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I was having dinner with my good friend Mari Ellen two days ago, and we were talking about a woman whose husband has two weeks to live and who has been writing beautiful blogs despite the impending tragedy. I mentioned that I didn’t think I’d have strength to project so much serenity in the face of such horrendous loss, and Mari Ellen said, “Sure, you would. You’re committed to encouraging others.” I might have nodded and given vague assent to her statement, but something in me was jarred by her words. Yes, I’m all about finding the lessons and beauty in any circumstances. I’m all about using what happens to me to impact others. I’m all about choosing how I react to those unexpected challenges that threaten to hobble me. But at what point does that commitment become disingenuous? At what point does my desire to express a real-life (real-crisis) faith hinder others (readers, students, loved ones) from seeing the not-so-glamorous human side my determined optimism might mask? 
I’m scared. That’s what I want you to know. I’m scared because I’ve been dizzy for nearly two months and no one can figure out why. I’m scared because I’m so tired that I sometimes find it hard to get out of bed and too easy to crawl back to it well before my normal bedtime. I’m scared because the dizziness got so bad a couple weeks ago that I felt the floor tilt violently under my feet, fell against the wall of my shower and couldn’t seem to get the world to settle for a few seconds. I’m scared because there’s nothing wrong with my blood sugar or blood pressure. I’m scared because the ENT found nothing wrong with my inner ear/brain connection either. I’m scared because a doctor yesterday told me “breast goes to brain” (i.e. breast cancer often metastasizes to the brain), because the MRI I might need to have will cost a horrendous amount and have to be paid for out of pocket (given my sky-high deductibles), and because I don’t want to have a German physician tell me I have brain cancer too. 
I’m scared. I’m not ashamed of the fear, but I’m not proud of it either. And yes, I’ve been combating the fear with my usual weapons of gratitude, focus on others and trust in a God who has carried me and will carry me. I choose to apply my mind to those, though the fear—that nagging, “what if” oppressor—still exists in the far recesses of my mind. I don’t want anyone to consider me immune to normal human emotions. I want to be as real in my fear as I am in my faith. The two are not mutually exclusive… 
There are women in my life who give me perspective. One of them is Mona, recently diagnosed with a nasty abdominal cancer and just two weeks into chemo. She had her head shaved yesterday, a prospect that filled me with horror when I was first diagnosed... To read the rest of this post, click here! http://michelephoenix.com/2009/11/the-fear-factor/
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| (NOTE: This site will soon be permanently replaced by my newly redesigned website. Please click on the following link to be taken there. Bookmark it for future perusal or subscribe by clicking the "syndication feeds" button to the right. http://michelephoenix.com/blog .) I'm an idealist at heart. If I had any control over this planet, teenagers would have a "mute" button, cheesecake would be calorie-free, and garbage would walk itself to the curb. Sadly, if I've learned anything in the past week, it's that my control over circumstances only extends so far. The last days before a major play performance are supposed to smooth-sailing: the lines are learned, the blocking is second-nature, the set is built, the lights are adjusted, and all a director like me has to worry about is keeping the troops fed, focused and just fearful enough to still invest effort. 
On our dress rehearsal day, one of our lead actors was throwing up. We had 20 people in the audience, a brand new actor trying to learn lines and movements, and a cast destabilized by all the upheaval. "At least it happened now and not next week," I kept telling myself. The official performances are more important than rehearsals, after all. Two days later, Reece was still throwing up.  Enter The Swine Flu. Rachel was coughing on Monday. Her temperature spiked on Tuesday. On Wednesday, with two days to go before performance #1, five BFA students had been tested for "The Swine" and I started to hear rumors about shutting down the school to prevent contamination. On Thursday, the day before opening night, Rachel was still out, Reece was still iffy, and tests had come back positive. More talk of closing our doors. More rumors of postponing the play until the end of the epidemic. 
Friday morning: Opening Day. More positive test results. An announcement is made in chapel that the school is going into Swine Flu Mode. Students confined to their dorms until Wednesday. No school until then. No extra-curricular activities. But the school play will happen on Friday and Saturday evenings as planned, albeit with one fairly comical caveat: the audience will have to wear masks. 
It wasn’t until 3 pm on Friday—a handful of hours before the curtain went up—that we knew Rachel would be able to act. Needless to say, my usually dormant ulcers were wide awake and twitching by then! 
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| (NOTE: This site will soon be permanently replaced by my newly redesigned website. Please click on the following link to be taken there. Bookmark it for future perusal or subscribe by clicking the "syndication feeds" button to the right. http://michelephoenix.com/blog .) It's a topic I both love and hate to discuss, mostly because it's so nebulous. And yet…it’s also powerful and life-altering and sanity-preserving. Corrie ten Boom said, “Prayer is the slender thread that moves the hand of God,” yet she watched her sister die a horrible death in a concentration camp. How could she believe so firmly in prayer when her own pleas had failed to save someone she loved so fiercely? 
