Month: September 2014

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Chapter 2: Importance of the Bible–The Source of Hope

We have the idea we can pray for patience as though it is a commodity God gives us, like our daily food. But patience, or perseverance, is an attribute which is developed in us by choice and use, in the midst of difficulties. Like practicing to become proficient on a musical instrument, we must practice patience. We must persevere. It isn’t handed to us like a piece of toast, but when we choose to persevere God comes alongside us and helps us.

When we persevere through difficulties and gain encouragement from the scriptures, hope is produced in us. What do we say of someone who gives up, who quits, who doesn’t persevere? We say they have given up hope, they become hope-less. It is through hearing what God has to say through His Word that we are encouraged to go on, to persevere; hope is renewed.

Many people have commented on how strong I am and have been through all that has happened to me. Let me be the first to say, I am not strong.  But I thank God I know who is: Jesus Christ, the living son of God, my Savior. I cry out to him in prayer and listen to Him speak to me in the Bible and there is where I find strength and comfort, the encouragement I need to persevere. From this I gain hope. The source of hope is not within me; it is in communicating with the living God, reading His words and talking to Him in prayer, that I find grace and strength to help me get through each day. I wrote in my blog:

Today I begin chemotherapy. I am nervous, apprehensive, I do admit. Lord, take my fears and anxious thoughts. I need your peace now.

“I am in pain and distress, may your salvation, O God, protect me.

I will praise God’s name in song and glorify him with thanksgiving.

This will please the LORD more than an ox, more than a bull with its horns and hoofs.

The poor will see and be glad—you who seek God, may your hearts live!

The LORD hears the needy and does not despise his captive people.” (Psalm 69:29-33)

 

And God gave me peace.

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Chapter 2: Importance of the Bible–Decisions, Decisions

When I made the decision to praise God, it was really the decision to submit to His Sovereignty in my life, just like my dad did when he gave me up to God. All the rest of my decisions have been shaped by that initial choice, and my emotions trailed along behind. The Bible played a key role in this decision and the consequences flowing from it.

“For whatever was written in earlier times was written for our instruction, so that through perseverance and encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope”. (Romans 15:4)

These two things, perseverance and encouragement of the scriptures, are important factors in getting through tough times. The scriptures are full of encouragement because they are about God’s dealings with people, people just like you and me. Here is an excerpt from my first blog, written days after my first cancer surgery:

What is hopeless and impossible with man is not so for God, for all things are possible with God. Am I scared? Of course I am. Do I have anger and fears? Absolutely. I cry to the Lord who hears and understands, and who alone can do anything about them. I cast myself on his mercy. If others hadn’t been in similar situations we wouldn’t have the scriptures which are full of such agonies. Now I choose to affirm my faith in the God Who Is. And He highly values faith.

Encouragement of the scriptures only comes from reading the scriptures on a regular basis. This is what I was talking about earlier, when I said I continued my reading in the Psalms after my cancer diagnosis. I had made reading scripture a part of my life, really hearing what it has to say and letting it sink in. No one hands encouragement of the scriptures to you apart from reading or hearing the scriptures. From the Bible I learned about what others have gone through down through the centuries, many of them much worse than my circumstances. I read how God was present with them and helped those who trusted in Him, and I gained encouragement in the midst of my scary situation.

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Chapter 2: The Importance of the Bible–Not by Myself

“The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God stands forever.” (Isaiah 40:8)

Opening my Bible, I turned to the next Psalm in my daily reading, which began, “Praise the LORD! I will give thanks to the LORD with all my heart…” (Psalm 111:1) and my heart said, no, I don’t want to, I don’t feel like praising God. I feel like I’ve just been punched. I’d rather demand why this is happening to me. I have a heavy weight someone just dumped on me and I definitely do not like it, especially since it can kill me.

It was the day after I received a diagnosis of breast cancer. I was sitting in the bedroom of our son’s home, 3000 miles from our home in West Virginia. My husband and I had been on our way to the airport the day before, stopping at the doctor’s office to get the results of my biopsy on our way out of town. We were heading to California to spend the Christmas and New Year holidays with our children and grandchildren and had been anticipating this time with great delight; it is hard being a continent away from the ones you love the most in the world. Now not only did we have to absorb and manage this news of cancer for ourselves, but we had to share it with our two sons and their wives. It seemed extra difficult to find the right time because it was the Christmas season.

As I read the Psalm that morning with these feelings and thoughts of hurt, confusion, anger and fear steam rolling through my head and heart, another part of me simultaneously acknowledged, “Yes, I will praise the LORD, because I know that is just what I need to do, it is what I must do”, especially since I was so hurt and didn’t want to do it.

