How to React when it’s Really not Cancer

It’s Advent, y’all… that time of year when I have come to realize I love waiting for everything except test results.  After two years of anxiety and panic attacks, sprinkled with CT scan radiation and a little bit of insanity; what I would like is a definitive note that reads, “This is definitely not cancer, it never has been, it never will be, thanks for playing along, as a parting gift you will never, ever die.” 

Here’s what I got instead: “Left lower lobe nodule has demonstrated stability for 24 months and is likely a benign abnormality.” 

Close enough.  I can live with that.  Literally.  Hopefully for a very long time.

If you’re just tuning in to my life, you might want to start with the post I made here: Perpetual Crisis Averted, about 16 months ago.  I should have read this post earlier in the week, because the mounting stress of having to go through the final follow-up scan left me unable to remember that there were some high points during this journey.  I’m glad I read it today, though.  I also want to direct you to another post I reference, found here: If I Die First, because you should know that I still think it’s an excellent idea to give your spouse very detailed instructions about what to do if you die first.  I might, however, make some tweaks, given the opportunity (In fact, I would have to, because my first choice for my children’s stepmother is no longer available…  I’m not taking applications…  Don’t send applications!).

In all seriousness, I do want to say something meaningful about these two years of suffering (and that’s exactly what they’ve been, no hyperbole).  I don’t think they were necessary.  What I mean by this is that I don’t think God wanted this to happen, nor do I think God needed this to happen in order to bring about some greater good.  What I do think is that God can use everything… even crap like this… and God has done so, as I have listened to God’s persuasive voice in my life, even when I couldn’t listen to much of anything at all.

I am not glad that I went through this!  I am glad that I am a different person than I was at the onset.  I think there might have been better ways to get there, but whatever…  I’m there.  This is not to be confused with, “I’ve arrived.” 

No, friends, it’s more like, “I am where I am,” and where I am is good… for today…

I am more brave.  (I know it’s really “braver,” but it’s one of those days when I feel like I can write what I want…)

I am willing to take more risks.  (Disclaimer: greater risk usually equals greater reward, although it can also equal greater disaster.) 

I am less concerned about what other people think of me and more concerned about other people, in general.

I fully recognize that if I have a goal or a dream, I had better start chasing it right now, because even if I have inherited the genetic make-up of the women on my dad’s side of the family—a hundred years will never be enough.

I started using the hashtag #LessFearIn2016 in an attempt to do scary stuff, but I also started using it, because I thought I might not have too many more days to practice less fear.  I think I’ll modify it now to #LessFearForever, because none of us have enough time to be afraid.

And with all of that said, if you think I was a hypocrite, this week… you’re 100% right!  Because this week, I was terrified!  Will I forget I’m OK and have a panic attack now and then?  Probably.  Will I struggle to remember that I can let go of this now, because all is well?  Almost assuredly.  But another thing this experience gave me was a community of people who kept listening and kept praying and kept being present to me when I couldn’t live into everything I wanted to be in any given moment.  Gosh, I’m thankful for that, but next time let’s decide to be friends over ice cream and Disney and good books.  No more of this death and disaster drama, OK?

For me, this is a great note on which to end, as we transition from a week steeped in hope to one filled with peace.  Sorry that it’s kind of personal for this blog, but I know many of the readers here have been wondering if there would ever be an end to this chapter.  I don’t usually love endings, but this one is good.

Oh, the daily office…  How about a doxology from Jude 24-25:

“To him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you before his glorious presence without fault and with great joy— to the only God our Savior be glory, majesty, power and authority, through Jesus Christ our Lord, before all ages, now and forevermore! Amen.”

L.

For the Suffering...

Luke 17:1-4, “Jesus said to his disciples: ‘Things that cause people to stumble are bound to come, but woe to anyone through whom they come.  It would be better for them to be thrown into the sea with a millstone tied around their neck than to cause one of these little ones to stumble.  So watch yourselves. If your brother or sister sins against you, rebuke them; and if they repent, forgive them.  Even if they sin against you seven times in a day and seven times come back to you saying ‘I repent,’ you must forgive them.”[i]  The word of the Lord.

This is a hard teaching for people who have been oppressed, abused, and sinned against, but I’m not sure it is as hard as we have made it out to be.  Unfortunately, in our zeal to preach forgiveness for the sinner, we have often missed the very real and pressing suffering of the sinned against.  Even with such a short passage, we focus in on the very last verse, never accounting for the strong language that Jesus uses in support of those who have been harmed.  As someone who has endured abuse, myself, I believe I have a voice that can speak into this blind spot in our teaching about forgiveness and healing, but it begins with redefining terms and accepting the brokenness of human experience.  

