Self Pity

Will the Lord reject forever? Will he never show his favor again?
Has his unfailing love vanished forever? Has his promise failed for all time?
Has God forgotten to be merciful? Has he in anger withheld his compassion?"
Psalm 77: 7-9

Yvonne has been fighting cancer for 7 years, and until this year I really hadn’t struggled with the question of Why. I’ve observed enough misery in my life to have become resigned to the fact that we live in a broken world where life is not fair, life is a risk and bad things happen, sometimes through nobody’s fault and with no discernable purpose or reason. I have always been heartbroken watching my wife fight for her life, but I haven’t had any inclination to blame God or demand Why; that’s just the way the world is. But then it got personal.

Until last spring there wasn’t any visible evidence of the disease except for the wig she wore. She was strong and full of energy. Then in April Yvonne underwent radiation for the cancer in her brain and in the space of a few weeks in May and June her health crashed. It wasn’t a decline, it was a free-fall. We were in the Philippines for Megan’s graduation when she reached the point that it was obvious her condition was very serious. Seeing her slumped over in a wheelchair in the Manila airport, more than half certain she wouldn’t survive the flight back to Portland, was the worst day of my life. That’s when I got angry.

Her suffering in the months following seemed completely arbitrary and meaningless. The unfairness of it all was an offense of such enormity that there was no reconciling it with what I believed I knew about God. Everything I thought I understood about God and about prayer seemed to be thrown on its face. The sudden silence from God was completely inexplicable, as if my own father suddenly stopped answering my phone calls when I needed him most.

It helped to know I’m not the only person to experience this – C.S. Lewis describes it agonizingly well in A Grief Observed – but it’s a perplexity of cosmic proportion that this gracious and compassionate God who abounds in loving-kindness, whose power created the world and everything in it, would seemingly step back and silently refuse to help when we are desperately helpless. My anger settled into sullenness – or, more precisely – self pity.

I shouldn’t have been surprised, I guess, to discover that the antidote to feeling sorry for myself was to take inventory of all the good things in our lives. Not to trivialize Yvonne’s condition, but things could be much worse. We could be living in the middle of a war zone losing our homes and watching family members die, as in Gaza and Israel. We could be living in abject poverty in the slums of Manila or Calcutta, or somewhere where the only medical help is the local witch doctor.

I still don’t understand God’s silent distance, but that appears to be where things are right now; I can’t change that. So, in the meantime, like the Psalmist, I will remember the good that God has done in the past and continue to trust. And I will be grateful that I still have my wife - even in her diminished health - and so thankful for all the pleasure and joy that our family brings us.

Then I thought, "To this I will appeal: the years of the right hand of the Most High."
I will remember the deeds of the LORD; yes, I will remember your miracles of long ago.
I will meditate on all your works and consider all your mighty deeds.
Psalm 77:10-12

Quarantined

This long blog absence constitutes one of the manifestations of a self-imposed quarantine. The sickness I haven’t wanted to spread is my own fear, doubt and discouragement; writing about it would have the effect of exposing others to my contagion. When someone you love is struggling to stay positive and hopeful, they don’t need the added burden of reading that their loved ones are struggling because of them. At least that’s how the thought process goes. It turns out, however, that my blog hiatus is rather pointless; the people I want to protect are the same ones I live with and am constantly around. Even without words, not much escapes the careful observation of those I’m closest to on a daily basis.

This is both good and bad. There’s no getting around the fact that people who are in need are – well, in need, and that means that others have to step up and sacrifice time, effort, and money in order to meet those needs. Most people I know have a very difficult time asking for help. We all hate to be a burden on someone, but even more, having to ask for help is a forced acknowledgment of our own helplessness and inadequacy. The loss of self-sufficiency and control is a heavy blow.

