Deep Shadows and Golden Light

The autumn sun drops swiftly through the naked trees and the golden light spills into our living room cutting shadows in the gold pooling on the floor. The day is stretching out, ready to tuck itself into the night as I hear the tick-tock of the clock -- another indication the day is almost done. Sitting in the silence in the golden pockets of light, the metal click of my heart valve ticks faster than the clock above my head.

That heart valve that Dr David put in six years ago, that was supposed to let my heart keep on pumping blood for decades, is tragically closing in with scar tissue. That’s what doctors believe is happening without actually cutting into my chest and handling my heart once again. No one can tell how long it will take before the tissue growth will make the hole so small it will be impossible for my heart to pump blood to get oxygen to the rest of my body. It is casting shadows in my life and it’s reminding me that my time here, well, it could almost be done. I’m collecting days like a string of pearls, every one precious.

I turn the tragedy around in my mind like I try to patch up pastry that has too many cracks. The more I struggle to fix it, the more it falls apart in my hands. It will never look right. How can I process all the impossible choices ahead? Do I accept a rare complication or choose an irrational intervention? How do I hold it all together and stop the insides from pouring out making a mess of life? How do I dish out a sloppy attempt at living here when there is a glorious banquet already prepared in eternity?

The darkness creeps in and makes me choke. It's an agony that I can't swallow. I don't want the darkness. So I keep looking because I keep learning that in the darkness even the smallest flicker of light radiates hope. It is in the darkness that light shines the brightest. I look for the light. I'm flailing in the darkness. I look to the Light. I don’t know where else to look.

When you read the story of Scripture, when you crack it open right at the beginning, your eyes catch the first thing God created when He spoke into the darkness was light. And it was good. He separated the light from the darkness and “God called the light day, and the darkness he called night.” (Genesis 1:5)

We are in the middle of the story right now. In the middle of the darkness and decay and death and we are all groaning. We are looking and longing for peace, for wholeness. We want all things to be made right. We don’t want hearts to stop and life to be taken too early. We agonize in the shadows. We rejoice in the glorious shining radiance of the Lamb who suffered and silenced death.

When you get to the end of the story, there is a final vision of that which is yet to come. It solves the riddle of life and death, of darkness and light. For all those who have looked to the Light of the world, turned and trusted in the Lamb who was wounded, “they will see his face . . . And night will be no more. They will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever.” (Revelation 22:5)

The hands that keep time have given me just over half the years we have come to expect. I don't know how many more I will get to string together. I desperately reach out to grasp more pearls, yet just like the night swallows up the sun every day, it feels like they are slipping through my fingers. I know God has all my days all numbered and one day I will see his face and night will be no more. Until He calls me home, to find my final rest in Him, I will keep looking for the light in this darkness. As I live in Christ, trusting his death was death to all death, the radiance of his glorious shining feeds my hope.

How To Have Peace in a World full of Affliction {What it Means to Take Heart}

{For the audio recording,

listen here at HopeStream Radio}

“Would you do it again?” He threw the question at me in the examination room 18 towering floors up above the bustling city.

I faltered as if the wind may have caused the skyscraper to sway.

“I can’t.”

I reached for a better response, squarely planted my feet, and lobbed it back.

“It will never be an option again. It was a one-time surgery. They told me, ‘there is no way my body would ever be able to handle it again.’”

He swivelled on his chair. I had misunderstood his question.

He leaned it, tossed another from a different angle: “Was it worth it?”

“Would you recommend the surgery to any other childhood cancer survivor if she needed it?”

The radiation oncologist who destroys cancer cells in children probed me with these questions. He was curious to know what I would say now that I had come through this non-conventional surgery done out of desperation—now that I was on this side of the stacks of medical files, all the pokes, and scars, and ongoing difficulties.

I finally got his point.

He asked me, if ever there is another patient that has come to this same long term side-effect--where the treatment killed the cancer and saved the child, but left the child scarred and made her heart so calcified it would shatter like eggshells at the surgeon’s touch--could I say: “Go ahead. Lay yourself on the cold operating table, and surrender your very life . . . to get more life?

Could I tell someone else to brave all the hazards to have the heart surgeon crack open your sternum when your one functioning lung may not draw in the breath of life once your body is taken off the lung-heart machine?

Was it worth all the risks, the pain, the weakness, the struggles, the delusions, the complications?

Ahh . . . well . . . “Yes!” Looking straight at him, I flung my answer across the room with tears teasing the corners of my eyes.

“I’m here; here with my family.”

