Category: courage

Mar 15

Is Heaven on Your Mind?

 

 

 

 

How much do you think about Heaven? A lot? A little? Not at all?

Whether your earthly life is close to it’s end or you have many decades still in front of you, I hope your thoughts turn often to Heaven because that eternal perspective lifts the weariness we all face. One of my dear friends who thought well and often of Heaven was named Melina.

Melina was a dark-haired, dark-eyed beauty (think, full-blooded Italian parents!) She and her husband Brian met in 1988 and married a decade later. Together their love produced two adorable little girls, Cecilia and Olivia. Melina was a mortgage broker and Brian worked as an electrical engineer.

It was a beautiful world.

But that was before October of 2003 came. And with it a diagnosis for 33-year-old Melina of colon cancer. I had just met Melina’s younger sister Rina through a mutual friend and I sent Melina a little note of encouragement when I heard about her diagnosis. I knew how important it was to hear from other survivors of “your” kind of cancer. I reminded her that I was still alive after having colon cancer spread to five lymph nodes (she “only” had it in two).

After surgery, Melina started chemotherapy, availing herself of the new anti-colon cancer drugs that had not been available to me back in 1990. But in August of 2004, three weeks after doctors told her there was no evidence of disease, she developed terrible abdominal pain: a grapefruit sized mass was on her ovary. Then a PET scan showed tiny cancerous spots in both lungs.

Melina quit her job to stay home with her daughters and for the next nearly three years, Melina fought back against the cancer, enduring such things as a clinical trial that left her bedridden for five months and a trip to Germany for a new laser procedure to remove the lung nodules. She spent two weeks in California learning about organic and whole food nutrition, and traveled to cancer centers in Philadelphia and Virginia to see what they could offer.

Each new approach seemed to knock down the cancer for a while, only to have it rear its ugly head once again.

Like many cancer patients do during their fight, Melina started a web page. She called it “Melina’s Hope.” As an author who appreciates a really great opening thought, I loved the way Melina began the first page of her site: “You might think my hope is to preserve my earthly life…”

That’s exactly what I was thinking her hope would be. But that’s because I was thinking of her cancer diagnosis as the beginning of her story. She set me and all her readers straight right away by explaining “My story begins one Sunday morning in August 2002.

“What a beautiful day,” she writes. “It was the day I accepted the Lord Jesus into my heart. With that acceptance came a promise: if I trust the Lord with all my heart and acknowledge Him in all my ways, He would direct my paths—and that He did in my journey with colon cancer.”

And that is why Melina said her strongest hope was not to preserve her earthly life, “but more important than that, is my hope that my story changes but one heart to accept the love and protection that comes from our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Trust in the Lord with all your heart and don’t depend on your own understanding. Seek his will in all you do and he will show you which path to take. Proverbs 3:5

That was Melina’s favorite verse—the one on which she firmly staked her life and the one by which she squarely faced her death.

“I can’t abandon the one true healer, Jesus Christ,” she wrote about five months before her passing. “It’s His decision where my healing will take place, here on earth or with Him in heaven. That is where my hope and comfort come from. I trust completely that the Lord will do what is best for me, my family and friends.”

Even though Melina grieved that she was going to leave this earth and not see her little girls grow up or grow old with her husband, she had hope because she knew this life is not all there is.

Hope that she was not saying goodbye forever.

Hope that she was headed to her real Home: Heaven.

Hope that in Heaven she would get a new disease-free body.

Hope that one day there would be a grand reunion of all her family and friends who also trusted in the Lord.

Near the very end of her life, she told her distraught adult family members: “I know you guys don’t want to hear this, but I know where I’m going and I can’t wait to get there!”

Then she added with a smile: “You’ll see me again.”

One of my favorite daydreams is to imagine that upon my arrival in Heaven, Jesus greets me and then takes me to a long line of smiling people: Melina and all of the faith-filled cancer patients I knew. I see that they are physically healed just like we prayed for so many times. We embrace and while there are no sad tears in Heaven, in my daydream I am filled with tears of joy.