As it happens, though, this can also be the good part. The most wonderful thing about love is that it cares, and it is fulfilled in serving and helping those we love who are hurting. It turns out that we are designed for serving. We are designed for giving. We are designed for sharing and supporting, even in the hard things. What a marvel, that we are built in such a way that we feel the most human when we are giving ourselves to someone in need.

I once had to have a stern talk with Yvonne to make her understand that she was not helping me by shielding me from bad news about her condition; she was in fact depriving me of the fulfillment I receive from sharing in her pain and serving her.

Fortunately I have wonderful friends who care enough to say the same to me, now, so I’ll be leaving my self-imposed quarantine.

Further up and further in!

Three years ago last month my father-in-law passed away. A few days after the memorial service, sitting in his little office I noticed an old worn Bible on the shelf and opened it. Inside the front cover he had written these words:

"The will of God: Nothing more, nothing less, nothing else."

There, I thought, was the answer to what made Dick Cadd the man he was: His single-minded focus on serving God.

Someone else reading those words might have found them terribly restrictive; after all, the usual image evoked by the "straight and narrow" is one of sober austerity, self-denial, seriousness. Not Dick. He had stepped into God's kingdom as a young man and had found there a world far bigger, more glorious and wonderful than anything his former life had offered. Dick's life was full of adventure, full of laughter and fun, overflowing with a joy that splashed over everyone around him. He was the best model I've ever seen of what a daily walk with Christ looks like because his rock-solid confidence and assurance in God's love & goodness was based on a lifetime of relationship with God.

"The further up and the further in you go, the bigger everything gets. The inside is larger than the outside." ~C.S. Lewis, The Last Battle

Photo opps

I've had very little time to get out and play with my camera since I bought it two years ago, but a weekend at the coast with the family a few weeks ago gave me some good opportunities. Here are my favorites - and I will not suffer any grousing that they all feature Isaiah.

Here's why cameras have a "continuous" setting; if you keep the shutter firing you can eventually catch things like this, with all four feet off the ground.

 

 

 

 

These two tell a little mini-story:

 

Don't know about anyone else, but this is my favorite:

The Real World-changers

Fatigue and crankiness tend to override my self-governor, so ordinarily I might not have posted that last entry. What prompted it, though, even more than Obama's victory speech, was sitting in a room full of missionary parents who had come from all over South East Asia to attend their childrens' graduation from Faith Academy. During the program at the Senior and Parents breakfast, each student's parents were introduced and we were told where they were serving and what their ministry was. By the time they reached Megan's name towards the end of the list I was rather hoping they would skip us. After all the church planters, teachers, pastors, nurses, doctors, tent-makers and translators, being introduced as a software engineer felt as relevant as a basket-weaver in a battlefront command post.

I don't want to discount or minimize the importance of selecting the right candidate to lead our country, but the hyperbole that politicians indulge in during their campaign speeches rings hollow and empty to the point of being silly in comparison to the very real changes quietly being made in peoples' lives through the ministry of God's ambassadors on the front lines around the world. God is working through these people in powerful ways to advance His kingdom in the face of strong resistance and and often at the cost of very real casualties. I was quite humbled to be around them.

It's just entertainment, folks...

It hasn't been any great effort for me to resist returning to the issue of politics, but when a candidate starts saying things like "we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal..." I can't help but hear echos of someone else who had a somewhat enlarged opinion of himself (Daniel 4:30) and I start getting more nervous than I usually am.

It is part of the normal political process for candidates to make wildly unbelievable and preposterous claims in order to get elected, but it's also part of the normal political process for everybody to understand that there's no way the candidates can actually deliver on those promises, and normally noone expects them to. Everyone understands, as someone else has said, that "Politics is show business for ugly people." What terrifies me the most in this current election is that a certain candidate and his supporters appear to actually believe that he can fulfill those wild campaign promises.

(Yes, living in the middle of Obamaland, I do know I've just offended 99% of my friends.)

