A Little Thought

I don't often write posts about the difficult things that happen in our life. By the time I get around to it, I can usually write about it in a funny way or keep it short and sweet. This is one time when I can't make it funny or short. I can tell you that I've written this post about five different ways and I keep deleting them because it's just too personal. The following is what I decided to share.

My sister, Terry, has small cell lung cancer. She has been really sick since her diagnosis in late May. We know she won't get better. She's only 39 years old.

Whenever someone hears this for the first time, they ask two questions:

1. Did she smoke?
2. Does she have children?

The answer to #1 is Yes, #2 is No. Amazingly, regardless of what the answers are ... it doesn't change the fact that she's dying from cancer.

In the past two years I've (in this order): lost my Grandmother Brown, suffered a miscarriage, lost my brother, given birth to beautiful Lily, and now Terry is sick. Mercy.

It would be easy for me to start with the sob story right now. I can't. I'm not wired that way. Don't get me wrong - I get down. The hard part is staying there. Every time I think, "this can't get worse - nothing else bad can happen." It gets worse, something else happens. I've stopped bargaining with God regarding life. If I were to write God a memo, it would go something like this:

To: God
From: Glenda
Re: Life

It may have come to your attention that in the past few years you have received a number of my relatives into your care. I would like to remind you that this is in breach of our 1:1 ratio agreement of good/bad happenings. Also, it violates the "My childhood sucked so my adult life could rock" clause in our Life Agreement plan. If possible, please rectify said discrepancies immediately. Thank you for your time and attentiveness to the matter.

Somehow I don't think that would work so ... I'm learning to give up control. I'm learning to be happy in the moment - to take on some "big picture" thought processes. Somewhere along the line, I forgot this is my one ride. I only have one chance at this life & it's up to me to give it all I've got!

From somewhere deep inside, I've discovered hope. I can't shake the sensation that while hard things happen, I can still have joy. Having that joy and expressing it is not showing disrespect for the difficulties in life, but it is blazing the path out of suffering.

I have to continually remind myself of this - especially when I run across pictures like this & am reminded that no matter what troubles this life has given us, we're sisters. Witnessing the suffering of a loved one is, for lack of a better word, insufferable:The following is an interview with Rick Warren that my sister, Sandy, sent to me in an email. I love it! His perspective is amazing!

In an interview by Paul Bradshaw with Rick Warren, author of The Purpose Driven Life, Rick Warren said:

People ask me, What is the purpose of life? And I respond, In a nutshell, life is preparation for eternity. We were made to last forever, and God wants us to be with Him in Heaven. One day my heart is going to stop, and that will be the end of my body - but not the end of me. I may live 60 to 100 years on earth, but I am going to spend trillion of years in eternity. This is the warm-up act, the dress rehearsal. God wants us to practice on earth what we will do forever in eternity. We were made by God and for God, and until you figure that out, life isn't going to make sense.

Life is a series of problems: Either you are in one now, you're just coming out of one or you're getting ready to go into another one. The reason for this is that God is more interested in your character than your comfort. God is more interested in making your life holy than He is in making your life happy. We can be reasonably happy here on earth, but that's not the goal of life: The goal is to grow in character, In Christ-likeness.

This past year has been the greatest year of my life but also the toughest, with my wife, Kay, getting cancer. I used to think that life was hills and valleys - you go through a dark time, then you got to the mountaintop, back and forth. I don't believe that anymore. Rather than life being hills and valleys, I believ'e that it's kind of like two rails on a railroad track, and at all times you have something good and something bad in your life. No matter how good things are in your life, there is always something bad that needs to be worked on.

And no matter how bad things are in your life, there is always something good you can thank God for. You can focus on your purposes, or you can focus on your problems. If you focus on your problems, you're going into self-centeredness, "which is my problem, my issues, my pain."

But one of the easiest ways to get rid of pain is to get your focus off yourself and onto God and others.

We discovered quickly that in spite of the prayers of hundreds of thousands of people, God was not going to heal Kay or make it easy for her. It has been very difficult for her, and yet God has strengthened her character, given her a ministry of helping other people, given her a testimony, drawn her closer to Him and to people...You have to learn to deal with both the good and the bad of life.

Actually, sometimes learning to deal with the good is harder. For instance, this past year, all of a sudden, when the book sold 15 million copies, it made me instanfly very wealthy. It also brought a lot of notoriety that I had never had to deal with before.

I don't think God gives you money or notoriety for you to own ego or for you to live a life of ease. So I began to ask God what He wanted me to do with this money, notoriety and influence. He gave me two different passages that helped me decide what to do, Corinthians 9 and Psalm 72.

First, in spite of all the money coming in, we would not change our lifestyle one bit. We made no major purchases. Second, about midway through last year, I stopped taking a salary from the church. Third, we set up foundations to fund an initiative we call The Peace Plan - to plant churches, equip leaders, assist the poor, care for the sick, and educate the next generation. Fourth, I added up all that the church had paid me in the 24 years since I started the church, and I gave it all back. It was liberating to be able to serve God for free.

We need to ask ourselves: Am I going to live for possessions? Popularity? Am I going to be driven by pressures? Guilt? Bitterness? Materialism? Or am I going to be driven by God's purposes (for my life)?

When I get up in the morning, I sit on the side of my bed and say, God, if I don't get anything else done today, I want to know You more and love You better...God didn't put me on earth just to fulfil a to-do list. He's more interested in what I am than what I do. That's why we're called human beings, not human doings.