Month: June 2020

Talking to people or sharing information about your life is not always easy. In fact, for me, it has always been very difficult. I like to hear what others are doing but telling my own story isn’t something I want to do.

I’ve had a number of problems in my life and I would rather put them behind me and never think about them again. I don’t know if that is a healthy way to live but it is what I do. I put the past behind me and try to live in the present and plan for the future.

When God first told me to write about my life, I did not do so. I asked someone else to write about Christianity and linked his website to our needlework store.

I knew I was supposed to write but could never settle on what type of writing I was to do. It wasn’t until I became ill and asked God, once again, what I should write. It became clear to me during a sermon series at our church. I was to do what was difficult for me. I was to do something I really did not want to do.

I was to write about my failures, problems and heartbreaks of the past. By writing about them and sharing how God has helped me along the way, my writing could be of help to those going through similar things.

It was hard to begin and every single time I sit down to write, it is still hard. I am still compelled to do so. I know that it is what God wants me to do and so, I do it.

Sharing about Jesus is also difficult. We are always concerned that the person we are talking to may not be interested or may even be offended.

That is probably true much of the time but there will be those few instances where the person you are talking to needs to and/or wants to hear good news.

You can’t know what others are going through because you are not those people. All you can do is talk to others about yourself and about God and let God take control of the conversation and their situation.

You cannot force others to listen. You can’t force them to understand. All you can do, if you are led by God to do so, is to plant a small seed in their lives.

It is the great commission that Jesus left for us and all Christians, yes all and not just some, are asked to spread the good news of salvation to the entire world. That doesn’t just mean me. It also means you, too.

Mark 16:15

And He said to them, “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation.”

Picking up the pieces of life, after my son passed away, was the most difficult thing I have ever done. If it had only been me, I would have sat and cried the days and nights away.

However, it was not just me. My daughters and my husband still needed me to be strong. I can’t say that I was always successful but I did try to be there when they needed me.

Still, there was a big part of me that was stuck in grief. To be honest, there is still a part of me that exists in the moment my son passed away. It still hurts so much and will until I reach heaven when I know that I will see him once again.

While I did what I could, my outlook on life had changed. I had always been a person who looked forward and wanted challenges to overcome. Instead, I became a person who was waiting.

I was waiting to die. I didn’t actively want to die, I just had problems finding a real reason to continue to live. I loved my family, my husband, daughters, sisters, brother, mother and all the rest. I just had lost the will to live.

I ended up quitting my job because of the travel they insisted upon. I did not want to leave my daughters; I wanted to be a much more present mother than I had been the last several years.

If I had asked them, they probably would have preferred for me to not be quite so present but I wasn’t about to give them a choice. Good thing I didn’t ask them.

My husband helped me so much. I knew he could see that I had changed. I don’t know if he knew that I was as lost in grief as I was. I was very good at hiding my tears and cried only when I was alone or when I was in the shower. My true solace during those years was my faith that God was still working his plan in my life.

That went on for years. I did ask a doctor about what was going on. He told me that grief was natural and that he didn’t want to give me medications as it would prolong the period and cause many other issues.

I told him I would not have taken medication, in any case. I had already lost a brother and a nephew to addiction to drugs. I was not going to go down that road as well.

The years continued to roll on. I enjoyed my life, especially once we moved away from California. In moving, we left behind all the places that caused me so much pain. I thought often about my son and what he would be like if he had lived.

Still, I was living and just waiting to die. I looked to the past more than I did to the future.

It wasn’t until my grandson was born that my outlook on life began to change. I was going to have surgery and just wanted to see the sweet boy before I died if that was what God had for me. That was the first inkling of wanting to live that I had had for over fourteen years.

When my grandson was born, I told God I could happily die during the surgery but if he would spare me, I would be happy to live as well. I didn’t die.

Instead, a week after my surgery, at six weeks old, my grandson was diagnosed with an extremely dangerous heart condition which would have very quickly become fatal if he didn’t have life-saving surgery.

He was going to need extra care during his months of recovery. I volunteered to watch him while his parents worked.

Just like that, I needed to live. I wanted to live. I had a real purpose in life. This child needed me and I needed him even more.

I had the privilege to watch over him and to work with him to help him gain some of his physical goals. Those goals had been delayed because of the surgery and the recovery period.

I can’t explain how much this time meant to me. It wasn’t that I helped him. It was that he helped me. I wanted so much for him to recover and be strong.