In the Philippines - 1

Yvonne & I are currently in the Philippines for Megan's graduation. Yesterday evening we were given a tour of the new Faith Academy auditorium (still under construction) which will be named in honor of Yvonne's mom & dad, Dick & Helen Cadd. I just had to share this. It is an amazing, state-of-the-art concert and theater auditorium, but the entire complex will also contain all the fine arts disciplines at Faith, plus meeting rooms & a prayer room.

Everyone who knows Yvonne's parents agrees that this is a very fitting memorial for Dick & Helen, for the contributions they made not just to Faith Academy itself, but to the lives of hundreds of students who were inspired and enriched by the Cadds' investment in their lives.

Sorry for the layout mish-mash...

Silver & gold have I none, but such as I have...

I followed closely behind the young Filipina missionary, stepping carefully around and over things I'd rather not remember let alone describe, following a path alongside open sewers, trying not to gag from the indescribable stench. Closing in on either side were rows of squatter shacks built from cardboard, tin, and miscellaneous wood scraps. No electricity here, and the only water was carried in from a truck a quarter mile away in 5 gallon gasoline cans. We were preceded by a crowd of barefoot children, laughing and shouting and seemingly oblivious to their squalid surroundings. Through the holes that passed for doors in the shacks I could see dingy, filthy interiors that were little different from the exteriors. From the shadows inside we were being carefully watched by many pairs of sullen, suspicious eyes. We were in Barrio Magdaragat, a "village" of roughly 20,000 people that lived beneath the shadow of Smoky Mountain, Manila's (then) 10-story-tall garbage dump. Everyone here, including the children, made their living by scavenging through the daily garbage for anything that could be recycled and sold.

My guide stopped and called out a greeting in front of a shack that even from the outside was different; there were curtains on the windows, and flowers in a jar on the bare plywood dining table. We stepped inside and my mouth dropped open: It was spotlessly clean and bright, sunlight pouring through the window. Inside, I was introduced in Tagalog to a beaming young woman, then my guide turned to me and explained that this young mother was part of our mission's ministry in Magdaragat, and part of a small church that had been planted there in the middle of the garbage dump. The difference between this home and all the others I had passed was astonishing. Here was a brilliantly shining testimony of the real and tangible difference God can make in a person's life.

Last Sunday, continuing our "Are we really going to talk about... " series of sermons, pastor Gregg's subject was poverty. Since his trip to India, the poverty he saw there is what defines the worst of the worst for him. For me it is Manila's garbage dump. Yvonne and I spent three years with a mission that had several ministries there (and elsewhere), and since I was the mission photographer, I got to see abject poverty more often than I cared for.

What will always stand out to me, though, was not the feeding programs for children, nor the training programs for mothers, or the vocational training programs, the homes for lost and abandoned children. What stands out to me is the difference between the people who had Christ in their hearts and those who didn't, though each lived in identical circumstances.

By all means, let us do what we can for the poor. But let us never forget that real power for transforming lives is not found in poverty relief programs - as good and necessary as they are;
the truly transforming power is Jesus.

(personal note: when we left the Philippines we were planning to return but our plans changed. I left behind thousands of slides and negatives that I would love to have, but don't. I'm very grateful for photo-sharing sites like Flickr; the photos there picture it exactly as I remember - except for the smell.)

Um... Say, Al?

Snow in Newberg, on March 27.


(And yes, I know all about the ice shelf in Antarctica)

Winter mornings...

The late organ virtuoso, Virgil Fox, used to say that Shakespeare and Bach had "felt everything." The same could be said of the Psalmists: Every emotion experienced by humankind is expressed somewhere in the Psalms. Like countless others, the Psalms have been a tremendous help and comfort in every circumstance life has thrown at me.

But today I'm having a some trouble finding what I need. Can someone point me to a Psalm that talks about getting up on the wrong side of the bed?

"His heart is steadfast..."

