Category Archives: reflections

Real Life is Hard: Missing the Hospital

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While I was showering today I started thinking about the things that I really miss from when I was first sick nearly a year ago.

 

  • I miss the excitement–going in for surgery, staying in ICU, managing pain med cocktails, learning to walk, having visitors…it was all so exciting early on. At the time there was little expectation that I would be diagnosed with terminal cancer (at least little expectation within my own mind!) so all these things were fun and interesting. They were all experiences that I, as someone who had never stayed in a hospital before, found interesting and exciting. (kind of weird, I know) Now, these days, everything is routine. The only exciting medical stuff is when we get MRI results back, when we get to wait and see how sick I get from my chemo meds, or when we get to see how constipated I get as I up my vicodin. It’s just not the same.*
  • I miss the Jello–Seriously, while hospital food isn’t the best, there was something fun about being waited on for every single meal. Not to mention that it wasn’t until the last four days of my stay in the hospital that I learned that I could literally choose and request anything I wanted for a meal! Literally, if they could make it I could order it. From milk shakes to blue cheese burgers I could order it…if only I had found this out on day one! Even better than the hospital food was the killer treats that you wonderful friends and family brought in to me. From thai food to a Wendy’s frosty it was great to eat so well. The thing is, is that I can (and often do) eat that well today…but it’s not the same. There’s something less exciting about it. Again, it’s just all so routine now.
  • I miss the simplicity–Everything was simple early on. I had one job: recover. Everything revolved around that. Even Jess’ jobs were simplified in many ways, though she definitely had more than one. Today one of the hardest things is figuring out how to function. How much do I work? How much time do I spend with friends? Following ten days of being sick who deserves my time most? I’ve been at home for those ten days, but by no means has it been quality time with my wife and kids. So do I follow up those ten days with a series of quality days? Do I catch up on my lost time outside the house? What about my “responsibilities”? Which responsibilities still apply when you may or may not be dying of cancer? I could/should write a huge blog about this one bullet point. I miss the simplicity ’cause right now I’ve got little to no idea how to manage my time, my energy, and my activity.
  • I miss the pain meds–It’s not so much that I don’t have access to pain medication right now, rather there was just something nice about having someone else in charge of it. It’s such a hassle trying to remember all my medicines, vitamins, supplements, etc. I liked when nice caring people would come in the room at the right times to give me the right stuff and to occasionally talk me into taking more or less of different things. It was nice. It was easy.
  • I miss the reading–It kills me that today I have lots of time to read but generally lack the mind-clarity to be able to do it. Due to “chemo brain” (as my doctor calls it) very often when I try to read one of the books in my long queue I just can’t focus nor can digest what I’m reading. It’s frustrating. When I was in the hospital (after the first couple of days) and when I first came home my brain was not the problem as much as my body was so I was able to read more…I miss that.
  • I miss the bed–Come on, who doesn’t want a bed that sits up?! The rails were nice too ’cause they keep my stuff (books and laptop) from falling off. Oh, and don’t even get me started on its ability to go up and down. For a dude that can barely get to his feet to put on his socks it’s nice to have an adjustable bed! The only thing I do not miss about those beds is that the mattress would constantly move in order to ‘protect’ me from bed sores and such. No, I do not miss that part.
  • I miss the visitors–For a social dude like myself it was pretty flippin’ awesome to have people visit every day. Don’t get me wrong, with where life has taken us and with how tired we are there’s not a chance we could emotionally and practically handle visitors like that today. But still, I miss that back then it was not only a reality but a semi-manageable one!
  • I miss the lightness–Let me say upfront that I should have been more worried and less lighthearted early on. But even still, I miss the fact that back then I could get excited about small things like learning to pee again or transitioning from a walker to a crutch. Those small hurdles were worthy of being celebrated…but today there’s few things like that to celebrate. Life is just life. And even more so with the development of my cancer everything is seen from a different perspective…a much more sober perspective.