But my dream is not just wishful thinking. The promise of Heaven for all who believe in Jesus is real and I know that reunion will really happen.

Another one of the people I look forward to seeing in Heaven is someone I never met on earth: my paternal great-grandmother May Andrews Peirce. She was a prolific poet and I’d like to think my writing ability came down through her genes. In 1928 when she was nearly 60, she wrote a poem she called “HOME.”

In childhood’s days, our thoughts of Heaven

Are pearly gates, and streets of gold.

But in the gathering years,

When time, within its fading leaf

With eyes, perchance be-dimmed with tears,

And hearts oft’ overwhelmed with grief,

We look beyond the pearly gates,

Beyond the clouds of sin’s dark night,

And see a place where loved ones wait,

A place all beautiful and bright.

And over all, we’ll see the face of Him

Who’ll bring us to our own—

Not to some far-off, distant place.

For Heaven is, after all, just HOME.

Today’s song is a real OLDIE (but goodie) from a live performance by Keith Green in 1977. Five years later he was killed in a plane crash at the age of 29. I’ve also included a “bonus,” more contemporary song about Heaven. (If the videos don’t automatically load for you, please copy and paste these links to hear.)  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbzJYqj2xC4https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1lrfjmSFkU

Feb 15

No more bad news!

 

 

 

 

Would you believe I’m typing this blog at 11:20 p.m. the night before? I was lying in bed thinking about my day: naming things for which I’m thankful and praying for those in need when it hit me: I never wrote a blog for this week! AAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGHHHHHHH!!!

Part of me thought that I should just skip it–it’s not like the blog police are going to arrest me for failure to write.But I kept thinking maybe there was someone who really needed a Word to the Weary today. In just the last few days so many of my friends have gotten bad news–cancer recurrences, the need for more chemo, the death of a loved one, loss of a job, and the list goes on and on. Maybe you or someone in your family has gotten some awful news too. And even if you didn’t personally get such news, there’s been enough rotten world and national news to discourage even the most optimistic person–me included!

So I decided to get out of my nice warm bed and get my four typing fingers moving and at least write a few words of encouragement to all of us who are feeling the weight of so much bad news. (Now I know why I couldn’t get Psalm 112:7 out of my mind all day.)

They will not be afraid when the news is bad because they have resolved to trust in the Eternal.  (The Voice Bible)

Scripture never promises that those of us who love and follow God won’t get bad news. In fact, it pretty much assures us we will. We can’t really choose whether or not to get bad news–although turning off the TV and not reading newspapers or Facebook might help a little 🙂  It’s when the bad news comes that we have a choice: we get to choose how we respond. And we can decide not to be afraid.

Why can we make that decision? Because we have resolved to trust God. The Google dictionary says resolved means that we have “decided firmly on a course of action.” The Amplified Bible translates that part of Psalm 112:7 as “steadfast, trusting [confidently relying on and believing] in the Lord.” Any way you put it, our minds are made up. We are not budging. We will trust God in spite of every negative, discouraging, evil, disease-filled, sad, depressing circumstance we come up against.

Well, it’s after midnight as I finish typing–I didn’t even stay up this late on New Year’s Eve! I’m not much for New Year’s Resolutions, but here’s the resolution I am making this night: I am resolved to trust in the Eternal God no matter what this life brings (or doesn’t bring). Won’t you join me today, and all the days that follow, in making that same resolution?

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If the video doesn’t automatically load below, please copy and paste this link to enjoy this song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXMPNXXnCls

 

 

Jan 25

Praying when You Just Can’t

 

 

 

 

 

It’s pretty easy to thank God when ­every­thing’s going well in your life. When you feel good. When you have your health. When your loved ones are doing fine.