I already knew, from years of living with MG, a severe muscle weakness, how important it was that I do choose to praise God in the face of these conflicting and dark feelings. If I only praise God in the sunny meadows, when life seems nice and comfortable, but refuse to praise Him in the dark valley where fear and pain stalk, I would be a hypocrite. Besides, it makes no sense to turn my back on God, cutting off my only source of comfort and strength and hope right when I most needed these things.

That moment, I chose to praise God; a sheer act of the will. Let me tell you, my emotions were not on-board at that point. This was not an easy decision. It was a struggle. But I knew that if I chose according to how I felt at that moment, I’d end up in the depths of despair and would have a long hard battle to dig myself out of that pit. This was not academic head knowledge. I had been on the edge of that dark pit of depression many times. I knew from experience not to go there.

When I made the decision to praise God, turning my back on that dark, deep pit of anger and fear, it was really the decision to submit to His Sovereignty in my life, just like my dad did when he gave me up to God. All the rest of my decisions have been shaped by that initial choice, and my emotions trailed along behind. The Bible played a key role in this decision and the consequences flowing from it.

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Chapter 1: The Backstory–Life Resumed

I came home from hospital weighing eighty-seven pounds, recuperated over the summer, and entered high school in the fall to catch up on the classes I had missed the previous year due to hospitalizations. I graduated with honors three years later, squeezing four years of high school into five.

The surgery had been successful to a great degree. I was not cured of MG; there is no known cure for MG to this day. But I was alive and functioning once again, not on the level of someone without MG, but doing amazingly well, for me. I had a new lease on life.

After graduating high school I went away to college. This must have been a big step of faith for my parents who wouldn’t be there to help me if things went wrong, and they sometimes did go wrong. I have had a few life-threatening myasthenic crises, precipitated by a cold or flu, in which I became so weak I couldn’t talk, swallow or breathe. This is not good! These crises usually meant hospitalization and life support, meaning a tube down my nose or throat so I could breathe with a machine’s help.

In spite of these things I continued with life. I loved life! I went to a Bible college in Florida and there met the man who would become my husband. We were married two years later while in college and we started our family. In the next few years I gave birth to two healthy sons and together my husband and I raised them.

Miracles to us, miracles all. That I could marry, bear children and raise a family with my health condition is miraculous to us. There were, indeed, times when I could barely function: hands too weak to pin a diaper, arms too weak to lift my baby, eyes too weak to safely drive because of double vision. Randy, my husband, took over much of the care of our two boys when they were toddlers. He bathed and dressed the boys, cleaned house, cooked and bought us a dishwasher (back in the days when these were not household staples!).  He took the boys out on his day off once a week so I could have a break and rest, and they had great times together doing dad and son stuff.

Fast forward forty-two years from the time of my MG diagnosis at fifteen years of age. I am now sitting in the office of the surgeon who had done my biopsy and just had the wind knocked out of me because he just told me I had breast cancer.  All the lessons I’d learned over the years I now pulled forward as I was hit hard with this unwanted, frightening news of breast cancer; cancer that could kill me.

It is out of these and other life experiences I write. This path is not the way I would have chosen. But since it has been my life, I want to share with you what I have been learning about going through suffering—thriving through it, taking the broken pieces of my life and making something beautiful from them.

But I didn’t do it all by myself. And that’s what I want to share with you.

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Chapter 1: The Backstory–The Story Continues

The next few months following my MG (Myasthenia Gravis) diagnosis became a blur of hospitalizations, tests, and adjustments to medications which had very unpleasant and sometimes embarrassing side effects. Instead of getting stronger, however, the weakness and debility increased. Within six months of my diagnosis I was unable to go to school, feed myself, or lift my arms to comb my hair. I became bed bound.

Back to the hospital once again, this time for two weeks of bed rest and then a major decision by my parents to allow a surgical procedure which seemed to help some MG patients. It would mean the surgeon would open up my chest, breaking the sternum (breastbone), and remove the thymus gland, which lies above the heart. My parents were told the prospects were slim I would survive the surgery, and on top of that, it was uncertain the surgical procedure would even benefit me if I did survive. But there were no other options for me. Or for my parents.

Looking back, I cannot begin to imagine the agony of my parents. The closest I have come to this was when our youngest son was hit by a car while riding his bicycle. What a nightmare, until later that day after several tests were done, we knew he had no serious injuries; he was fine, just some road rash. His helmet took the brunt of his head colliding with the windshield of the car that hit him. God mercifully spared him.

My parents, however, had watched my decline from a healthy, active teenager to one who now was fading from this life day by day. The prognosis was grim. Little hope was given them.