He was such a brave little boy. Some of the things he went through were so painful. He seemed to have problems smiling for a while but as he grew stronger, he smiled more often.

A few years later, his sister was born and my reasons to live multiplied overnight. By that time, though, I was only watching them one day a week and it was more for fun than anything else.

I wanted to live but I was, once again, searching for a purpose in life. I was struggling, running this way and that, trying to find something to do that had meaning.

When I became ill and was told that I was going to die, I was ready to pass. However, I was a little sad that my two little ones would not remember their Nana. Still, if it was time to go, I had had a full and wonderful life. Once again, I didn’t die.

I’m thankful every day for my life. I look forward to each day as it arrives. If it is my last day, then I have nothing but praise for the God who has given me that day.

What he did was to give me more time and he gave me a true purpose, one that will last for the rest of my life. He wants me to share the word of the gift that Jesus gave to each of us. What could be a better purpose in life than to share the love of Jesus?

I didn’t deserve God’s favor. I treated the gift of life he had given me with little respect. Waiting to die is not what he wanted for me. It’s not what he wants for any of us.

He wants us to live, in his grace, and to live life abundantly. That doesn’t mean to have a life filled with things but, instead, it means to have a life full of hope and meaning. It means to live your life for God and to do the things that he has especially given to you to do.

Revelation 21:4

“And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away.”

I recently read a book that took me back to the the time when my son fought valiantly against a terrible disease. He was seventeen when he was diagnosed with an acute and aggressive version of leukemia. His odds, at best, of recovering from it were only one in ten.

He went into remission following a terrible and debilitating form of chemotherapy. He spent six months doing everything he wanted to do. He started classes at our local community college. He went on a few dates. He was 18.

At the end of six months, the disease was back and the only treatment available was a bone marrow transplant. None of the family matched his DNA.

He was blessed that a donor was found and he was given the transplant. It took. His new marrow was that of the donor.

Sadly, just as we left the hospital after four months, his doctors gave him oral magnesium and potassium without checking to see how he tolerated them.

He did not tolerate them and the ensuing reaction caused him to go into graft versus host disease. That is when the transplanted marrow and the body of the transplant patient go into battle. In his case, it lowered his resistance to both bacteria and fungus.

He ended up contracted a fungal infection in his brain. It took two weeks to receive the diagnosis during which time he went downhill and started having seizures.

Then he died. He had not made it to age 19.

I stayed with him throughout and bullied him to do what he needed to do to get better. I fought for him. I also laughed and spent time with him and prayed constantly for him. I tried to force the disease out of his body by the strength of my will

It doesn’t work that way but, believe me, that is how a parent reacts when their child is desperately ill.

To have to talk to your child about the type of funeral he would like and which of his sisters would get his belongings was something I can never wish on my worst enemy. We did it in a joking manner just before his transplant.

We also talked about how far he wanted to go with his fight. He spoke the words that allowed me to know when to stop fighting and to let him go.

I probably would have still had problem doing so but just before he was diagnosed with the brain infection, I asked him if there was anything that he wanted. I meant that moment. But his answer was more than that.

He said, I just want for this all to be over.

It broke my heart to hear those words. Through my tears, I responded, Then that is what I want as well.

It really wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted him to fight but he was telling me that it was time. He had fought so hard and for so long and he was tired of fighting.

Those were the last words he ever spoke to me. He immediately went into a semi-comatose condition where he could not see or speak but could hear and feel pain.

I had to explain to my daughters, my husband and David’s father what his wishes were. David’s dad wanted to continue fighting but the doctors told us that it would only delay the inevitable.

I didn’t want to prolong his pain. He had given me the power of attorney and I made the decision to keep him hydrated and on pain medications but to withdraw all other forms of treatment.

It took three days for him to pass away. We had been warned that it would take weeks and he would progressively grow weaker and colder.

I was so thankful that God didn’t prolong his suffering. He lasted long enough for his sisters, friends and family to say good-bye. I suddenly realized he was waiting for his grandmother but that she was ill and could not travel to his bedside.

After I told him what was going on, I believe he stopped trying to wait. He passed away hours later without ever having the progressive symptoms the doctors warned us about.

Throughout his illness, I prayed for God to heal him. About three months into his transplant, I could no longer pray for healing. I would try and my prayer would change to asking God to use David for his glory.

