our property on the dark path and I must sound the alarm to chase them away. It always works. They all leave. Eventually.

Le Monde: You must get lonely at times, no?

Buddy: Until recently I had two girl friends living in a home across the dark path, Kali and Sasha. They adored me, though at times I questioned their devotion. Did they love me or my food? They run straight for my kibbles when they come to visit. I have of course annexed their home as well, inside and out.

Le Monde: Rumor has it that you were sporting a Mohawk earlier this year.

Buddy: Yes, Madame was feeling playful with the clippers, but I quite liked the look. The Mohawk, paired with the rugged good looks of my Harley Davidson collar (complete with metal spikes!) made quite a fashion statement. I hear that my predecessor was dyed each Fourth of July red, white and blue. It sounds so undignified. I would never allow such liberties to mock the honor of my breed.

Lessons from the Life Model

It is a simple exercise, you simply say, “Lord, help me to perceive you,” then when you see where he is, and make that connection, you say, “Lord, help me to perceive you more clearly.” (www.kclehman.com)

Quiet yourself and enjoy being with him. After all, Jesus is always with us, even if we do not believe in him, so the sense that we are alone is a matter of our perception, not reality. He is there. With me. With you.

The other night I was watching a DVD with my family when a memory flooded back—losing my new red bike to my brother.  Before you conclude that my parents are heartless, let me explain.  I was the second of five children and had received a new bike, a rarity, for my birthday. I eyed the shiny wheels and frame and my heart sang.  Then a few months (or was it years?) later my older sister got a new bike for her birthday,  so all the bikes bumped down the peaking order: I got her old one, a used blue, heavy thing and my bike went to my younger brother. I remember well the sting, the sense of outrage. It was, after all, my bike!

 

So I prayed silently, Lord help me to perceive you. All at once I saw Jesus in the garage with us kids, he was sad, too. He understood. Then I saw myself on the red bike, my bike, and was astonished to see my arms and legs akimbo.  Was I that big?  Was the bike so small?  In the next scene, Jesus and I were racing down the hill that was our driveway, side by side shooting out on to the street then cutting left over to the dead end where we kids often rode.  The dead end! I had forgotten that the side street did not go through when I was young, but there it was!  We were laughing out loud, ear-splliting grins plastered on our faces.

 There is nothing like connecting with Jesus to restore the soul.

But what if, when we ask Jesus to help us perceive him, we feel shame or anger?

I’ve seen this over and over again in my office when I ask someone to picture Jesus standing in front of them and then next thing I know they are sobbing.  I feel so unworthy, they say. Or, I feel so angry! Where was he when I was being abused? I cried out to him and he did not rescue me!

 

That is when we switch to Theophostic Prayer Ministry to uncover the lies that block our relationship with Jesus.  We were meant to live in joy.  The kind of joy that comes when we know we are the apple of someone’s eye.  Feeling blocked?  Confused?  Angry?  Check out Theophostic.com, especially the recording of a live session, or read my article in Charisma (http://www.charismamag.com/index.php/features2/625-inner-healing/16099-hope-for-the-wounded-soul-).

My heart’s desire is to see you come into deeper intimacy with the giver of life, so that you know the peace and joy that only he can bring.

For more on the Life Model, see Lifemodel.org.  Lots of great information on how life works.

They Made It!

I was in a meeting, but when I heard my cell phone ring, I jumped to my feet and was pulling the phone from my purse in seconds. “I won’t answer this, I just want to see if it is Anna and Dan,” I explained to the bewildered woman sitting in my office.
It was Anna! Despite my promise I opened the phone. “The last few days have been unbelievable,” she said. “You would not believe, Mom, how difficult it has been.”
I smiled. I felt like I had known. Yes, I had not been there, but I had sensed it in my spirit, studied the topo maps and the snowy ground from sattelites, and read the weather reports. I had asked scores of people to pray for their safety. They had not encountered high winds at San Gregorio Pass, famous for its blowing sand. In fact, that passage had been unbearly hot, eight miles without a single tree in still hot air. “The only shade,” Anna reported, “was in the I-10 underpass. But that night, 8000 feet up the San Bernadino Mountains they expereinced winds that made the tall pine trees a 100 feet high look like upside down pendulems, swinging back and forth. Two large pine trees fell so close to their tent that they felt the ground shake. The flexible poles on their tent bent under the wind then snapped back to attention all night long.
Anna also described the perils of navagating old snow, melted and frozen to icy on steep slopes.
But in the end they made it and are now at Big Bear Lake in a room with a bed, a hot tub, and a mini-fridge. Bravo Anna and Dan. Yeah God! He is good.