It’s a lot harder to praise Him when things—sometimes most things—are not going well. Before I was diagnosed with cancer, I always enjoyed singing in worship, praising God and thanking Him for all my wonderful blessings. Prayers came easily to my lips, especially prayers of thanksgiving, because I had a lot for which to be thankful. In fact, if you had told me there would come a time in my life when I ­wouldn’t be able to pray, I would have laughed at the suggestion and insisted it could never happen.

But it did.

In those first dark days after my diagnosis, I literally ­couldn’t pray. When I would read my Bible and then try to pray, the words simply would not form. Instead, tears rolled down my cheeks, sometimes just a trickle and sometimes turning into heavy sobs. The ­only thing I felt like I wanted to pray was a desperate cry for healing. What else was there to say?

And then I read a verse in the Bible—one ­I’m sure I’d read many times before, but it never had seemed that significant:

And the Holy Spirit helps us in our distress. For we don’t even know what we should pray for, nor how we should pray. But the Holy Spirit prays for us with groanings that cannot be expressed in words. And the Father who knows all hearts knows what the Spirit is saying, for the Spirit pleads for us believers in harmony with God’s own will. Romans  8:26-27

Two wonderful verses about how to pray when you feel you ­can’t pray. They were right there in the Bible, sandwiched between Paul’s discussion of suffering and his explanation of how we can be victorious even in difficult times! (Read the whole chapter and you’ll see what I mean.)

It was okay that I felt I ­couldn’t pray. The Holy Spirit would pray for me. He would take my “groans” that were too deep for words right to God Himself. And even better than that, the Spirit would know what to pray for me. He would pray accord­ing to God’s will. I love how The Message renders Romans 8:26: If we ­don’t know how or what to pray, it ­doesn’t matter. He does our praying in and for us, making prayer out of our wordless sighs, our aching groans.

That’s one amazing God! He knows that at the times we need Him most, we may not be able to express ourselves to Him, so He has His own Spirit do it for us! After I found that verse, I would often just sit, my hands on my lap, palms toward heaven, tears rolling down my cheeks . . . praying.

I never said a word. I ­couldn’t even form cohesive thoughts in my mind, but I prayed. I ­didn’t worry what or how to pray. I simply allowed God’s Spirit to take my innermost thoughts, my deepest fears to God and pray for me.

In time I was able to pray again myself, but sometimes even now I still practice the kind of prayer I learned when I had no other way to pray.

Another amazing thing I learned about prayer during my cancer ordeal is that God has given us prayers we can pray when the pain is too deep.

I spent the entire six months of my chemo in the Psalms. I ­don’t think I opened my Bible up anywhere except to the middle, where my eyes would fall upon a psalm that expressed my need to God.

I remember one day telling my husband how much the Psalms were blessing me as I dealt with the struggles of chemo treatments.

My surprised husband reminded me that in years past I had commented that those who wrote the sorrowful psalms seemed to be “a bunch of whiners.”

“Well, now ­I’m a whiner, too!” I explained.

It was true. For the first 36 of my life I had it ­really easy. A wonderful, loving home growing up; a good education; a great marriage; super children—nothing to whine about. Life had been so good that I had never needed God the way I did after I found out I had cancer.

Quite to the contrary, the psalmists had plenty of trouble in their lives, plenty of times they desperately needed God’s help. So I read the Psalms. Day and night I read the Psalms as my prayers to God.

To you, O Lord, I lift up my soul; in you I trust, O my God. Psalm 25:1-2 niv

I am worn out waiting for your rescue, but I have put my hope in your word. Psalm 119:81

However you pray, your prayers are reaching the Father’s ears. The scriptures tell us that in Heaven there are “gold bowls filled with incense, which are the prayers of God’s people.” (Revelation 5:8; 8:3-4) Your prayer is a sweet fragrance to God. Here’s one more from the Psalms you could pray today: Lord, sustain me as you promised, that I may live! Do not let my hope be crushed. Amen. (Psalm 119:116)

Don’t miss the INCREDIBLE song here. If it doesn’t load automatically for you, copy and paste this link to enjoy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Te0hy2YcLgg

 

 

Jan 11

Happy endings only, please!