I was so angry with myself because I could not pray as I wanted to. Then I thought that God had changed my prayer because David was well and needed a different prayer. With that thought in mind, I relaxed and allowed God to direct my prayers his way.

After David died, I realized that God had answered my prayers for healing up to the point when my prayers had to change. He answered those final prayers as well. David’s death was something that I ended up writing about and people came to Christ because of what had worked in his life and in his death.

At one point during David’s illness, when the chemotherapy had laid him very low, I asked him if he ever asked God why he had allowed him to get leukemia?

David said No. He told me that God was using his life as He needed to do and that David had dedicated his life to God and had asked him to use him. He accepted that this was what God had planned for his life.

That experience taught me so much about God. It taught me what true dedication really looked like. It taught me that God answers prayers even if the answers don’t look like what we want them to be.

1 John 5:14-15

And this is the confidence that we have toward him, that if we ask anything according to his will he hears us. And if we know that he hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests that we have asked of him.

We run around talking about hate. This group hates that one. That group hates someone else. We are told that it is part of the system in which we live.

In a way, that is true. The system isn’t one government or another. It isn’t one race versus another. It isn’t one ethnicity versus another.

The system that we live in is that of the sin of humankind.

When we rebelled against God, we opened the door for the evil one (Satan) to come in and rule our hearts. We severed the connection with the one who is love and embraced the one who is death and hatred. We began to wage war against our Creator, God.

There isn’t one of us who isn’t guilty of this type of hate. It just manifests differently depending on whom we are. We don’t learn deceit and hate. Sadly, it comes naturally, since we are born in servitude to the being who is hate.

We were not made to be hateful. We were made to be in communion with God and to love one another. Because of our wish to be like God, we lost the ability to truly love like he does. We know only how to hate.

It doesn’t surprise me that, in this day and age where people no longer believe in God, that this hate is boiling over. It is splashed across the news. We can see hate when a police officer pins a man by his neck to the ground until he dies. We see hate when people run wild in the streets rioting and looting and harming and killing one another in some of distorted way of honoring the man who was murdered.

Protests are not evil but doing harm to others is. There is no redeeming quality to killing people or in harming your neighbors. There is nothing eternally gained by stealing and destroying. There is only destruction.

That destruction is not just to the city you live in but to your own soul. That kind of hate corrodes you and hardens your heart to hearing the good news of Jesus.

Jesus saw the wretched state of our souls and he still loved us. He loved us so much that he was willing to die for us.

Imagine if you were found guilty of the most heinous type of crime imaginable and, when the Guilty verdict was read, someone you didn’t even know came forward and said they would take your death sentence and allow you to live. Imagine then that you somehow convinced yourself that that person deserved to die and not you. Imagine then that you were the one that nailed him to the cross.

Imagine that same person wasn’t just another human being. Imagine if he was also the God who created the universe simply by the words of his mouth.

It just isn’t fathomable to our brains. Humans don’t behave like that. That’s why humans could never be the perfect sacrifice that was demanded to forever make the relationship right between God and man.

A human is sinful in their own right and their verdict is already Guilty. They can’t take the punishment of another because they already deservedly share in that same punishment.

God had to come to the earth himself. He lived as a man (while still fully God) and lived sinlessly. That way, he could offer himself, an innocent man who, on his own, did not share in our punishment.

Just as one man (Adam) brought sin into the world and broke our spiritual relationship with God, one man (Jesus) was able to repair that relationship and bring forgiveness for our sins into the world.

We need to see it and acknowledge it. We need to know that we are guilty and that we deserve our sentence of death. We each need to accept that Jesus died for each of us. We then need to make the decision to follow him and to strive to life as he asked us to do.

We need to know that hate is in the world but that, as followers of Jesus the Christ, we are called to love and not to hate. In the face of hate, we are to love one another. We are even to love those who hate us; maybe loving those individuals most of all. It is easy to love those who love you, it is extraordinary to love those who hate you.

The only way to fight the hate that is born into us through our sin is to learn how to truly love. The only way to truly love is to know and follow the only who is love. God loves us and Satan wants to kill us and destroy us.

Who do you want to follow for the rest of your life?

Who do you want to spend eternity serving?

For me, without question, it is God.

James 4:1-10

What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions.

You adulterous people! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. Or do you suppose it is to no purpose that the Scripture says, “He yearns jealously over the spirit that he has made to dwell in us”? But he gives more grace. Therefore it says,

“God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.”

Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Be wretched and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you.