Tuning In

It's been quiet over here for a few months, but I hope you've been checking my Caring Bridge site for updates on my health. You can always access that site from here via the link at the top left of this page.

I've been quiet, I'm slowly realizing, because I've been in a valley of shadows. While I'm glad for more treatment options and that this one is turning out to be pretty tolerable, I have dreaded the time when chemo would be my only option. While I'm thankful for the port they put in to make it easier to access my veins each week, I'd also dreaded having to deal with that irritating, lumpy thing hanging out under my skin again. And I was so caught off guard when my hair started falling out that I had no time to reconcile myself to its loss. The fact that finding a wig that resembles my strawberry blonde hair turned out to be a challenge akin to finding the Holy Grail didn't help me accept my hair loss any faster either. And this season of graduations, Mother's Day, Father's Day, and summer family movie nights has felt particularly "in your face" this year, as all I seem to see are happy families, celebrated by the church as if any other life you've been given is somehow less than God's best. 

Meanwhile, we've been living through a kitchen renovation that seems neverending, surrounded by the contents of our old kitchen cabinets, which we had to leave accessible in order to continue to eat. (Sorry family, we didn't tell you about the reno because we wanted the grand reveal to be a surprise! Surprise!) The mess in itself has been a slog but this week, when it seemed like we were finally seeing big progress in the kitchen, our existing water filter system broke, flooding the main level of our house and ruining all our floors. Now we are facing removing the beautiful new cabinets and granite that had just been installed, as well as the entire contents of the kitchen, dining room, and living room so that everything can be ripped up and replaced. And of course we're having to move out of the house while they do the demo and new floors. And to top it off, I have shingles.

I've started to feel a bit like Job. I know it's a dramatic comparison and that my suffering is nowhere near that of so many others, but that's the turn my mind had taken.

I recently loaned my copy of One Thousand Gifts to a friend at church. Surely this was God-ordained timing because as she was reading it, she began preaching those words back at my grumbling heart. My heart that couldn't find a way to offer the eucharisteo this book talks about. Eucharisteo - the hard thanksgiving Jesus offered when, hours before His crucifixion, He took bread, told His disciples it represented His broken, tortured, and murdered body, and gave thanks (eucharisteo in Greek) for it. He gave thanks for the bread representing the agonizing suffering He was about to endure.

As I was discussing all this with my counselor, she reminded me that scripture talks about a sacrifice of praise (Heb. 13:15). A sacrifice. We tend to think of praise as something we give when things turn out the way we wanted. But there is a deeper praise, a harder praise, that we can offer in the middle of our pain and brokenness. And that praise, when we're offering up our hands to Him anyway, praising Him when we don't yet see a way forward, that He recognizes as a sacrifice, an offering to Him.

I had to get a brain MRI last Friday. As I was lying in the machine, the occasional strains of spa music I could hear over the clanging conjured up images of green pastures and bubbling streams, the imagery of Psalm 23. And as I pictured this serene setting, I thought of other words in that psalm - "He sets a table before me in the presence of my enemies." The various bangings and clangings and beepings of the MRI certainly felt like enemies at my back. But if I focused hard, strained my ears, I could hear the pastoral sounds of the spa music and imagine the table set before me, God with me, lavishing grace on me, even as my enemies bang their weapons right behind me - close, but never able to reach me. What I heard in that MRI machine was all a matter of what I tuned in to. I could focus on the banging enemies or I could focus on music and the table set before me, God's presence with me. I was reminded of the hymn which pleads, "Tune my heart to sing Thy grace. Streams of mercy, never ceasing, call for songs of loudest praise." It doesn't come naturally; we must tune our hearts toward Him.

As these various thoughts accumulated over the course of this week - eucharisteo, a sacrifice of praise, a table set before me in the presence of my clanging enemies, tuning in to the table rather than the enemies, tuning my heart to sing God's grace - I've felt my grumbly heart soften, to open again to thanksgiving in the midst of the mess and the hard. To giving thanks to the Savior who gave thanks first, offering eucharisteo for His broken body and blood shed for me. The Savior who pursues me, the lamb who's lost her way.