 

 

 

 

 

If this hasn’t happened to you yet, I’m pretty sure it will.

Someone finds out you or your loved one has cancer–or some other serious diagnosis–and begins to tell you a story about a relative or friend of theirs who had a similar one. I’m sure it’s an attempt to try and identify with what you’re going through, but unfortunately as the story unfolds, it’s not what you really want to hear.

People used to come up and tell me gruesome stories about their neighbor who had the same kind of cancer I did and just “wasted away” or their grandmother who was “wracked with pain.” I hated hearing these stories, but at first I tried to be polite and listen.

Finally, I decided I could take it no longer and when people started a cancer story, I would interrupt them, smile, and say, “Does this story have a happy ending? Because if it ­doesn’t, I don’t want to hear it.”

That reply ­really stopped people in their tracks, and I ­didn’t have to listen to any more hopeless cancer stories.

You may want to adopt my approach as well. Many patients tell me they have and that surprisingly it worked quite well even though some folks’ mouths dropped open at the shock of being asked to stop talking midstream! Eventually, you may be fine to listen to any and all stories, but at first I think it’s best to stick with the happy endings.

All the patients in the office where I worked as a patient advocate for nearly two decades knew that when I started to tell them a story, they could relax because it was going to have a “happy ending.” Either the person got cured or went into remission or lived much longer than predicted. You also can trust that all my books are filled with endless hope and not hopeless endings. There are plenty of books with formulas which promise that if you do this or ­don’t do that, your prayers will be answered just the way you want them to be. I know such books exist because cancer patients and their families in our office often wanted to talk with me when such a prayer formula ­didn’t work for them.

The truth is that some people get cured of cancer–or other life-threatening illnesses–on this earth and some ­don’t. I join you in hoping and praying for your cure, but I want to remind you that no matter what does or doesn’t happen to your health, you do not have to be a victim.

I hate the term “cancer victim.” It somehow implies cancer is the victor. It wins; we lose. While we can do little to choose whether we get cancer (or most other serious diagnoses), I believe we can do a lot to choose whether we are its victims. I don’t just mean whether we live or die. I mean how the diagnosis affects us in the deepest parts of who we are.

I urge you today, whether you are the patient or the caregiver, not to choose to become a victim of cancer or any other illness/condition. Do not let this disease seem more powerful than it is. Do not let it fill your mind, steal your peace, invade your soul or destroy your hope. It has no power to do those things unless you allow it to.

As you take this unwanted journey, I believe you are going to discover two things:

You are a lot stronger than you think
and God is a lot greater than you think.

If you had told me prior to June 1990 that I was going to be diagnosed with cancer and have to endure major surgery and six months of weekly chemo, I would have said there’s no way I can face that. If you had a crystal ball and showed me the terrible side effects I would suffer because I was allergic to the main chemo drug and no other alternative existed at that time, I would have said: I can’t do it. If you told me I would have to live with the knowledge that if my cancer came back, there was no second chance at a cure and I would die very quickly, I would have told you there’s no way I can live like that.

But that’s because I didn’t have a true appreciation for how great God really is. Oh, I’d believed in Him and even served Him faithfully for many years, but until I suffered personally, I’d never experienced how powerful He really is. Now I’ve seen firsthand the amazing strength of the human spirit and the incomparable greatness of the Almighty God.

The Lord is good, a strong refuge when trouble comes. He is close to those who trust him. Nahum 1:7

If you ­don’t want to be defeated by this diagnosis—no matter what it does or has done to you or your loved one, you need a supernatural touch from God.

