Cancer Progresses

More news RE Dan Howell’s sister Mary Ellen. A while back, her family was requesting prayer. She has advanced cancer. This is a real person, not an Internet fiction. Here’s a new message from Dan; it was relayed to me this morning:

Mel had a rough day today, Pray that God will give her a restful sleep. I will be leaving to go home on Wed, it will be hard to leave my sister. I know that her work here is done, and I am so Blessed to see the fruit that she is bearing. Thanks to all who have lifted my sister up for the 3 years.

Mel had asked to see the new home that she and Mike just bought last week. The new paint and the way that it is arranged..So if the Good Lord will see fit, in the morning, Hospice House has arranged transportation to the house. Lets just Pray that she will be up to the trip. It will be rough on Mike, so please hold him high in your Prayers.. the reality is finally setting in with him. The Dreams that they shared are slowly dying out and he has come to finally realize that. He is hurting bad now. All I can do is hold him and cry with him. I just wish that more of you could have met Mike.. AWESOME is all that I can say.

His frame of mind is mature and exemplary and right. Still, I’ll keep praying for a miracle. I don’t pray for people to go easily. I pray for healing, and that if anything in their or their family’s history has caused the problem, they will be made aware of it and helped to repent and have the condition undone. I remember the story of David, when his son was ill. He prayed for healing, and he fasted and repented and asked for mercy, until the boy died.

I’m all for praying for people’s suffering to be eased, but that’s not really the same thing as giving up and asking for a pleasant passing. Your suffering can be eased, regardless of whether you get a healing.

People don’t always get their threescore and ten, even with prayer. But I see no harm in praying for healing as long as there is hope. I have experienced miraculous healings of minor problems (I’ve never had a major problem), and I know I’m not the only one God cares enough about to help.

Googling around, I see the courts are getting steamed up about “faith healing.” I wish people would quit using that phrase. It sounds like “snake oil” or “time shares” or “pyramid clubs” or any number of other shady phenomena. The issue seems to be whether parents have the right to deprive their kids of medical care while relying on prayer.

I don’t think this conflict should exist. If the courts say your kid should have treatment, and that treatment is not somehow inherently sinful, why not give in? You can pray in a hospital. Besides, medicine often works. You can pray for food while driving around looking for an open drive-thru, can’t you? Maybe by avoiding provoking the courts, you are giving unto Caesar. Nothing wrong with that.

I can understand resisting if a doctor wants to cure your child using parts from an aborted baby. And you shouldn’t buy a kidney taken from a prisoner or a slumdweller in India. You should not let an unhealthy attachment to earthly life–which is fleeting, anyway–drive you to harm others in order to stick around a little longer. Presumably, if you’re a believer, you expect the hereafter to be an improvement, and it’s where you expect to spend the bulk of your existence. You shouldn’t cling to this life as though it were the most important thing in the world. It’s not. But I don’t think things like antibiotics, surgery, and chemotherapy are evil.

Twice in my life, I have been convinced I was going to die. Well, three times, if you count a strange experience I had, which probably fit the description of an anxiety attach. Twice I dreamed I had driven off an elevated roadway, and I looked through the windshield at the ground coming up at me, and I was positive it was over. There was no way out.

It wasn’t terrifying. I wasn’t exactly pleased, but I didn’t lose my composure. I had a very solemn feeling, realizing this was a very serious moment. One phase of my life was over–there was no point in continuing to think about the concerns of that phase–and I was about to start the next. I was curious, and I was nervous, because I didn’t know exactly what to expect. Part of me was relieved that I was about to leave a somewhat putrid world behind and enter a world where everything was right. I looked forward to seeing the change. I was not so alarmed that I would have harmed someone else or done something evil in order to be spared. I knew that what was happening to me was normal and good.

I hope that when my time comes, I react the same way I did in the dream. I hope I’m mature enough to accept death as part of life. I hope I am true to my belief that it’s a birth into a different and better world. I don’t want to go screaming and begging, like an addict who won’t go to rehab. If you’re a Christian, you have to believe that you can’t grow unless you die. This life is like a diaper; you mess it up, and then you mature, and you go on without it. It’s like a beater car you buy a teenager, so he’ll know what he’s doing by the time he gets something better. You can’t hang onto it in an irrational unwillingness to grow up. That’s what death is, for a Christian. Growing up. The earth is a playpen. The real world lies in front of us. Why would you want to stay here too long? I want a few more years, but I don’t want to be a hundred and fifty years old, hooked up to tubes, full of implants and transplants, barely aware of what’s going on. Not when I could be healthy and well and active in God’s presence. Insisting on remaining here would be like being a 50-year-old high school student.

One of the sad things about having no faith is that you are likely to think this short, corrupted, pain-filled life is all there is. You might consider yourself entitled to do absolutely anything in order to stay here. That’s a dangerous mindset. Soon, in societies where God is considered a fantasy, we’re going to see doomed babies conceived solely for the purpose of providing parts. I’m sure there are places where you can buy parts taken from the living, under circumstances amounting to coercion. We already think it’s okay to kill an unborn baby simply because raising it is an inconvenience, so the devaluation will continue, and the rationalizations will probably gain the force of law. People in such societies will be like the Canaanites, who killed their firstborn sons, pickled them in jars, and put them in the walls of their houses to insure good fortune.

You’re going to cross over some day. It won’t be long before it happens. Whether you’re two or ninety, it will be sooner than you think. Your body is deteriorating all the time. It never stops, and it gets faster as you age. Sooner or later, this life will cease to be rewarding. You should try to determine what comes after, and you should limit the things you are willing to do to postpone the inevitable. That’s what I think.

I admire Dan’s attitude. He is having a very painful experience, yet he will not abandon God or accuse God of doing his sister wrong. It’s easy to talk about the way you should act in a crisis. He’s teaching by walking the walk, which is much harder. In the past, I’ve had the temerity to be angry with God, and it was never over something this serious. I was an idiot and an ingrate. I am grateful for Dan’s example.

As for me, I find myself in the enviable yet not always pleasant state of one who suffers as the result of answered prayer. I’ve been asking to be made aware of the things I do wrong, and the things my family has done wrong before me, and over the last few days, I’ve had some surprising revelations. I’m amazed to realize how badly I’ve acted while trying to do what was right. I asked for this, and I am thankful for it, but I can’t say I enjoy it.

I believe you have to let God clean you up in order to experience his protection, blessings, and guidance. The Bible makes that clear. And I want a better life. I want less anxiety and guilt, and I want protection from evil, and I want guidance and success. I want some good deeds in my account when I leave this life. But the cleansing can be a little like the scene in Rambo, where they bathed Sylvester Stallone with a fire hose.

Hopefully the sensation tapers off after a while.