I still get to be a wife, mother, daughter, sister, friend, neighbour. I know to live is Christ and to die is gain. And, here I am living. 

No, it wasn’t easy in any sense of the word. It broke me; brought me to the lowest I had ever been, left me cut off, hemmed in, confined, lonely. But, it didn’t destroy me. At the bottom of the bitter cup I was longing for a better place.

I came through the waters with a greater desire to know Christ more. It brought me to a deeper place of soul-searching for the ultimate meaning of our ‘being’.

Charles Spurgeon once said, “We get more good out of our adversity than out of our prosperity.”

So, I sat in the oncologist’s office at the Pediatric Cancer Aftercare Clinic, a year and a half after my heart-salvaging operation, where he can’t promise me a long life, but one marked with continued side effects that make living in this life challenging. He hurled hard realities at me.

He told me, if ten children had have been treated with the rare type of cancer that was rapidly growing in my body in 1979, seven to eight of them would not have made it to their eighth birthday. It was a terrible cancer and aggressive treatment.

These unofficial statistics are sobering. I sit with this awareness.

They keep me from asking “why me?” Instead I ponder: “why not me?”

Life is full of questions. And if we knew all the answers there would be no more questions.

I didn’t deserve to be spared; as a three year old fighting cancer or as a thirty-seven year old with a failing heart.

There was nothing that made me more deserving than any other to be rid of the cancer in my body or for my heart to be patched up to go on beating, ticking like a steady clock in a quiet room, keeping time to all the days that God has purposed for me.

I keep grappling for answers for the fundamental question: “Why am I here?”

We’ve been created to glorify God, to love Him, and enjoy Him forever. We turned from God and exchanged the truth of God for a lie. We worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator. In Adam, death reigns. In Christ, grace reigns. Grace is infinitely greater.

Sin has had its effect on this world. “The whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now.” {Romans 8:22}

Our mortal and corruptible bodies will suffer disease, decay, and death.

But as Christians, ones who have been justified by faith, who have been made new and been given new regenerated hearts that love God and know Him, we are no longer under the reign of sin. We have died to sin and we now live in the reign of grace.

That is why we take heart!

This is not some self-help, self-promoting scheme. This is the truth that God, the Father “has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son.” {Colossians 1:13}

We are in Christ. We are children of God awaiting the final redemption, the full and final salvation that is absolutely certain. In Him is our peace.

To ‘take heart’ is to have confidence, to have courage, to be unafraid.

A quick word study reveals that the original meaning behind the word used is "showing boldness" and it comes as the “result of the Lord infusing His strength by His inworking of faith.”

Jesus said to his disciples just before he was taken away to be made sin, to die the death that we deserved, to suffer incomprehensible agonies as He conquered sin:

“I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world.” {John 16:33}

Christ has made a way for us to be brought back to God, to no longer be slaves to sin, but to be made children of God.

It is the by the power of the Spirit of God working in us, that makes our hearts adore Christ, that makes us yearn after God, that opens the eyes of our hearts to know God, to taste and see that the Lord is good.

Jesus assured his disciples that there would be tribulation in this world. But, He promises a peace which co-exists with tribulation, a peace which is realized in and through conflict and struggle. Our peace is in Jesus Christ.

Christ bolsters our confidence, gives us courage. He has overcome the world—all that is opposed to God, all that would turn our desires away from God, anything that we would want more than God Himself.

For those of us in Christ, we will not escape tribulation.

Some of my tribulation has come from a diseased body, but this world is temporary. I am looking to that which is eternal. As a citizen of heaven, I gaze beyond the heavens and all the glory that is on display there and I realize a greater glory. That Jesus Christ has come to give us eternal life: that we might know the only true God and Jesus Christ.

We can take heart, show this unflinching, bold courage, live out the inner confidence that is Spirit-produced while we face tribulation because Jesus Christ has overcome the world.

Again, I quote Spurgeon, who reminds us: “As he died for us when we were ungodly, what will he not do for us now that he has sought us as his own? He gave the highest proof of his love to us when we were most unworthy of it, so will he leave us now?”

Whatever difficulty, tribulation, or affliction that is nearly squeezing the life out of you, take heart Jesus Christ has come to give eternal life to all that the Father has given him.

Courage to Move Forward {One Thing Our Marriages Desperately Need Today ~~ A Husband's Heartfelt Words as His Wife's Heart was Weak #HeartMonth}

{To read Part 1, the beginning of the series:

"A Husband's Heartfelt Words as His Wife's Heart Was Weak"

click here first.}

There had been many days in which I struggled to move forward. It is a fight to move forward when faced with adversity, but it is not fight that you fight alone.

