I was not prepared for blessing!

Prayers for healing have always perplexed me.  Of course, I want those prayers answered.  Who doesn’t want to see healing?  Yet when folks ask others for prayers for healing, I wonder does God need volume to hear and answer?  Are the stories of Yaweh being “roused” by prayer to be taken literally?  When folks report the blessing of healing, I wonder why some are healed and some are not?  Healing violates my equalitarian impulses.  Prayer violates my scientific impulses.  What happens inside a body when we pray for healing?  You and I know that all prayers fail.  Everyone you or I have ever prayed for has died.  What happened?  I’m more of a C.S. Lewis guy, “I pray because I can't help myself. I pray because I'm helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping. It doesn't change God. It changes me.”

For two and a half years now, I have been waging war against cancer. When I first heard the news, I wept.  I mourned for my life, for my wife, for my children.  Sorrow, fear, regret and rage took their turns in my heart.  After living with disease and treatment for these years, I thought I was prepared for what lies before me.  How wrong I was.

I have been fortunate in a way.  The cancer has been slow to grow.  I have had time to adjust.  I have had time for treatment. I had lung re-section surgery.  I had one half of a round of chemotherapy, but the side effects were so severe my oncologist stopped it.  The cancer metastasized into my spine. I had immune therapy.  I had radiation to relieve the pain in my back.  Yet none of these treatments stopped the slow growth of the tumors spreading through my lungs.  The sluggish speed of the growth furnished me with time to contemplate the road I walked. 

All through this time, prayer has supported my oncologist’s work.  My prayers rise daily.  I’m sure, in their own way, my wife and children have prayed.  I send out email missives and my sister, and her Sunday school class, my niece, my cousins, my friends from across the years, all have lifted me up in prayer.  When I told my Sunday school class of my diagnosis, one of the women came to me, laid hands on me and exclaimed, “Begone!”

In December of 2018 my oncologist stopped the immune therapy because it had proven ineffective.  She enrolled me in a clinical trial that combined an older chemotherapy drug with a new drug.  The old drug shrunk lung cancer tumors in about 10% of patients.  The new drug was being tested to see if it would goose up that number.  The side effects of the first round were very difficult.  I got a blistering body rash, nausea, neuropathy in my feet, the skin peeled off my hands, the hair on my body thinned, and I lost the hair on my head.  During Christmas’s 12 days, I shaved my scalp and sang “Chrome for the holidays.’

Others say they offer fervent prayers for my healing.  I am sure they do.  Instead of praying for healing, I usually prayed to walk into the looming valley of the shadow without fear (well, much fear) in the face of despair.  I told several of my pastor friends, “All prayer runs out, all prayer fails.  Jesus is Lord and that comforts me in the face of the inevitable. That’s all I need, the affirmation that Jesus is Lord.” 

I went to church with my mother back in the late fall.  She has dementia.  Every day, near every moment, is new for her.  Yet as the choir launched into “Jesus loves me this I know” she still knew all those words.  I wept.  That is all she, and all I, needed or wanted for the road ahead.  The firm conviction that I was in the wounded hands of Jesus sustained me because, “Jesus loves me this I know.  Even as the side effects of the new chemotherapy trial knocked me down, it was not the hope of sudden cure, but the deep theology of my mother singing the song “Jesus loves me this I know” that kept me from falling.

Because of the clinical trial protocols, I had a follow-up CT scan in early January.  The evening of the scan I left for Florida to be with my father-in-law as he faced his own cancer diagnosis and to be with my mother-in-law as she descended the steps of dementia too.

Two days after I arrived, the oncologist office called.  Colette, my oncologist’s nurse said, “The new scans are back.  Your tumors have shrunk.”  I was stunned into shouting “Praise God”.  I danced.  I wept for joy.  My Jewish father-in-law gave me an embarrassed smile.  I called my wife and told her I wanted nothing more than to plant a big wet sloppy kiss right on her warm lips.  I wanted to hold my children.

I, who talk a good game about God’s mercy and care, was not prepared when it came my way.  I was completely floored.  Blessing, blessing, blessing rolled over me and I was thoroughly unhinged. 

The psalms sing of blessing.  Jesus names those who mourn, and I sure mourned, as special recipients of blessing.  The great biblical story ends with tears being wiped away in a city with streets lined with trees whose leaves bring healing to entire nations.  And me, purportedly a student of that great story, well I guess I just learned something quite new—prepare for blessing.

It still doesn’t seem fair—why me and not the young gaunt girl I saw in the infusion center today?  Why me and not the old frail man in the wheelchair?  Yet, inexplicably I have apparently been given more than I expected.  There is so much I don’t understand, I just accept this with joy.  The end will still come, but for now, I sing the Doxology in the tune of the Old One Hundred.  Praise God the author of all blessing: expected and unexpected alike.  I thought I knew all about it.  I was prepared for the worst (well sort of), but for now, unprepared as I was, my mourning has been turned to dancing.

Once when I was 57 years old, I walked 500 miles across northern Spain on pilgrimage.  Buen Camino!