Post Number Forty-Six

TWO YEARS AND THREE BIRTHDAYS

I began this journal just before I turned 60 in 2009.  Little did I know at the time that my 60th birthday would be consumed with taking Terry to the first of her chemo and radiation treatments.  I remarked at the time that I regarded that situation as an unexpected gift - to have the privilege of helping my wife through an unexpected and unwelcome medical crisis.  I said at the time that I was filled with confidence that the treatments would be effective and that we would win this battle against cancer.

Today is my 62nd birthday.  Today I went with Terry to the oncologist to receive the results of the latest CT scan.  Here we are two years after I began this journal and the battle continues.  The cancer is progressing once again.  Now Terry is experiencing chronic pain.  Once the pain issue is addressed she is looking at another round of chemotherapy.  Our expectations have now changed.  We now concede that cancer is a part of our lives and that this is a running battle against a tenacious disease.

On this my third cancer birthday I have a new understanding of what it means to "beat" cancer.  Physically this disease is what it is.  The surgeries and the treatments have some effect, but there is no cure in this case. There is only a relentless determination that this disease will not keep us from living the lives God has given us.  The victory over this disease will be a spiritual victory.  We will beat it back repeatedly and continue the living and loving for which God has equipped us.  There is nothing that can separate us from the love of God - certainly not a tenacious and despicable disease.

Post Number Forty-Five

Constancy

Choir Camp 2011 begins in two days. With the exception of a few years when we lived in Illinois, Terry and I have participated in this camp every summer since 1975.  That is a constancy that cannot be matched by anything else in our lives, save for our marriage and our children.  

Every year shortly after Christmas I begin to worry about Choir Camp.  Will anyone come this year?  Can I find music that challenges and inspires.  Have we gotten too old to be effective? Do I still have the stamina to keep pace with the week?  Is this still the place God wants us to be?  

Every year I arrive at camp and the answers to those questions hit me with the force of a mighty wind - my own little Pentecostal moment.  More than you expect.  Always.  Not yet.  We shall see. Trust that it is so.

The constancy of this annual experience is not physical nor geographic.  Since 1975 Choir Camp has been located in three different camps, Lake Huron (now the Lake Huron Retreat Center), Judson Collins United Methodist Center, and for the past five years at Lake Louise United Methodist Camp (my favorite).  The people involved over the years change continuously.  Children become adults.  Counselors drop out and are replaced. Terry and I are both trying to set the camp up for our eventual retirement.  We too will hand this off to others.

The constancy of which I speak is a constancy of spirit.  It is a constancy of love and joy that has never failed. It arrives in camp and sets up shop before the coming of the staff and the campers.  It takes its place in the first rehearsal and rides the wave of every song.  It lights the vesper fire every night as we ponder what God has taught us through each and every day.

In the fifty-one weeks between the end of one camp and the start of another I tend to forget the lesson of Choir Camp.  The burdens of living, the weight of responsibility that I feel, and the uncertainty of our future all dull my spiritual receptors.  I fall into the delusion that all things depend upon me.  But through Choir Camp, God teaches me every year that my part in God's plan is to show up, trust God, and tune in to the love and the joy.

Dave Gladstone

Post Number Forty-Four

DREAD

Terry is finished with her chemotherapy.  She is back to work full steam developing and promoting programs for the Lake Louise Christian Community.  She feels good.  Winter is finally over.  Spring is breaking through.  Why do I feel so anxious all of the time?

How can it be that life is both courageous and fearful at the same time?  How can someone who believes themself to be a person of faith also find themself dreading the next scan or the next medical test?  This is where I find myself in the present moment.  It causes me to wonder and question my strength and my willingness to rely upon God.  Am I the person of faith I thought myself to be?

Who knows what the next scan may reveal?  For the moment things are good.  What I have learned in this experience is that faith is not a commodity to be possessed as much as it is an attitude to be lived.  There is room in the living of it to accomodate the full spectrum of my heart - joy, peace, fear and even dread.  I am trying to make friends with all of these emotions and to accept them as the reality of my spirit.  Faith has come to mean a trust in God that cannot be canceled by my momentary emotional reality.  You may already know this.  I can be a slow learner.

Dave Gladstone

Post Number Forty-Three

Haiti and Accommodating Cancer

My Haiti mission trip is over.  I am processing what I have learned and trying to come to grips with an encounter with poverty on a scale I have never imagined. This experience has brought a huge change in my heart. My previous sorrow toward the people of Haiti and their plight has been replaced by a profound respect for their industry and resourcefulness.  These are people who have high aspirations for themselves and for their country.  They continue to scratch away at the challenges they face trying to put together a brighter future for themselves and their children.  I heard someone remark that the people of Haiti are poor because they are lazy. Nothing could be further from the truth.  You cannot be lazy and survive in Haiti. Everything needed in life requires a huge expenditure of effort.  

Terry and I have something to learn from these people.  She is coming up on chemo treatment number six of eight.  There are encouraging signs.  Her blood CEA levels have dropped dramatically.  Even Dr. Cox acted relieved.  He began to talk about a future we had not yet considered.  He talked about beating cancer back time and time again as we go about trying to live out the lives we have planned together.  Rather than a cure, he indicated a future in which we have made an accommodation with with cancer as a constant unwelcome presence in our lives.

This is not what I imagined when this battle began.  I imagined a clean victory over cancer with battle stories to tell at future family gatherings.  Now we are considering a different future - a future in which we are constantly clawing away against cancer while we live our lives as completely as we can under the circumstances.  This accommodation is not resignation nor is it submission.  It is about living, hoping and loving in the presence of an unwelcome reality.  Like the people of Haiti living, hoping and loving in the face of profound poverty we may be coming to a defiant accommodation with cancer.

Dave Gladstone

Post Number Forty-Two

Persistence

Terry is away at a conference on Christian camping in the United Methodist Church.  I hope that it is a time away filled with purposeful activity that draws her spirit away from her illness.  This past weekend was difficult.  Neither she nor I could shake the specter of her illness.  Mary came home to give us a hand in this exercise in coping.  Mary was a great help, but the specter remained.

I have been thinking about the lake freighters that ply the Great Lakes and pass Port Huron on the St. Clair River.  Up until the end of January these ships push on with their work despite the growing presence of ice and the resistance it imposes.  They have a mission and a purpose and they will keep at it until conditions force them to lay up for about a month or six weeks.  Until then they persist and they push against the opposing ice.  

From time to time they need some help.  That is when one of the Coast Guard ice breakers is called upon. They may be stuck for a time, but they always break free to continue with their mission.  They never stop until the opposing ice is just too thick to conquer.

Persistence is the word for this moment in our struggle.  Pushing on against the growing opposition and asking for help when it is needed.  There is also a patience required in this moment.  Spring will yet come.  The ice will disappear for a time and we may yet enjoy a time of easy journey.

Dave Gladstone