Ugh, sorry for being absent for so long, between friends coming to town and being sick as a dog blogging has not been a priority (or even a possibility!). Keep me in your thoughts as my bed and my porcelain toilet have been my friend for the past week…good times.

As for updates, I go in on Thursday for my next set of MRI’s. We’ll get those reports on the following Wednesday, June 13th.

(new update. Jess just called the clinic and turns out I’ve got a UTI. This is good news ’cause due to my numbness down there and also ’cause I’m a dude–they can be much worse if you’re a dude I guess–much of what I’m experiencing can be caused by this. It’s a good thing Jess personally requested the urinalysis!)

Last week I was blessed to hear my friend Jenney perform some of her poetry. Now I must admit that I’m not really a poetry guy. Poetry does not immediately speak to my heart or capture my imagination…but it might be because I haven’t been reading or listening to the right stuff! I’ve included one of Jenney’s poems below called “Motion”. When Jenney read this it caught me. It caught my imagination. The last two sentences continue to hold me firmly in their grasp. They say that “…we must not be ashamed of our aching need for contact for god is the absence of aloneness whatever the modern prophets say. And the need for love is not a cringing whisper of our indecent feebleness but a clamoring bell that shouts out our impossible greatness to the mad but listening world.” God is the absence of aloneness. How does that strike you? I find that phrase absolutely breathtaking–in a world where we’ve somehow mistakenly overvalued individuality, isolation, and self-sufficiency to be reminded that God is the absence of aloneness is an incredibly hopeful image. It is an incredibly poignant image to hold onto and I think it draws us back into an understanding of God that is both accurate to his identity and to our need for him. And our need for him, as the poem suggest (though using the term ‘love’), is not something to be ashamed of. Being in need of love, and embracing such a need, is never something to be ashamed of. It is who we are, it is what we are created for, it is built into our identity. We are lovers. We cannot get away from it…or, rather, when we get away from it we begin to disintegrate and lose who we are and what our humanity is all about. I am created to love and to be loved–and it is in this love that we come to understand our “impossible greatness”…or as the Christian narrative characterizes it…our identity as creatures who are indelibly fashioned in the image of God. We spend so much time moving, staying busy, filling our homes and cars with noise, making every attempt to keep our lives and minds so full that we’ve got no space to recognize our neediness impossible greatness. We “resist standing still” because if we stand still too long we might be reminded of our identity as lovers, and if we are reminded of our identity as lovers we might just begin to love, and if we begin to love we might become vulnerable, and if we become vulnerable we may just get hurt, and getting hurt…hurts.

Motion

Do you move through your life as I do? Hacking into each moment as if you are cutting a path Through a ricocheting field of insects? Do you resist standing still?
Fearful that the accumulation of seconds Will pin you to a tree branch And leave you as an offering to An already bloated predator? Are you breathless from your conviction That the years will pile around you as you stand still–Bury you under the frozen confetti of your regrets? Do you move not because you love motion But because you hate the microscopes That are trained above you as you try to commit To being a simple organism in a static microcosm? Are you like me? I who have tried to increase the speed Of my life without having first learned to release the weight of
My disappointed hopes. Have you in your fury sprinted into the distance Knowing there is only a wall to meet you? And have you in stubbornness, Your ignorant pride, tried to move that wall through the violence of your Personal outrage? If you have, then you are kin to me, we are brothers and Sisters in our confusion, and we cannot climb this wall alone, nor contend with The wilderness beyond it, through random motion and blind reaching in the dark.

No.

We must first become the offspring of the counterintuitive. We must gather our courage as casually as we gather shells from an unpolluted shore. We must coax our wounded peace out from its hiding place and rehabilitate its broken faith with our commitment. And we must not endorse regrets. We must not feed them even little bits of well intentioned love because this would not be a kindness but an invitation to a prolonging of our loss. Instead, we must learn to hurl superfluous desires back into the turbulent waters and be bold in the belief that the light does not arrive with the answers that we find but with the questions that we ask. And we must not be ashamed of our aching need for contact for god is the absence of aloneness whatever the modern prophets say. And the need for love is not a cringing whisper of our indecent feebleness but a clamoring bell that shouts out our impossible greatness to the mad but listening world.

I hope we find space in our life to risk getting hurt.

* I can’t claim that my perspective here in any way captures Jenney’s perspective…but I think that’s part of the beauty of poetry right? If you would like to purchase Jenney’s book of poems you can do so here. It’d be worth your while!

As I posted on Facebook, yesterday we were filmed by an amazing crew of people in an attempt to capture some of my families life together. In just a few hours they recorded the four of us doing some of our favorite things together–playing with Legos, playing board games, eating, tickling, etc. It was fun and I’m excited to see what they do with the footage. The movie is going to be set to music (here’s one of their videos that captures the style) and we have the taks of figuring out what song to use.

A hard task indeed.

My first thought was about our wedding. I’ve only seriously sung in public one time. At our wedding. My sister and I sang “Come What May” from the Moulin Rouge soundtrack as the groomsmen and bridesmaids walked down the isle. Can you imagine? Can you imagine a tribute video of our family with those lyrics?

Come what may
Come what may
I will love you until my dying day

Yeah, that’s not going to happen. Too much. Too painful. Yeah. No.

Who would have thought that nearly nine years ago this song would be so significant–so telling–so…accurate. It breaks my heart to think of how painful those words are for my wife, for the person who will live through my dying day, for the person who truly has to hold onto those words “come what may”. I couldn’t ask for a more perfect person to spend the last nine years with. In reality, actually, nine years is only the tip of the iceberg. You have no idea how enmeshed our lives have been. At the age of seven Jess journaled about her “hunk” (me). Her brother and I were best friends all growing up. Our families did life together through homeschooling and church. At the age of fifteen and sixteen (after her brother moved away) the two of us became best friends…and it never changed. Virtually every memory of life we have is a shared memory. We genuinely can’t imagine life apart because we’ve never done it. She’s my best friend, she’s been my nurse for the last year, she’s been my chauffeur, she’s my counselor, she’s been patient with me, she’s been constantly present for my children, she’s helped me to laugh, she’s allowed me to cry, she’s done everything that could ever be done to walk this path with me. There’s a reason why I I always refer to “our” doctors and “our” cancer…because it is, and always has been–us.

Come what may.

I sang another song at our wedding. It was a surprise to my new bride, it was a joke (please tell me that it’s obviously a joke!), and it is one of our most cherished memories. This song won’t be in our video–but there’s no better way to end this blog than to end it smiling. There’s no person that I have laughed with more than Jess. We laugh well, we laugh often, and…we’re just pretty funny together. I wish I could end this blog by somehow seriously capturing a lyric from the song below, but it’s just too cheesy and it ain’t gonna happen!