There are definitely things that I don’t miss. When I was in the hospital I didn’t get to see my children enough. I don’t miss having a catheter. I don’t miss smelling (I didn’t get to shower as much as I should!). I don’t miss having a bag of my own urine strapped to my leg. I don’t miss the blood thinning shots. I don’t miss having my blood drawn every morning at 4:30. I don’t miss being prodded in random awkward places. There are many things I don’t miss and given the chance I wouldn’t go back. But being honest, being completely honest, the bullet points above are things that I’ve probably romanticized…and I’ve probably romanticized about them because real life is just so hard. Hospital life isn’t real life. It’s not. It’s an alternative world that costs lots of money to create. Real life is gritty, real life causes immense clashes of balancing worlds, real life requires more of you, real life invites harder choices, real life is just more difficult.

Real life is also more rewarding and its worth it and I wouldn’t trade it for anything…

 

*  Jess would like to clarify that SHE would never use the word “excitement” with regard to her husband going in for back surgery and tumor removal. Maybe I should clarify that I use the word “excitement” quite loosely!

Ups and Downs

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Life is filled with ups and downs. Even if you look at the American economy you can see how things ebb and flow, how fifteen years ago everything was perfect and we could do no wrong to today where we don’t seem to have enough jobs or money to go around. Ups and downs.

One week I was in Disneyland and the next I was discovering that I had a tumor in my spinal cord. Another week I was taking joy in learning to walk only to then find out that walking was the least of my worries. The week that I finally waved goodbye to steroids was an exciting time, but it was followed by ten days of excruciating headaches from withdraws. The night of the amazing fundraiser planned for us was followed the next day by the emergence of blood clots in my lungs. Ups and downs.

Its been a challenge the last week to find energy (both physical and emotional) following my bout with blood clots because it starts to feel like there’s always going to be ‘one more thing’. Additionally its to the point now where its hard to think about a future different thats not filled with constant rest, doctors appointments, and nausea.

Lately it’s been feeling more down than up…but as we know life is filled with both. Neither define us but both shape us. Both invite us to become new creatures, transformed into something that we could not otherwise be. Some lives are filled with more ups than downs while others are filled with more downs than ups. Most of my favorite people have experienced lots of downs.

As a follower of Jesus my belief is that death’s ass has been kicked–that life will one day be filled with ups–that the downs that we experience this side of death are temporary and only wet our appetite for a future consumed with peace, love, and joy.

Until then I think we’re invited to live into a reality that does not yet fully exist, we attempt to join in with God’s movement in bringing that future into today’s world. But part of that is the freedom and even the necessity to grieve the brokenness (the down moments) of life for what they are: imperfections introduced into God’s perfect creation.

Life is filled with ups and downs. Lately I’ve been experiencing more downs than ups, tomorrow may be different…and that’s just life this side of eternity. We anticipate, we wet our appetite, and we seek to bring that reality to todays world while simultaneously grieving the fact that it has not yet fully come. Downs suck…but that won’t always be the case…at least that’s where my hope lies. Where’s yours?

What am I doing?

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I keep asking myself what I’m doing. Or better yet I keep questioning what should I be doing? Part of me desperately wants to get back to life as normal. And so I have someone drop me off at the coffee shop down the street where I’ve spent way too many hours over the last two years. It feels normal to see old friends and to even to continue making new ones. In an effort to get back to normal the wife and I went out on a double date, I’ve scheduled a meeting or two, and I’ve been trying to frantically catch up on coordinating our second annual Compassion Vancouver event. In an effort to feel normal I try to walk as much as possible, do housework, and play and interact with the kids as normally as I used to. In an effort to get back to normal Jess has scheduled girl time with a couple different lady friends (though there’s never enough time!), we’ve done a couple mini-grocery trips, and run occasional errands. Normal stuff. Everyday life stuff.