At the expense of sounding arrogant, forgiveness has never been all that hard for me, at least as I define it.  I think this might be because I always believe people can change and be better.  Honestly, that's sort of weird, since I am decidedly not an optimist.  Now, forgetting?  That’s another thing altogether, but we should take great care in remembering that the notion of ‘forgive and forget’ is not actually found in Scripture…  Huge sigh of relief for detail oriented people who remember everything…

We need to make a distinction between forgiveness and healing related to pain, suffering, mourning, or grief.  Too often, I feel that we approach wounded people by insisting that they forgive those who have harmed them.  That is biblical after all, right?  But we also project unreal expectations on forgiveness.  In so doing, we perpetuate cycles of abuse.

Let me tell you what forgiveness is not:

• Forgiveness is not forgetting the offense and moving on without taking the necessary time to heal.  No one can determine the length of time that another person needs to grieve the loss that comes from being violated.  Grief is not something that is only associated with death, and we have to move away from the misconception that it is.  Although there are some predictable patterns of grief, it does not look the same for everyone, and we cannot put limits on the number of days that are appropriate to suffer from denial, anger, bargaining, or depression.  Even in acceptance, there is no need to embrace the act of abuse but to acknowledge that suffering occurred, and that it was terrible.  The victim gets to determine the timeline for the healing process.  Of course, people who genuinely love the hurting person should come alongside him or her and offer support as directed by the one who has been harmed.  Empathy is a beautiful gift, but none of us should conflate our own narratives with that of the one who is currently hurting most, and we absolutely must not ask a victim to care for our emotional needs in the midst of his or her pain.  One of the best articles I have ever read regarding this phenomenon was written by Susan Silk and Barry Goldman, entitled, “How not to Say the Wrong Thing.” Their principle of “comfort in, dump out,”[ii] is exceptional.  The general idea is that the people closest to tragedy and pain are allowed to hurt however they need to.  They are allowed to express themselves however they deem necessary, and anyone in a larger ‘ring,’ further removed from the suffering, may only offer comfort.  If those people also feel a need for comfort, themselves, they must seek it from someone even farther removed from the pain.   
• Forgiveness is not indiscriminately returning to how the relationship was before the offense.  This is incredibly difficult to flesh out, because as followers of Jesus, we also frequently cite passages of Scripture about losing our lives and participating in the death of Christ, which may include being persecuted in some way, but please hear me clearly… none of this means that you have to participate in unhealthy relationships that violate who you are as a human being, created Imago Dei.  You do not have to allow yourself to continue to be abused in any way.  In the passage we began with, Jesus is clear that abusive actions are not justifiable.  Abuse and oppression cause harm, and nowhere… in any of this… do I see forgiveness defined as offering yourself to someone who will hurt you over and over again, without boundaries or consequence.  Nowhere.  We have to stop telling people that forgiveness means sucking it up, putting yourself in danger, and moving on, because it doesn’t!
• Forgiveness is not blaming yourself, as opposed to the offender, for what happened.  There are some very important lessons to be learned about the difference between being culpable for terrible things that happen and taking responsibility, even when we are not directly culpable, but these burdens should never fall on the victims of oppression or abuse.  If we’re going to talk about taking responsibility for things that are not our direct fault; we must encourage people who are healthy and whole, in a good place where they are able to bear the suffering forced upon others either by individuals, corporate communities, or systemic systems, to work toward solutions.  This is never an opening to blame victims for the abuse that has occurred.  We should all be living by basic standards that do not allow the personhood of another to be violated in any way.  If such a violation occurs, it must never be labeled as the fault of the victim, regardless of circumstance, because offenders take advantage of anyone they can.  They will look for weaknesses to exploit, and they will create them if they do not exist.  Any story can be twisted to make it look as if even the most innocent victim was at fault, but ‘innocent’ is the key word here.  Abuse and oppression are not acceptable in any situation and cannot responsibly be explained away.

So what do we do about this?  Things are bad, but can they get better?

As the church, we have done a miserable job of helping victims to work through their pain, blanketly stating that forgiveness will restore all things.  Maybe we can roll with this from an eschatological viewpoint, but let’s be real, friends… most hurting people are more concerned with how they might survive the next few minutes than the end of the world as we know it!  We have to stop making these things congruent, because they’re just not…

I’ve made a decent case for several ‘just nots,’ including how we should not define forgiveness, but we must always be careful to reconstruct after tearing a concept apart.  So what is forgiveness?  As I set out to answer this question, I found that even Webster struggled…

Webster’s definition of forgiveness is “the act of forgiving” (ahem… super helpful).[iii]

Webster’s definition of forgiving is “willing or able to forgive” (there’s something to work with there).[iv]  I would argue that the capacity to forgive comes, at least in part, from care and healing.  To ask someone to forgive when he or she is still in the depths of sorrow and concerned about meeting the basic requirements of survival from moment to moment, is cruel.