May I pray for you? Heavenly Father, this diagnosis feels very big right now. Please show Your power in my friend’s life and let him/her see that this disease/condition is very small and weak compared to Your amazing strength. Help him/her to choose not to be a victim. Amen

(If the music video doesn’t appear below, please copy and paste this link to enjoy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKLQ1td3MbE

 

Jan 04

How to Have a Close Encounter of the Divine Kind

 

 

 

 

I don’t know if this cancer diagnosis is the first one your family or friend has faced or simply the latest in a string of such bad health news. Lucky me…I was the first in our large extended family to find out my DNA had “slipped up” and allowed cancer to “slip in.” At the time, we had plenty of relatives with diabetes and heart problems, but always thought cancer wasn’t something lurking in our genes.

So, while some folks might suspect they may get a cancer diagnosis some day, I never did. Instead it seemed as if my cancer just came out of nowhere and struck when I least expected it. I hear many cancer patients say the same thing—some of them are even in their seventies and eighties, but have enjoyed such good health, they felt rather immune to cancer.

And then there are those whom I meet who already have had cancer knocking at their family’s door too many times—they’ve watched parents, spouses, grandparents or even their children wage cancer battles and now are discouraged that it’s their “turn.”

I think it’s hard to be the first in your family with cancer and it’s hard to be the latest one diagnosed. Either way this disease is a very unwelcome intruder.

I know that’s how my friend Guy felt when he was diagnosed in December 1993 with what his surgeon later would describe as “Stage D” prostate cancer (and yes, this story has a happy ending!). In 1991, Peg, Guy’s wife of thirty-four years, died from a rare, inoperable cancer, and his middle son, Mike, endured chemo and radiation for testicular cancer in 1992.

Now it was Guy’s turn.

“I ­didn’t get angry,” he recalls, “but I felt very empty and I said, ‘Why, Lord, why?’”

Even though Guy had a strong faith in God before his diagnosis, it ­wasn’t easy for him to face cancer without Peg at his side. But he was about to find out that this unwelcome intruder was no match for the Creator of the Universe.

A radical prostatectomy was scheduled for late January 1994 and Guy remembers the anxious moments before he went ­under­ the surgeon’s knife.

“Before I went into the O.R., they prepped me, and Mike’s minister was up to see me and he asked me if he could pray with me,” Guy says. “Then they took me out of the room and down the hall. Before we got to the [operating room] door, I said, ‘Stop!’” Guy recalls. “The guy pushing me said, ‘What’s wrong?’ but I just told him again to stop.

“I looked up and pointed up and I said, ‘Lord, You know me and I know You—do with me what You will,’” he remembers. “Once I said those words, I was so at peace and I said to the guy that was pushing me, ‘Let’s go!’

“I left [my cancer prognosis] up to God and I ­wasn’t afraid of anything. I had a peace that I can’t really describe.”

I would describe what happened that moment as a close encounter of the divine kind.

As Guy reached out to God, he said a simple prayer of surrender, giving the Master of the Universe permission to have His way in Guy’s life. He did what I believe we all need to do: agree to let God simply be God.

Let Him be the unfaltering, faithful God, willing to strengthen us for any and ­every­ circumstance.

Let Him be the incredibly sovereign God, wise enough to know how and when to answer any and ­every­ prayer.

Let Him be the mighty awesome God that He is, powerful enough to heal us at any and every­ level—powerful enough to heal my friend Guy, body, mind, and spirit.

Have you ever had a divine encounter with the Lord before? If you have, you’re probably already praying for another such special moment. But if you haven’t, you may be a little wary (maybe even a LOT wary!) Personally, I don’t think you have anything to lose—and a great deal to gain—by reaching out to God and saying a simple prayer surrendering your situation to Him. You could pray something like this: Dear God, You know me and I want to know You more. I surrender this situation to You and ask You to have Your way in my/my loved one’s life. I pray this in Jesus’ Name. Amen.

P.S. If you want more of the happy ending to Guy’s story, you should know the surgery (which did not remove all the cancer) was followed by radiation and hormone treatments after which he was cancer-free until his death more than twenty years later. Up until that time, he sually could be found spreading cheer as he volunteered helping the “old folks” at a local nursing home!

(If the music video doesn’t appear below, please copy and paste this link to enjoy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgsqfjRslzA