Me and my son, Disappointment Lake, Central Sierra Nevadas, CA
July 2, 2019
Life seems to be embedded with endless troubles, trials, and tribulations. It seems that as soon as you have finally conquered one problem, another takes its place. Everyone on earth seems to be forever working to solve pesky problems that plague them in life, but few ever succeed. We want peace, we want to know what is coming up, and we want to avoid pain and suffering, but the task to realize these hopes never seems to be finished.
I was carefully watching the activities of wildlife in my backyard the other morning, especially the squirrels and the birds. They always seem to be busy at one main task: to find food for the day. They don’t have money, they don’t have stores, they aren’t enticed by advertising, they don’t have jobs, they rarely have any kind of solid and safe house to retreat to for the night, and their transportation is their legs or their wings. They wake up each morning and spend most of their day looking for food. Similarly, if you carefully watched a typical human go through the entire day, you would see lots and lots of endless activity mostly of the ho hum mundane variety, with the only breaks from the work being used to take a short rest, to quickly eat, or give yourself some kind of treat. And then you go to bed and wake up to repeat it all over again the next day. If you are looking for a lot of fun in life each day, better try another planet!
God has designed life so that there is never ending work of some kind. We likely will never escape it. The answer is to accept and embrace this work rather than trying to eliminate it. It seems to me like most of our problem with work is not the work itself, but rather the wearying task of forcing ourselves to work each day when our attitudes inside have locked us into disliking to do this work, resisting accepting it, and complaining that we shouldn’t have to do it. This is like trying to move a train with engines at both ends going in opposite directions. A lot of energy is expended, but little movement is accomplished. The answer is to willingly embrace work, change things in your life so that it is as pleasant as possible, and then spend most of your time enjoying the ride. Our natural inclination is to run away, but the best way is to relax and trust God:
“Come to me, all you who are weary and find life burdensome, and I will refresh you. Take my yoke upon your shoulders and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble of heart. Your souls will find rest, for my yoke is easy and my burden light.” —Jesus in Matthew 11, 28-30
Let God take charge of your life and lean on him, and you may just find that he is not nearly as great a taskmaster as you yourself are. Did you ever think that maybe you are the one mercilessly driving yourself, and not life or God?
One of the most difficult things that we can face in life is contending with unexpected problems which suddenly plop themselves down squarely in the middle of our train track of life, temporarily bringing our lives to a screeching halt. This happened to me in mid September last year. Actually, in retrospect, it really began in mid July, 2017, when on a solo backpacking trip in the Sierra Nevada Mountains I managed to bang my head on a broken branch pointing down from a dead tree. It hit through my hat right on a sore that I already had there and it hurt like crazy. It wasn’t bleeding much, so in my typical stoical way I just forgot about it. But it didn’t forget about me! For the next 14 months I worked with it on and off trying to get it to heal, but it never really healed. The thought kept going through my mind that a sore that never heals is a sign of cancer, but hope seems to spring eternal with me, and I went with the thought that it probably was just a tough staph infection. I finally went to my Primary Care Doctor in September, 2018, to find out what was going on. She took a quick look at it, grimly looked at me and said, “It’s cancer!” I asked her how sure she was and she replied 90% sure. At that point I resigned myself to accept whatever happened and face it with faith and trust in God. This is exactly the kind of thing that I hate to have come into my life, but I figured that God must be allowing it for a reason. She ordered a blood test a couple of days later and it brought more grim news: my white blood cells looked misshapen, a sign of leukemia, but I put off undergoing a diagnostic bone marrow test because I actually felt so good.
In the meantime, my newly assigned dermatologist started doing biopsies to see if my old head wound and other spots on me were cancer. The old sore on top of my head, plus a patch of skin on my right temple and a sore on my right cheek were all cancer. All three were removed in one session at a Mohs surgery office on November 28, in Elk Grove, California. I gritted my teeth and got through it feeling pretty confident. Prior to this surgery my dermatologist had also determined that growths on my chest and back were also cancerous, and removed them successfully in her office. I started to wonder why I had so many skin cancer sores on me now, when I had virtually none previously.
Two more cancers on my right ear were removed on January 7, 2019, and three days later I underwent a bone marrow test to determine why my initial blood test showed so many misshapen white blood cells. The results came back three weeks later–I had leukemia! My oncologist told me that in my bone marrow only 10% of my white blood cells were normal and that I needed to start therapy right away, taking daily pills and infusion treatments three times a month. She also told me that leukemia actually promoted the proliferation of skin cancer. No wonder I was getting so many skin cancers!
Surprisingly, I had no fear as I felt God’s presence within giving me the assurance that all was well. With this assurance came many periods of euphoric bliss and contentment that actually started soon after I met with my Primary Care Doctor in September. This sustained a deep peace within me throughout my numerous trips to the doctor’s offices. Well, two additional skin cancers were found on me, one on my forehead and one on my nose, bringing a total of 9 lesions that had to be removed so far. I began to wonder if new cancerous areas would ever cease to be found.
I started treatment for my leukemia on February 11, 2019. “My leukemia”, a phrase that I just used in the previous sentence seemed unusual and odd, I certainly never invited it to become part of my life. However, I just kept accepting everything without fighting it in my mind, and put my entire trust in God. After 4 months of treatment, things were finally looking good, as tests indicated that the targeted drug therapy cancer treatment was effectively destroying all the leukemic cells. Also, it was looking like all the skin cancer lesions on my body were removed and that there were none left. I started looking forward to the end to my “troubles” until a new problem hit me out of the blue–one day my heart started beating irregularly, hard, and fast (160 beats per minute).
I went to my oncology doctor, she ran an EKG test on me, and thinking that I was undergoing a heart attack, promptly sent me to Emergency. Yikes! But I kept my cool and doubled down on my trusting and dependence on God. I remained surprisingly upbeat and resigned myself to having to go through another medical emergency. This happened on June 19th, a mere 11 days ago as I write this. In the Emergency Room many tests were given me, including a blood test, two hours of being hooked up to an EKG machine, a chest x-ray, and a test for oxygenation of my blood. Thankfully, all tests said that there was nothing wrong with me, except for my irregular heart beat. I was diagnosed with Atrial Flutter, probably the result of my age (71), and was put on a medication to reduce my heart rate, and sent home.
I have since been assigned a cardiologist, and he said that he would shock my heart in three weeks, which will hopefully restore my heart to its natural rhythm.
Troubles come and troubles go, but the one constant you can always count on is that life is unpredictable and full of surprises and trouble. That’s why I lean on God, who lives outside the tumult of life, and trust him to keep me stable and safe. I figure that the worst thing that could happen to me is to die, and then I would simply head for heaven. So, if I live or die it’s a win win! Currently, I’m still hoping to live past 100, and be there for my kids and to help a world that is fast turning away from God and heading for destruction. Yes, I remain upbeat and optimistic, the only way I know.
Journey to Truth 