Webster’s definition of forgive is “to give up resentment of or claim to requital.”[v]

If I were to define forgiveness, I would say it is the moment at which you reach a point where you no longer hope the one who has harmed you will be run over by a truck or struck down by lightning… or actually have a millstone hung around his or her neck and be thrown into the sea.  Admittedly, even this can be a process, depending on the offense.  And that’s OK.  Jesus said it!  The biblical definition from the Scripture we read also allows for rebuke and requires the offender to be repentant.  When translated, the original Greek from this passage speaks of the offender having a change of mind or purpose, and forgiveness is referred to as a sending away or leaving alone.  How often do we talk about that?  We don’t?  Well, we should, starting now.

Of course, Jesus gives us an example of forgiveness that neither demands nor receives such repentance when, as he is dying, he says, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”[vi]  So, I’m not necessarily saying we must hold out for an apology, and, in fact, I have certainly offered forgiveness to others, myself, who have hurt me deeply and never bothered to care.  But… we have to stop shaming victims into this kind of obligation, because even if it is freeing to stop praying for that thunderstorm to hit; there is so much more work to be done than this.  Forgiving someone who does not deserve it is not a magical band-aid that removes all pain… And it certainly doesn’t remove scars.

What I’m trying to say is that we should stop lying… and we should also stop discrediting and humiliating victims.  Forgiveness is important, but it comes with guidelines and often with really long timeframes.  Perhaps we could stand in the gap while our brothers and sisters are allowed the space they need for legitimate healing to occur.

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[i] Luke 17:1-4 (NIV).

[ii] Susan Silk and Barry Goldman. How not to Say the Wrong Thing. Dallas News, April 2013. https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/commentary/2013/04/12/susan-silk-and-barry-goldman-how-not-to-say-the-wrong-thing

[iii] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/forgiveness

[iv] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/forgiving

[v] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/forgive

[vi] Luke 23:34

Put this Mud in Your Eyes... Rinse... Repeat

I had this sort of humorous, kind of ironic moment, last week, when I wrote the wrong commentary!  However, it was the right commentary for today, so there's that...  John 9...

***

We all struggle with the problem of evil—particularly in light of pain and suffering, perhaps most visibly when the pain and suffering are unmerited.  We want answers.  When we read about “a man blind from birth,”[i] we want to know why.  But we’re not looking for medical explanations.  The question is not how did this happen but, instead, why does the world have to be this way.

Historically, the religious community had it all figured out.  Pain and suffering were the result of sin.  Even today, many religious communities offer the same answer.  Pain and suffering are consequences of the fall.  Humanity somehow deserves this anguish.  Suck it up and realize that this is the way the world works.  Admittedly, sometimes this makes sense.

But in this case?  When we’re presented with a man who was blind before he took his first breath?  What could he have possibly done to deserve such a lot?  Did he sin?  Was it his parents?  The disciples are working from a cut-and-dried, cause-and-effect philosophy.  It certainly affects their theodicy, which in turn affects their theology.  Lucky for them, God incarnate is standing in their midst.  Perhaps Jesus can clear this up, since he’s right there.   

Jesus immediately offers some incredibly upside-down teaching.  The Pharisees, and even the disciples, assume that the blind man is steeped in sin from birth, or at the very least his parents have caused this great calamity, because this is all they’ve ever known.  But Jesus sees this altogether differently.  In fact, as this passage comes to a close, Jesus declares, “If you were blind, you would not be guilty of sin; but now that you claim you can see, your guilt remains.”[ii] Well, that surely throws a wrench in things…

Jesus takes a severe deficit and turns it into an asset.  Being born blind is not the problem.  Jesus can work with that: Jesus can even squeeze something good out of it (and he does).  As the disciples seek the rationale behind this tragedy, Jesus redirects their attention to the ways in which, “the works of God might be displayed…”[iii]  

I got a little caught up in verses 3-5… and I didn’t originally write about this in the commentary, but I think it’s something worth talking about.

We have these words, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” said Jesus, “but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him. As long as it is day, we must do the works of him who sent me. Night is coming, when no one can work. While I am in the world, I am the light of the world.”[iv]

And then Jesus goes on with the miraculous healing.