Norwegian Bridge

The problem with snow is that it melts, producing torrents of ice cold water. Anna and Dan’s trek down the PCT is bring back memories, some wonderful, some . . . not so much.  One that keeps popping into my head took place when I was nineteen, new to hiking, inexperience with the out-of-doors. I was living in Norway, where I first experienced the exhilaration of climbing mountains to gain vistas of distant fjords. I had seasoned instructors who insisted I do it “right”– hardy Norwegians full of instructions: ‘Swing you legs and not your hips; land on your whole foot; don’t walk downhill on your toes, roll through each step.” I still remember climbing the second highest mountain in Norway and hobbling to the bus stop the next morning, alone, while the rest in my party continued on foot.

I was in Norway as a University of California exchange student. We “California students” flew to Paris three days after school got out in June on a chartered plane from LAX.  I had never ventured further from the L.A. suburbs than the border towns of Mexico. I was so nervous, I threw up in the airport.

After a quick tour of Paris the ground split up with some headed for the American University in Beirut, some heading for Germany and the rest–about twenty of us–traveling by train and boat, via Copenhagen, to Oslo for summer language school. That summer we enjoyed a delightful season of hiking, picnicking, and swimming in mountain lakes while learning to speak Norwegian.

When fall came a group of us wanted to squeeze in one more outing before the weather turned too cold and the days too short for hiking. Some fellow students, Norwegians, told us about a great weekend hike: you took a bus to the trail head, hiked a short distance to a cabin where you spent Friday night, hiking to another cabin the next day and finished up on Sunday with a short walk and a spectacular ferry ride back to town. They were planning to take the same trip that weekend. If the weather remained clear.

Later in the week we I ran into one of the Norwegian students at the bus stop. No,” he told me. They weren’t going, rain was forecast for the weekend. They would wait until next summer. We should have realized then that our trip was doomed, but at that moment we were struck by fatal case of machismo. Those Nordic wimps, we thought. The may have descended from Leif Erickson but they weren’t as tough as us American women!

Off we went–four women with heavy packs and head-to-toe rain gear, the kind the fishermen wore in The Perfect Storm. The first leg of the hike was easy. The bus dropped us off at the junction of a winding mountain road and a narrow dirt path through the tundra. We hiked a short distance to the first cabin, or hytta, in the lingering dusk. In the dark we found a set of bunk beds and threw ourselves into them. In the morning it was pouring. But we were undeterred. Hardly. With no more sense than a wet cat, we set out on our journey.

The hike seemed endless. Each time I lifted my head to search for the top of the mountain pass, I would see what looked like the summit about 100 feet away ensconced in clouds. I was wearing a sowester hat, with a wide brim in back, tied snuggly under my chin, and a  narrow brim in front, for visibility I suppose, so my face was wet and I kept my head tucked low. The water ran off the hat onto a raincoat, then onto rain pants and at last onto the rubber boots and the path below my feet. The get-up should have been watertight but after hours of hiking I grew damp at the margins.

It was easy to imagine that the clouds covered the peak, just a few feet away. But each time I stopped and gazed up the scene was repeated. Finally, late in the day we cleared the top. We climbed down the far side of the mountain in silence, each of us focusing our thoughts on the cabin ahead. Warm beds. Food. Heat.

Then suddenly through the driving rain, we spied the cabin a short distance off, only between us the cabin there was a stream, no a river, no a torrent. The water was so high it swept several feet over the narrow wooden footbridge, which was dangling precariously partly submerged in the rushing water. We stood for a long time staring at the bridge in silence. Then we began to argue. Karen insisted that we should try it. We were so wet, so cold, so hungry–and it was getting dark. We couldn’t make it back up over the mountain again this late, she argued. I couldn’t imagine trying to cross. I remembered having been swept off my feet one summer in a fast-moving stream in Utah, unable to regain my footing in water only knee deep. The water looked so swift, so cold. It seemed suicidal. Karen insisted that we could make it if we held hands and stayed together. Or we could position several people on the banks of the river downstream, she argued, just in case someone slipped.

Finally, too weary to argue any more, I turned and started climbing back up the mountain. I gradually realized that someone was following me, then a third person and finally even Karen.

My friendship with Karen never recovered. She was furious with me for “ruining” the trip. But recently when I recalled that trip, I think I heard God whispering to my heart, You saved her life.

If I who knew so little back then–who could not distinguish the voice of God from all the other voices yammering in my head–could know to turn back, I have to believe that Anna and Dan will also know when to turn back, when to stop, when to move ahead.  He is with them, always and evermore.