But things still aren’t normal. My body still hurts; my back still feels as though there are ropes tying my shoulder blades together. My right side is still paralyzed and doesn’t work right; it cramps and as the day goes on my whole body stiffens and gets difficult and painful to move. I can’t bathe myself, I can’t drive, and can barely make it down the stairs from my bedroom without help. While my extreme emotions are not as extreme as they were even a week ago I still find myself having a short fuse with my wife and children. As a matter of fact the level of emotion in our family swings as quickly and extremely as our kitchen’s swinging door. The children, while early on ecstatic to be back at home with mom and dad quickly realized that life was not normal. Dad can’t play on the floor with them, he can’t pick them up, he can’t put them in bed, and he doesn’t have the same energy level he once did. Jones also knows that dad might have cancer and the thought plagues him. Every day he asks me if the tumor is benign. The kids recognize how stressed mom is, they recognize the burden she’s carrying, and they act up and intensify in order to compensate—and mom and dad have little physical and emotional energy to respond appropriately. We kind of constantly feel like bad parents as we respond in ways contrary to our normal parenting preference or methods. Knowing your parenting badly is a heavy burden to carry isn’t it? So we try to create breaks by having the kids spend time with grandparents—it is a blessing to have grandparents in town! But the kids want to be with us, they should be with us, they need to be with us…and yet we continually ship them off…because things are not normal.

I want them to be normal. I want to better participate in our Sunday Arnada Community Meal, to be available on Monday nights to dream the Grassroots Conspiracy into further reality, and to live into the rhythms that have defined our Community House for the last eight months. But the energy comes in spurts, the kids freak out in flurries, and my mental capacity to process through my schedule still seems off.

At times things feel almost normal. I want things to be normal. But things are not normal. Things can’t be normal. Things can’t be normal because we still have not received results from the Mayo Clinic. They told us that we should hear in the next couple of days. Of course they told us that we should have heard five days ago and they told us we should have known twelve days ago. If we find out results today that that I start chemo on Wednesday (I am completely making this up) normal will be defined very differently! If we find out tomorrow that a miracle has happened and the cancer isn’t cancer then on Wednesday normal will be defined very differently. If we find out tomorrow that we’ve got to wait another week normal will be very…well…

Until we get that message—whatever it is—this is normal I guess.

Maybe in-betweens ARE normal. I don’t know. I don’t know what I should be doing in this in-between. I think I’m going to keep trying to be normal—keep trying to go to coffee—keep trying to walk normal—keep trying to ignore my back pain—keep trying to not be a jerk to my wife—keep trying to be emotionally and physically present for my children—keep trying to work—or maybe I’ll just rest, continue to write my thoughts down, journal, let my back heal, read some books, and wait. Maybe I’ll do it all…or maybe I’ll just blog about it!

Thank you all for listening. My blog started in December of 2005 as a joke and has turned into a cathartic exercise that keeps me sane. I think its working!

A Church Planters Job Description

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I think it is becoming more and more evident that school (undergraduate) does not really prepare you for any sort of career or job. I mean, maybe there are some fields where your undergrad studies actually prepare you for what you’re getting into, but more often than not it just gives you a platform big enough for you to jump into the abyss from. Within this framework I’ve been doing some thinking about everything I needed to learn in college in order to be prepared to be a church planter. Because the list can be enormous I will only focus on practical needs.