I read in another commentary that in verse three, there may be an ellipsis, and I use ellipses ad nauseam in my writing, so this struck a chord.  If that’s the case, instead of, “but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him,” we might have, “but this happened (dot… dot… dot… ellipsis… appropriate pause, wait for it…) Jesus takes a deep breath and continues, “so… that the works of God might be displayed in him…” and then the rest.

It’s not necessarily a cause and effect statement.  Instead, this may be Jesus giving voice to the fact that genuine evil, suffering, and pain are present in the world, but this is not orchestrated by God.  Instead, these things exist outside of what God actually wants, but God is still somehow able to bring some good out of them.

The man is blind.  OK.  God can heal that.  Here’s some dirt and some spit (perhaps reminiscent of God’s creative work in the beginning).  Go wash yourself (oh, that I had time to consider how this might relate to baptism and initiation into the people of God).  Sight…  Restoration… Redemption…  It’s all there.  But, of course, this is not the end of the story.  The trouble has just begun… 

In truth, on the heels of this beautiful account of renewal, the rest of John 9 is at least a little bit exasperating!

The fact that the Pharisees don’t believe the previously blind man’s story is par for the course, albeit frustrating.  This is the way of the Pharisees, who are often portrayed as attempting to catch people in their words, to manipulate the narrative.  It should come as no great surprise to us when the Pharisees question the man about Jesus and determine this miraculous act must not be ascribed to God.  We should expect the Pharisees to attempt to discredit the man and his story, his very identity.    

But neighbors who have presumably known this blind beggar for his entire life are suddenly unsure whether or not it is him, at all!  It’s somehow easier to believe he might be a completely different person than to accept a miraculous account.  And the previously blind man’s own parents?  We are told that they are afraid.[v]  Undoubtedly, they have already lost much, because the Jewish community has likely blamed their son’s affliction on the sins of the parents.  They can’t risk being kicked out of the Synagogue, altogether.  The people (the blind man’s people!) go silent.    

The man who has been healed, however, takes the chance.  His experience with Jesus speaks to the truth of who Jesus is, which is, ironically, exactly what the Pharisees ask for when they assert that he must, “Give glory to God by telling the truth,” (δὸς δόξαν τῷ Θεῷ).[vi]  In the Greek language used here, the Pharisees are not looking for praise or adoration of God but for a factual account, a truthful testimony.  Later, Jesus will allude to the issue of spiritual blindness, but as I re-read this passage I stopped to wonder whether the problem might be more directly linked to ears than eyes.  The Pharisees refuse to listen to the report for which they asked.  Although it is difficult to argue with first hand encounters, it is not impossible.  They can claim that the man lied.  They can claim that the work of Jesus is outside the scope of what may be acceptably accomplished on the Sabbath.  But they cannot take the man’s newfound sight.  His sight is worth alienation from those who blamed him for his own suffering.  In the end, he is rejected, but having lived his whole life as a blind beggar, this is nothing new.  He can see!  The Pharisaical religious community has nothing to offer him that trumps this new reality.

The man’s final words to the Pharisees speak volumes regarding who now has the upper hand:     

            

            Now that is remarkable! You don’t know where he comes from, yet he 

            opened my eyes.  We know that God does not listen to sinners. He listens to 

            the godly person who does his will.  Nobody has ever heard of opening the 

            eyes of a man born blind.  If this man were not from God, he could do 

            nothing.[vii]

The Pharisees have lost their power in this man’s life.  Even though they subsequently insult him, judge him, and kick him out; it hardly matters.  When Jesus hears about the man’s rejection, he finds him.  Jesus cares about his story.  Jesus has already made a remarkable difference in the man’s life.  The Pharisees didn’t listen to him, but God did.  Their claims are void.    

So, back to the problem of evil…

We don’t partner with God to alleviate the pain and suffering in the world when we neglect to listen to the other; to attentively discern who is speaking, what he or she has experienced, what great needs exist, and what we might learn from their narratives.  In this passage, Jesus offers us the ultimate example of how to work redemptively in the world.  Perhaps the next time we are tempted to ask, “Why does the world have to be this way,” we should consider an alternative. 

Perhaps we are the answer… not the cause, but the solution—God’s agents of change, working together to realize the inbreaking Kingdom. 

L.

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[i] John 9:1 (NIV)

[ii] John 9:41 (emphasis mine)

[iii] John 9:3

[iv] John 9:3-5

[v] See John 9:22

[vi] John 9:24

[vii] John 9:31-33