When you have a close loved one (your wife, for example) who has what constitutes a major disease (such as cancer), bad news eventually becomes routine. Not that you get used to it, you just get used to the idea that it's going to keep happening. Kind of like getting beat up by the neighborhood bully; you never get used to it, but over time you come to expect it, and resign yourself to it.

So when Yvonne called late this afternoon to tell me she was in the emergency room with severe chest pains, my first response was to steel myself for the blow; it looked like the bully had caught us with our collective guard down again. Fortunately it wasn't any of the very serious things it might have been, but a case of Costochondritis - an inflammation of the cartilage that connects the ribs to the sternum. (Similar to Costcochondritis, the inflammation in my brain when I go to costco.) One Aleve and one hour (and several hundred dollars) later and she was feeling fine.

Maybe getting resigned to bad news is better than what my response used to be - instant panic - but it's not what I want it to be, either. In spite of the fear, pain, weariness, and anxiety that have marked this battle with cancer, God has proved his faithfulness and trustworthiness in ways that we would never have seen otherwise. So, after experiencing God's provision, grace, and comfort first hand over the last few years, you'd think that when bad news jumps out at me now that my first response would be to remember God's faithfulness, remind myself that He is still in control, and trust Him.

Right. Uh-huh.

Not yet, maybe, but this I aspire to:

"He (the righteous man) will have no fear of bad news; his heart is steadfast, trusting in the Lord." Psalm 112:7

Environmentally overwhelmed, part 2

Just when you think help is on the way:

Low Energy Bulbs Worsen Rashes

Doubts cast on Hybrid Efficiency

Environmentally overwhelmed

In church yesterday, pastor Gregg - quite bravely - spoke about the environment. And, quite rightly, he focused our attention on the responsibility we Christians bear to be good stewards of God's gift to us. He concluded by suggesting ways we can reduce our harmful impact on the environment and pointing us to some web sites where we could learn more.

Somewhere towards the middle (as often happens but it's not Gregg's fault!) my thoughts started wandering and I found myself mentally back in Manila. I remembered the thousands upon thousands of buses and jeepneys in this city of (then) 11 million people, billowing impossibly enormous black clouds of diesel exhaust. On a normal day visibility might extend for a few blocks; other days it was a stretch to see across the road. But the air pollution was just the tip of the iceberg. The raw sewage, garbage and industrial waste pouring into the rivers and into Manila Bay made the Exxon Valdez look like a kool-aid spill in kindergarten. Sadly, Manila is not unusual; the same could be said of pretty much any city in the third world. In comparison to how massive the problem is outside our borders, it would seem that our most diligent efforts here in America could - at best - have little more than a negligible impact on the global problem.

Obviously, something needs to be done. But when daily life is a desperate struggle to put food in front of your family, the environment doesn't even show up on your radar. How, then, does the global community put pressure on the third world to address pollution without wiping out what little means of livelihood they have?

Then my thoughts wandered to the article titled "High-Tech trash" in January's National Geographic, about the West's electronic trash being exported around the world. Then I started thinking about everything I use each day: my car, paper, shampoo, razors, clothes, shoes, computers, cell phones, CD's, DVD's, TV's & stereos, musical instruments, electric & gas heating - it's not just the discards that damage the environment, it's the manufacturing process of all the trappings of modern life. I find it overwhelming, because the problem is far too big to be resolved by simply conserving and recycling: It's now a matter of changing our way of life, but we are hopelessly addicted to our technology, our comforts, our entertainments, our conveniences.

My fear is that no significant change will be made until the environment collapses and the change is forced upon us.

Blessed

Yvonne & I have never been much for the Christmas newsletter thing, where people write about all the wonderful things they did the past year and all the wonderful things their wonderful offspring accomplished that year – not that there’s anything wrong with that, you understand. We’re just lazy. While looking today at this photo, though, I thought that if I were to write one it would be very short and would go something like:

It’s been a hard year, but a good year. Life has been full of difficult things, but also full of wonderful things. In the end it all comes down to this: I have a beautiful wife & three beautiful daughters who all say – without any coercion on my part – that they love me. I have a wonderful son-in-law that I thoroughly enjoy and who makes me very proud, even if I can’t take any credit for the quality of his character.