  1. Fund raising. I was never taught to ask for money, how to ask for money, or how to find success in asking for money. But the reality is that aside from prayer I think that fundraising is the single most crucial thing in getting and keeping church planters going.
  2. Database management. Try fundraising, sending out newsletters, etc. without some kind of working knowledge of how to organize contacts, keep track of the last time you contacted them, keep track of if you’ve written them a thank you note, keep track of whether or not they get your newsletter, support you, etc. I waste my time doing this stuff because I have no idea how to do it, but it’s a must!
  3. Written word. In seminary you get a class or two about how to preach, so in theory you’re completely prepared to be a weekly teacher (read in sarcasm here) but the written word is completely different. You’ve got to write newsletters, blog posts, and articles among other things.
  4. Graphic Design. Connected to number three, if you’re writing newsletters you had better make them look good. Also you probably don’t have money to pay someone to make your new churches website so you had better start figuring out a way to make your own website! You’ve got to make yourself some sort of church logo, design your own business cards, and create all those beautiful documents and posters that make any worship space a communication workhorse.
  5. Powerpoint. You should probably learn this in high school, but if you didn’t you’re in trouble ’cause any church planter without his powerpoint might as well be naked. Learn it, use it, custom animations, inserted video clips and sound, etc.
  6. Social networking. Yes, thats right, starting churches is actually all about people! So if you want to start a church you’ve got to know how to connect with people. What makes it even harder is that often you come out of a schooling context where your nose is stuck in a book (albeit, a good book) for 2-3 years. When you take your nose out of that book and look around at all the people it takes about three years for your eyes and nerves to adjust to human contact again!
  7. Social activist. Church planters must be connected in their neighborhood, in their community, schools, and the like. They attend the PTA meetings, the neighborhood watch meetings, chamber of commerce meetings, they serve at local schools, homeless shelters, and anything else that sends them to the community in love. Try learning that in seminary.
  8. Training leaders. One of the most important things you do as a leader is to train other leaders. Otherwise you’ll never create a sustained movement and your church will only go as far as your Superman-like shoulders will take it. How do you train a leader? Who do you train? Do you take them through a curriculum or just let them shadow you? Do you just look for those who already lead and tell them to keep doing it or do you plug in people where you think they’ll fit? Leadership development is important!
  9. Time Management. I know, I know, this is in no way unique to church planters…except for the fact that often you do not have an office when you start a new church. Which means that you’re working from home, from coffee shops, libraries, and anywhere else that has wifi. You had better learn to stay motivated and on task ’cause there are an innumerable amount of distractions around you.
  10. Finally (though I’m sure you could list more) your appearance. Can you grow a good goatee? Do you look good with a shaved head? Got plugs? How about a tattoo? Do you own a Moleskin? Have an iphone? Got good eyesight? If you have good eyesight you had better stab yourself in the eye ’cause you’ve got to have a pair of black framed glasses!

School cannot and will not ever prepare you for all that!  So what’s the answer? Obviously experience can never be replaced. But I would also suggest that reinventing how school and graduate work is done is vital (see Rochester College’s new Missional Leadership degree). But even more practically speaking we need more opportunities to watch, follow, be mentored, and learn from others’ mistakes. I get excited when I see groups like Kairos an Northwest Church Planting because they are beginning to offer these types of experiences.

Oh yeah, and I didn’t even get into the stuff that really makes a new church work. Stuff like prayer, listening to God, engaging the world, taking care of your family, theology…you know, all that stuff!

Worshiping on Saturday

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I worshiped last week with the Cascade Hills Church of Christ, a church plant that launched at the same time that we did almost five years ago. We drove down to Salem on Sunday morning to be with them. Jason, the leader there, referred to that day as their church Saturday. What he meant by this was that Jesus died on Friday and resurrected on Sunday, and on Saturday God was just…well…dead. Followers of Christ celebrate the backwards nature that God brings life out of death, and on that Sunday Cascade Hills was dying. They had not yet experienced the full reality of the life that would happen as a result of their death, and so they celebrated their “Saturday”. Jason said some powerful words that resonated with me. He listed some of the top things he had learned in planting Cascade Hills.

  1. Responsibility makes you old (makes you grow up)
  2. The best way to learn something is to teach it or do it
  3. There is more to do than we’ll ever be able to do
  4. When everything goes wrong…things then tend to be just about right
  5. In order to do church you’ve got to go where people are
  6. A few people can make a huge impact
  7. Prayer works
  8. Building faith takes time
  9. Failure and faithfulness often go hand in hand
  10. People make the church (not vision statements, strategies, buildings, programs, etc.)