My voice was but a whisper and I could only breathe out a few words at a time. But, it was a privilege to stand, the only patient among all the medical staff that gathered in the hall of the CVICU in Toronto General Hospital, to sing O Canada, listen to In Flanders Fields and stop for a moment of silence at 11 am to remember the many who have fought for freedom.

On November 11, a day we remember many who have endured many extreme difficulties, Jon reflected on and shared a few humble thoughts:

Toronto General Hospital operates under this simple motto:

"Courage lives here!" 

Courage is: "The ability to bravely face, stand up to and endure through something that overwhelms, challenges or frightens you." 

Today we all think and pause to remember the courage and boldness of men and women who rose up in and amid their fear and have come face to face with horrifying realities both recently and decades ago, for the sake of honour and freedom in our land. For thousands, it has cost them their very life, for others a lifetime of scared memory and disability. But they are remembered for their valour and we honour them, pausing in our silence.

In this hospital setting we see brilliant minds who seek to learn and challenge the known methods, medicines, and technology and who aren't afraid to pioneer into uncharted waters for the sake of the global good. Not letting the safe normals and risks hold back progress, new discovery and intervention.

It's this mindset that sent Rebekah to the operating room 75 days ago. The reality that to walk away, retreat, give up and do nothing, would have meant medically, certain death, much sooner than later. Dr. David refers to Rebekah as "the lady who has aged him." Even though he teaches the world new unprecedented procedural interventions and methods that flow from a genius mind down through his hands, he has told me often now in our casual discussions together, "I thought several times I was going to lose her—but I kept telling my team, she is so young, she has a family—and she needs to survive."

I thank him for his courage to push forward among the many risks.

In many instances in scripture, courage is the demonstrating fruit of adherence to these imperatives from God. - Stand strong!, Move forward!, and Do not fear! (Psalm 27:14, Psalm 31:24, Joshua 1:9, 1 Chron. 28:20, 2 Tim. 1:7, 1 Cor. 16:13) 

Even though we feel weak and are filled with trepidation, and anxieties want to consume us daily, we are also reminded in these same passages that our ability to be courageous itself comes from the strength and power of the Lord, not simply from rising above fears and uncertainties with mustered up human strength which can only take us so far.

In this supernatural power—we are able to prevail in hardship and difficulty and we can triumph in trial with a courage that is not driven by fear, but by the power of God.

We are continuing here in days of waiting. 

Rebekah had an electromyography test last week that showed continuity in the left phrenic nerve which fires to drive the diaphragm when breathing. This test showed no severing or total paralysis, but because of next to no diaphragmatic movement its been determined that some sort of trauma happened during and post surgery that greatly weakened and pretty much stopped its function. We hope time will heal this nerve and muscle (which can take months—at only millimetres of recovery every few days) and once again give her the ability to function without assistance. The diaphragm is so important in everyday breathing, eating and stomach movement, as well as speech, singing, etc. 

Rebekah breathes on the Bi-PAP machine each night to fully oxygenate her while she sleeps and to drive out the CO2 in her blood. She is tolerating it better now that she knows it is essential and that it can be managed at home too eventually. An oxygen saturation test will happen today to prove to the team that will look into our home transfer and care that oxygen will be needed at home for a while.

Application has been made for us to transfer to West Park Healthcare Centre over in the north west side of Toronto with the purpose of training and acquiring the proper machine and masks to assist Rebekah at home. We don't know how long it will take to get in there, but we will likely leave directly from the ICU here to that rehabilitation facility once room is available for us. The goal is to train us and transition us to home from there. We don't know how long Rebekah will stay at that facility either yet and even if or at what point she may just be an out patient to travel there for regular visits for a while from home.

This is the path that we're heading into and it can't come soon enough as Rebekah feels more than ready to bust out of here and be home. 

I thank God for her courage to fight and to live on, (even through the many times over these weeks that it became overwhelming and unbearable, making her cry out for God to just take her home), and to continue to overcome the barrage of battles she faces with her health— because she knows that there is no other way, than to persevere—fuelled by the inward nourishing strength and the sustaining power of God, that flows like a steady river of restoring water through her life, her soul, her mind, and her body.

-Jon

~.~.~.~.~.

This is part 19 of the series:

One Thing Our Marriages Desperately Need Today ~~ A Husband's Heartfelt Words as His Wife's Heart was Weak

{for #HeartMonth.}

You can read Part 1, the beginning of the series here.

Come back for the final part to this series or to receive these updates in an email subscribe to A Soft Gentle Voice.