I remember sitting propped up in the hospital bed, my parents and the doctors in the room asking me my opinion about the surgery they were proposing. Was I willing to go to surgery? I don’t remember all they told me, only that this surgery might help me. I gave my assent almost cheerfully. My optimistic nature, coupled with my ignorance of my real condition, made me hopeful this surgery would make me better. What could I lose? Little did I know.

A few days later I awoke from surgery with an elephant sitting on my chest. Well, it felt that way. At that moment, though I don’t think I’d ever taken anything stronger than an aspirin before, I was glad for pain medication. I was cold and realized my chest was exposed, an embarrassment for a young lady of fifteen years. But I had a raw incision about eight inches long in the middle of my chest, with tubes protruding from under my rib cage—one for the left lung, one for the right. When I tried to speak to my dad standing there next to my bed, a different kind of pain etched on his face, I discovered I couldn’t talk. I had a tube in a hole in my throat to help me breathe, a tracheotomy, he explained, through which I was hooked up to a breathing machine. It pumped air into my lungs, breathing for me since I couldn’t breathe on my own and this made it impossible for me to talk right then. So began sign language, and writing in place of speaking. I learned the frustration of not being able to clearly and simply communicate.

For weeks after surgery I was in and out of consciousness in the ICU, those tubes protruding from my lungs, and a hole in my throat. Finally, after what I thought was a couple of weeks, I was released from hospital and taken home. It was not until years later, in a conversation with my mom, that I found out I had been in ICU for six weeks. I was shocked! I had no idea I had been there that long.

The reason I was there such a long time, my mom said, is because I had almost died. I was on my way out of this life, declining daily. The doctors had known this was a possibility and had tried to prepare my parents. They were doing everything medically that they could do. Lots of people were praying for me, though, many I had never met. My dad had been “wrestling” with God for weeks to save his little girl, but on my worst night when doctors didn’t think I was going to live to the morning, he finally gave me up to God for Him to do with me as He pleased.

The night he let go of me and let God have His way, my mom related, was the turning point in my recovery. I began to improve.

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Brokenness to Beauty: Chapter 1: The Backstory

“I have the diagnosis. It is breast cancer.” As the doctor said those words it was like a stomach punch unawares, taking my breath away, but at the same time I had the urge to turn and look over my shoulder to see who he was talking to. Certainly it couldn’t be me. My mind reeled, simultaneously rejecting and absorbing what he said. I have cancer.

This was just the most recent onslaught of physical trials for me. I recall another doctor many years before say almost the same words, “I know the diagnosis,” after administering an intravenous solution.  I was just fifteen years old.

At that time the doctor told my parents I had a rare disease called Myasthenia Gravis (My-az-thee-nee-uh). It sapped my energy and strength so that in about a year’s time I went from an energetic teenager to being tired all the time, listless. My speech became nasal, I had great difficulty talking, chewing and swallowing and my eyelids drooped. I had a hard time gripping things with my hands, lifting my arms to comb my hair, and carrying my school books. My arms felt like lead weights.

At night in bed I secretly cried, asking God what was wrong with me. Was I going crazy? I felt like I was being locked into a cage in which my body was trapped. I was unable to move properly, like being in a suit of armor rusted stiff and immovable.

While my parents observed some of the changes in me, such as tiredness and listlessness, not normal for a healthy teen, they were not aware of all the symptoms of weakness I was becoming familiar with.  Mom, who had always been at home before, had taken a job at the hospital to help support the family while dad studied surgery. Neither of them was at home as much as they used to be to observe these changes in me. They were unaware of my struggles with being unable to grip the knobs on my dresser drawers to open them, or the inability to lift my arms and comb or curl my hair, or being afraid to step up on things for fear of falling and hitting my head, which I couldn’t hold up well because of weak neck muscles.  When I started choking on food, however, because the muscles were too weak to chew and swallow well, they became quite alarmed and started taking me to doctors to find out what was wrong.

I hadn’t always been tired and weak. I grew up healthy and happy. The oldest of four children, I had two brothers and a sister (my parents much later adopted another two boys). Ours was a happy home and I was an active, happy, vibrant child.

Living in the country, I remember doing things like tromping through the woods (I say tromping because I must have made enough noise to scare away any snakes for miles around; I never saw one, thankfully). We kids had a rope-and-tire swing hung from a tree on the edge of a bank, and we’d swing Tarzan-like out over the drop-off and back around to our starting point, unless we crashed into the tree the swing was tied to instead of our intended landing point. I loved riding horseback and playing in the creek which ran through the eighty acres of our land. I wasn’t much for dolls, and my mother’s mantra to the four of us kids, “Go outside and play!” contributed to my tomboyishness.