And now we have this wonderful little man in our lives who we hope will soon officially be our first grandchild.

I figure this makes me the luckiest man in the world.

Has anybody seen my good friend …

Curtis & I met the first week of 7th grade, and by the end of the school year we were inseparable. For 5 ½ years the two of us were our own little clique, unaffected by the “jocks”, “hoods”, “hippies” or any of the other little subcultures of the time.

Together we explored nature, rock & roll, puberty, counter-cultures, and Christianity. We once tried experiments in developing ESP so we could communicate without talking, but gave it up because we already thought so much alike there didn’t seem to be any point. We made “bombs” together - very unsuccessful ones, fortunately (or unfortunately depending on your gender and age), played with knives, bows & arrows, swords - all the usual boy stuff. We joked and laughed together. Curtis introduced me to Bill Cosby on a sleepless night in the pitch black of a pup tent by reciting, verbatim, the entire “Bill Cosby is a very funny fellow” album. To this day, when I hear recordings of Cosby’s “Noah”, in my memory Curtis does it better.

Curtis lived and breathed motorcycles. He could tell me the make, model, and displacement of any approaching bike by the sound of the engine before it came into sight. After he got his license, I was attached to the rear of his BSA like a piece of velcro. If we weren’t in school, working, or sleeping, we were on that motorcycle going somewhere. The only exceptions occurred because of the occasional girl friend; not quite enough room on one motorcycle for 3 (or 4) people.

In the middle of our Junior year, Curtis’s family moved away. I was absolutely devastated, as if I’d been torn in half. I spiraled into a horrible depression and came within inches of committing suicide.

I saw Curtis only two or three times after he moved away, the last time in 1973; we eventually lost touch altogether. On a drive through central California many years ago, Yvonne & I stopped in his old home town and looked through the phone book, hoping at least to find a relative if not Curtis himself, but there weren't any Ellis's listed.

He has been on my mind a lot lately. Not sure why. But if you happen to see him, please tell him I miss him.

What goes around...

Our youngest, Megan, was born at home (an event that deserves a whole story), so we didn't have the usual data collected that a baby born in the hospital would, such as birth weight. When Meg was a couple days old, her aunts took her down to the local grocery store and weighed her on the meat scale. When I found out, I was horrified. It seemed so demeaning to take my little baby and put her on a meat scale! As I recall, I made a rather big deal of it.

So you can imagine my chagrin as, many years later, I'm reading my mom's entry under "Weight" in my own baby book: "Eight and one half pounds on the scale at Safeway"!

Who defines reality

While browsing the New Book table at Borders recently, I flipped through several pages of "God: The Failed Hypothesis. How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist ". The absurdity of the idea made it fairly compelling reading.

Using science to disprove God is like using a ruler to prove that the ocean is not wet. That water is wet should be self evident, but those who will not believe in wetness are insisting on proof using methodology that is totally irrelevant to the properties of water. God, simply by definition, is completely Other, wholly and forever beyond any capacity we mortals will ever have for measuring and testing. If we cannot accept that our mere existence is sufficient enough proof of God's existence, then there is nothing more that the laboratory can produce that will be any more convincing.

Prevailing Western culture believes we became enlightened when we enshrined human rationality and eliminated from our definition of reality everything that could not be seen, touched, measured, observed or tested. Such enlightened people now relegate things of the spirit to the annals of mythology as relics of primitive, ignorant savages.

And therein lies the problem, of course, because (to paraphrase Tozer) it is the spirit that apprehends God. It is the soul that has the ears and eyes that hear and see God.

Science is far too limited in what it can know for me to let it define my reality.

