Carrying On

Well, let's see. Melissa is still in the hospital. It's the little things that get you. In fact, evil is in the little things. Strangely enough, it seems you can steel yourself for really hard and diffcult things, but it's the minor aggravations that take their toll.

It's the dilemma I mean when I say it's not enough to have cancer. And it's not enough to have the things that come with it-- feeling badly, feeling tired. Even those are bearable. And you can even handle how you've been robbed. Melissa wants nothing more than to be a mom, to take care of John and Joe. But when you have been beaten and robbed, it is too much to be needled by things that those of us who are well just take in stride.

And even when you can hear that graft-versus-host disease is a good thing, an expected thing-- such that if you don't develop it, they will introduce more of the donor's stem cells to cause it-- it still gnaws at you that just as you were feeling better, you had to go back to the place where you were radiated and poisoned, where you spent many painful and bitter days.

It strikes me that a lot of people don't like this kind of talk, as if somehow in all this there is some lesson on patient endurance. And yet, it is in the very pain and frustration that the presence of God is found. So if I say something negative or angry, it is not a sign of losing faith or hope (read the Psalms is all I can say).

About ten years ago, I wrote a country song with the awkward title, “Merle Haggard, I Wish I Didn't Know What Your Songs Were All About.” The function of country music (real country music) or the Blues is mostly to realize that someone else has been where you are, or even worse. You can't fix what happened to them, they can't fix what happened to you, but you share. You can never underestimate the power of solidarity. It shouldn't surprise us that God came to us in Jesus; after that, you can't doubt that He knows. He knows.

Sometimes there's nothing to say. You just sit with the person who is suffering. Sometimes you have to know when you can venture some word of encouragement, some word to keep things in perspective. And then you have to know when to keep quiet. And yet, both say something. And sometimes God shows you something. In the half-awake half-asleep time this morning, I started out bitter, all the things robbed from us. It was really focusing on how for four months now, closer to five, Melissa has been separated from us, from me. There she was, in the hospital bed. There I was on the uncomfortable bed/chair. But then, it hit me. I was there with her. She is still here. And even though the Evil One's threats are dire, he has yet to make good on them. And even so, we were still there together. It sounds like madness or some half-awake delirium, but I started chuckling. Even though we get stretched to the breaking point, we're still here, still have two sweet boys and all the same hopes we had before, perhaps more refined.

You don't want something like this to happen, but when we come through it, there will be a savor to life we did not have before, if only because we realize that since you're always under a threat, you may as well get the best revenge-- living well.