Now, at about age thirteen, after the family moved to the big city so my doctor-dad could study surgery, life took on a different tone. I began to have symptoms of muscle weakness and the inner struggle it brought on because I didn’t know what was happening to me. The not knowing is torture. For two years I lived in this no-man’s land of doubt and increasing weakness.

When I finally got my diagnosis, rather than fear, I felt relief! I wasn’t crazy! There was a reason for what was happening to me; I had a disease with a name! Strange comfort, you think, but oh, very real.

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If you write it …

Brokenness to Beauty: Transforming Your Brokenness into a Beautiful Life

Everyone needs encouragement. We all go through difficulties in life and look to those who can give us a word of wisdom, an understanding ear, a word to carry us through the dark times.  And sometimes we need more than a word. We need someone to come alongside us with compassionate assistance.

Encouragement comes in various forms. I believe there is benefit in sharing what one has learned about walking through the good and bad times, about living a life worth living regardless of what comes our way, passing down truth from one generation to another, one friend to another. I am a follower of Jesus Christ, a Christian, and Christians have an obligation to serve one another in love and pass on to the next generation and others around us the lessons God has taught us.

I found as I blogged my journey through cancer treatment, the readers were encouraged by how I went through it. Since every person will go through some form of suffering, difficulty or tragedy in the course of life, either personally or through someone they are close to (a simple reality, folks), it is important to learn how to go through these times in such a way as to come out the other side not only intact, but better for the journey; in essence, to turn one’s brokenness into beauty.

Since childhood I’ve lived with a chronic disease. I couldn’t ignore physical struggles. What I learned, as I observed life, was that no one—no matter how strong and healthy, no matter how gifted or talented, no matter how well-off financially—no one is immune to sickness, disease, injury, pain; loss of loved ones through disease, death, divorce or war; loss of support structures; mistreatment; loss of job, status, social standing. You name it, you and I can be affected by any or all of these in a heartbeat.

For as many people as there are in the world, there are as many different responses to suffering. I’ve seen some people who tragically fall apart. Some turn their backs on God, “losing their faith.” Some people turn to deceptive and destructive “aids” such as alcohol or drugs. Others even walk away from the pain and agony of suffering family members, leaving a wake of ruined relationships and bloodied, trampled hearts. Many become bitter, blaming anything and anyone, especially God, for their woes, clearly revealing their belief that suffering should never have come their way, as though they should be somehow exempt.

Then there are others who appear to just survive, getting through the hard times, as the old saying goes, “by the skin of their teeth.” They grumble and complain their way through it all, with a dark cloud over their lives, like Eeyore, the pitiable friend of Winnie the Pooh. Not an appealing sight.

Thankfully, we’ve also seen those who seem to go through suffering and trials with poise, with grace in the midst of their struggles. Though they have real fears and battles, they aren’t beaten down but actually thrive as a result of their ordeals, real ordeals, coming out the other side of the dark valley stronger and better for their time of struggle. They encourage onlookers by their spirit in the throes of troubles. How do they do it? The answer has more to do with what is inside us than what comes at us from the outside.

I’ve heard from people who went through terrible ordeals and yet came through them praising God that as a result of that ordeal they have a stronger faith in and a deeper relationship with God, that they are better human beings for the experience. Because I’ve had to deal with Myasthenia Gravis (MG), I’ve learned valuable lessons in how to live. I’ve been learning for most of my life to allow my brokenness to change my character, transforming my weakness into inner strength. It matters not what we are born with or what comes into our lives. It only matters what we do with those things.

As an adult in mid-life I was diagnosed with breast cancer, a whole new world of threat. I worked through it day by day. Cancer presented new challenges and new fears for me to face, and those challenges and fears weren’t easier than others I’d faced previously; they were just different. I came to realize, however, that the way I dealt with these new cancer challenges and fears was the same way I dealt with the old familiar challenges and fears of MG.

Facing the scary reality of cancer in my life, dealing with it day by day, I added the dimension of blogging about my struggles as I went through treatment.  To my surprise, the readers told me my blog postings encouraged them, time after time. It has been these readers, along with other significant people in my life, who have prompted me to write this book. They told me numerous times I should write a book so more people could benefit from what God has been teaching me about going through suffering and thriving through it, about using my brokenness to create a beautiful life.

This blog will present my book, “Brokenness to Beauty: Transforming Your Brokenness into a Beautiful Life”.  Most of the book will be here in my blog postings, but not all of it. I plan to publish the complete book when I finish blogging it.

So come along on this journey with me from blog to book … from Brokenness to Beauty.