"I, the Lord, am the maker of all things, stretching out the heavens by Myself and spreading out the earth all alone, causing the omens of boasters to fail, making fools out of diviners, causing wise men to draw back and turning their knowledge into foolishness..." Is 44:24,25

Your wisdom and your knowledge, they have deluded you; for you have said in your heart, 'I am, and there is no one besides me.'" Is 47:10b

But a natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually appraised. 1 Cor. 2:14

We sing about God because we believe in Him. We are not trying to offend anybody, but the evidence that we have seen of Him in our small little lives trumps your opinion about whether or not He exists. ~ Jeff Foxworthy

Unresolved Tension

In the initial shock of a crisis it’s natural, and easy, to call for help. In the immediate aftermath of a crisis as well, it’s natural and easy to share with others the good news of a crisis overcome, or even bad news of loss and defeat. But when the immediate crisis becomes a prolonged battle with no end in sight, it’s not so natural or easy to keep asking and sharing.

When a crisis evolves into a long slog of a battle that seems to have no end, when there’s little or no progress – or even worse, when there are losses and defeats – the battle turns inward and weariness, discouragement, frustration and depression become the enemy. Hope and the will to fight are inevitable casualties.

Anyone left still watching this blog may have noticed a bit of a hiatus recently. Fighting several battles at once, each one seeming never to end, has brought on a weariness that can’t bear to face the struggle, a fatigue that begs for relief or escape.

Into this depression came my last post (How Great is our God). More than just my own wondering, I felt like God was confronting me, asking whether I would continue to believe in his goodness, whether I would continue to trust him, whether I would continue to obey him and stay on the front lines even if I couldn’t see the end. Even if the end looked like a defeat. Even if I was certain that, in the end, there would be defeat.

I don’t know where this fits theologically, but I feel God calling me to the battle whether or not there is any hope of winning. I could very well lose Yvonne to cancer. Relationships that I desperately wish were healed may never be. Friends and family that I dearly love may never respond to God's invitation to redemption and wholeness.

Comprehending this call from God to live in unresolved tension is a new thing for me; I want to believe that God always, sooner or later, answers prayers and resolves these conflicts, these tensions in our lives. Well... maybe; maybe not. All I know at the moment is that for me to be faithful means to continue to trust, to continue to pray, to continue to do whatever I can to bring God’s kingdom to bear in these battles, and to do it as though I intend to win them.

Dear God, grant me the courage.

So do not throw away your confidence; it will be richly rewarded. You need to persevere so that when you have done the will of God, you will receive what he has promised.
Hebrews 10:35,36

How great is our God?

I was following along the theme of our morning worship service just fine until we got to the 3rd song, where I was diverted and never quite made it back (sorry, Gregg).

Somewhere in the middle of singing “How Great is Our God” I suddenly wondered, Do I believe in God’s greatness? Really believe? (Warning: inadequate, somewhat silly analogy ahead) If I could place all the seemingly overwhelming issues in my life on one side of a scale and place God on the other, do I believe that God would outweigh them? More to the point, do I really believe Jesus understood as fact what he said when he announced that he was the fulfillment of God’s promise to preach good news to the poor, release captives, restore sight to the blind, release the oppressed, and restore us to our place as His children?

Or do my actions (or lack of) testify that I believe he was just putting us on?

"... this is my prayer. ... that you may receive that inner illumination of the spirit which will make you realize ... how tremendous is the power available to us who believe in God. That power is the same divine energy which was demonstrated in Christ when he raised him from the dead..." Eph 1:16-20

Vacation

One of my stated purposes with this blog was to post photos from time to time. I haven't done much of that, mostly because I haven't had time to take any. This has been especially frustrating because I bought a new digital slr a year ago and haven't had the opportunity to really get familiar with it. But a recent vacation gave me opportunity to play with it - almost to my heart's content. Hope you enjoy!




If you click on the slide show, it will take you to my google photos where you can see them much larger.

Now, isn't this better than sitting you all down in my living room and putting you to sleep with a slide show? :)