Struggling With Faith

This post on Scot McKnight's Jesus Creed blog is an honest letter from someone struggling with faith because of health issues. Those of us who spend time with people fighting cancer (or going through any of life's other difficult challenges) face these faith questions frequently, both theirs and ours. Here's my comment reproduced from the blog -- not wisdom, just where I am.

What you're struggling with is hard. Many of us have been, are, or will be struggling with precisely the same questions you're asking. In fact it's likely that we'll go through this questioning multiple times in our lives.

After years of spending time journeying with people asking these questions, struggling with them myself, and studying lots of what's been written on the subject, I'm convinced that in the end, it boils down to a simple decision we each have to make. We can choose to believe and trust -- in spite of not understanding or liking what's happening -- or we can choose not to believe or trust (and still not understand or like what's happening). That was Job's decision -- to maintain his integrity, his faith and trust in God. If we understood it, if we could explain it, if it all worked the way we wanted, then it wouldn't be faith.

I choose to believe and trust, because I simply can't imagine going through these trying and uncertain times without God. That's my prayer for you as well.

Resilience under Fire

Sometimes I'm amazed by the resilience of people. Today is one of those days. I visited with three people, each of whom has been hit with at least a double whammy.

First, there's the mom. Her teenage son is battling a difficult cancer and will undergo two difficult surgeries this week with periods in ICU following each surgery. Yet she's stuck in a neighboring hospital having just been diagnosed with brain cancer. She's facing the battle of her life while her son is fighting his own. I can't even imagine what she's going through, what her son is going through, what her husband is going through. Yet they were all doing what they had to be doing today. She feels that this battle is really about spiritual warfare -- Satan trying to diminish her faith, her testimony. I didn't disagree

Then there was the man with serious cancer in ICU. As we talked, he revealed to me that he and his wife were involved in a bad auto accident a week or so ago. She was severely injured, and has just been released from the hospital. He told me that when he woke up in the hospital after the accident, that he didn't believe what they were telling him had happened. Yet today he told me that both of them were taking this new chance to live their lives for God. Part of our conversation touched on his decision to forgive someone who wronged him almost 60 years ago, and how difficult forgiveness is. He's focusing on forgiveness -- not on self pity.

Finally there was a 30-something year old guy recovering from surgery for his fourth cancer recurrence. He's been fighting it for six plus years, with chemo, surgery, and radiation. And each time he fights back. I was inspired by his fight, his optimism, and his recently found faith.

What I learned today is that people are capable of dealing with incredible hardships -- and through it all staying faithful and positive. May God bless them.

From Bad to Worse -- But With a Respite

For some, life turns upside down seemingly overnight. That's the case for a man I visited this week.

Inoperable pancreatic cancer. Major medical complication after two rounds of chemo, requiring extensive surgery and extended stay in ICU. Metastases discovered during surgery. Unknown future treatment options, if any. Loss of 60 pounds in two months since diagnosis.

It's a story of things going from bad to worse fast.

Yet we prayed a prayer of gratitude and thanksgiving because his immediate condition had improved enough not to be as scary for him and his family as it had been for a couple of days. In the midst of fear and terror came a respite and time for rejoicing. I treasure that moment even as I'm saddened by the long-term outlook and the pain this family will suffer.

Grief: Yearning vs. Depression

Here's a nice article discussing that yearning is the primary emotion of grief, not depression as has been previously thought. Article also discusses the fact that in normal grief situations, depression does not normally peak until 5-6 months after death, which was previously thought to occur much earlier. According to the study, "Clinical guidelines should focus more on symptoms of yearning and pining and heartache and missing rather than on symptoms of sadness and feeling blue."

Our Subconscious Grieves

I had an "Aha" moment last night while reading about Anniversary Stories in John Savage's book, Listening and Caring Skills. I was reviewing it in preparation for helping teach Lifeline Chaplaincy's Creating a Healing Community workshop.

Savage writes about the fact that we often display emotional, mental, and physical symptoms of grief as we approach an anniversary of a loss, even when we have not consciously thought about the anniversary. He gave personal examples of a time when both he and his wife were irritable and grumpy, and once they talked about it, realized that it was the anniversaries of both of their mother's deaths, even though they occurred almost 20 years before.

This is further validated by brain research which indicates that the brain, when not focused on some present activity, stays very busy trying to make sense of the past and working on the future.

The reason this brought an "Aha" to me is that for several weeks I have been a little down, both emotionally and physically. While I'm conscious that today is the fourth anniversary of Mom's death, I hadn't tied my symptoms to grieving. Perhaps an even bigger "Aha" came when thinking about Dad's behavior and symptoms over the past month or so in this light. He is grieving Mom's death as well as the illness of his wife Carol, which has interrupted their lives in significant ways. He, as we all do, keeps trying to figure out how to feel better by trying to find physical remedies -- prescriptions, exercise, foods, etc.

He's just following the same rule we all seem to follow, "I'm not feeling well, so there must be a physical solution." Yet we all know that our emotions drive how we feel, even physically. But most of the time when we're not feeling well, we first think about physical causes. Part of that is probably a defense against the pain of bringing the emotions to the conscious level, and part of it is cultural -- being seen as overly emotional is a sign of weakness. Yet it's amazing how healing it is when we recognize the grief and allow the emotions to become conscious.

Learning how to grieve consciously seems to be a lost art in our culture. But the more life experience we have, the more we have to grieve. And the more important it is for our physical and emotional wellness that we learn to grieve well.

A Cup of Tea

I've always received comfort from a cup of tea. It's something I learned from my Mom, for whom a cup of hot tea seemed to be about the most luxurious gift to herself imaginable. Her favorite was plain old Lipton's, sweetened. I drink mine the same way, except often with a dusting of cinnamon. Nothing tastes quite as good early in the morning, or anytime I'm struggling through a cold or migraine or whatever. It's hard to tell whether the comfort comes from the tea or its association with Mom, or both.

I'm drinking a second cup of tea this morning, and it tastes especially good. Part of that is due to the cold I have that just won't go away because of the weather swings and the heater being on and off and being around others with whom I keep swapping germs back and forth. But I think the real reason may be that today Sara and I plan to visit Mom's grave.

It'll be the first time for Sara to visit her grandmother's grave, and Mom's been gone for almost four years. We've talked about knowing that Mom's not there and how weird it is in a sense to visit a grave. But it is a reminder of Mom's life on this earth, and it's also a dose of reality. My visits over the years, both alone and with Dad, have been unremarkable. But today may be more, because for Sara, she's covering some new ground in grieving her grandmother.

I've been grieving Mom more this last year than the previous three. No doubt, part of that is the fact that Dad has been back here and I've been spending a lot of time with him. But the larger part of it has to do with my involvement with Lifeline Chaplaincy, making pastoral care visits with people who are often quite sick, and many who are in the process of dying. My feelings about Mom, her illness, and her death are very much a part of me as I minister to those going through similar processes, and I know that it helps me be effective in helping them. We were told in training that our pain would rise as we help others in pain, and it does. But it's okay, because it's a good sort of pain with Mom.

I know that each of us go through grief differently. But I'm learning better that it is a long-term process, and also that I don't want it any other way. Time for a little more tea!