Some of you might remember Dotsy, a friend I met over the Internet when her daughter Googled microcystic adnexal carcinoma (MAC) and discovered my blog. After months of correspondence, we met for the first time last summer, both post-op, both with scarred faces, both so grateful to be past the hardest part of our MacJourneys. 
Except that Dotsy's journey is still ongoing and it has just taken an unexpected turn. She went in this week for some pre-op exams before further reconstructive surgery and the doctors discovered something suspicious in the area of her initial tumor. A biopsy was taken and results should be in soon. When I heard Dotsy's news, my first impulse was to pray. Drop everything and pray. My second impulse was to get others praying too—first among them, my choir. She's been our prayer project since last year and we're committed to "our Dotsy." In the days before her check-up, we'd put this short video together for her as a cyber-send-off. Needless to say, our prayers have redoubled since Dotsy's disconcerting news reached us. (Click on this link to view the short video we made for Dotsy.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhvcbRRTpe8 "Prayer is not overcoming God's reluctance, but laying hold of His willingness." Martin Luther Opinions about prayer seem to be as strong as they are varied. Some call it a hoax. Others call it wishful thinking. I even had a student who considered it tantamount to mass hysteria. To be honest, there were many years in my own life when I doubted that prayer had any effect on the concerns that mattered most to me. My misgivings hardly made me unique. There is something so mysterious and unpredictable about prayer and God that I'm sure there are few believers who haven't, at one point or another, wondered whether it really "worked" or not. 
Several years ago, I read a book by Dutch Sheets called “Intercessory Prayer.” (If you're a student or former student and would like a copy, let me know...I'll be happy to buy one for you.) I don't agree with everything he writes, particularly in the latter portion of his work, but his definition of prayer as it relates to God's partnership with us is brilliant, Biblically sound and absolutely logical—mystery, inscrutability and all. Prayer doesn't bounce off the ears of a deaf God. Prayer doesn't temporarily distract us from the pain of real life in the real world. Prayer isn't the invention of overwhelmed humans faced with challenges larger than they could tackle alone and seeking, through intercession, to "pass the buck" to a fictitious higher power. No—prayer is His endowment in us of the ability to effect the course of life in this world. He is still the sole ruler of Heavens and earth, His plans for us beautiful and redemptive (and more often than not derailed by the free will we so carelessly use to hobble His best for us). But He also gave us the supreme responsibility and honor of releasing some of His power in this world through our prayers. Some of them won't get answered in a way we recognize, some of them will go unanswered for years, and some of them will leave us baffled, angry or confused, but every prayer we say is counted and important--another opportunity for us to partner with God in promoting His plans for this agonizing planet. "We must begin to believe that God, in the mystery of prayer, has entrusted us with a force that can move the Heavenly world,and can bring its power down to earth." Andrew Murray My favorite prayer image is from Revelations 5: bowls of incense, which are the prayers of the saints. Our prayers don't float up into a void and dissipate. They're collected in golden bowls. They amass. They build in power. And then they are released.  Some of Dotsy's prayer warriors. But what about Dotsy, you might ask. She has been bathed in prayer since the beginning of this ordeal and now is facing another interminable wait for results that might shake the foundations of her world. What about another friend of mine who, after years of trying to survive a debilitating illness, now is waiting to find out if she has breast cancer too? What about the lost children whose parents pray day and night to be reunited with them? What about the woman who is about to be assaulted and screams for God to protect and spare her? I wish I had answers for every circumstance that is painfully incomprehensible. "Prayer is weakness leaning on omnipotence." W. S. Bowd When things get muddied, I always choose to focus on what I know, and this I DO know without a doubt: prayer didn't spare me (we must all bear life in this broken world and the consequences of the sin others inflict on us as well as our own). Prayer didn't built a magical wall around me that shielded me from hurt. Given my history, I can attest that strangers can inflict the kind of pain that cripples in invisible ways, that those who are supposed to protect you can do more harm than good, and that cancer doesn't spare people devoted to God and sometimes even strikes twice. But prayer—your prayers—steady and full of faith—made the unthinkable bearable. They were a stronghold in the quicksand. A sliver of light in the most oppressive darkness. A shred of companionship in the loneliest of ordeals. We don't know yet if they yielded long-term, recurrence-free health and they certainly didn't dissolve the scars of my youth, but they gave me that undefinable surge of hope and strength and emotional healing that can only come from something as simple, powerful and unfathomable as prayer. 
Whatever your frustrations with the mechanics and outcomes of prayer, K.E.E.P P.R.A.Y.I.N.G! We'll never understand it all, and there may be times when we want to throw in the towel, but as someone who has received the kind of peace that can only have come through the prayers of believers who cared enough to intercede without guarantees or manuals, I can only urge you to pray. As Jesus urged His disciples, “Pray and don’t give up.” “Prayer can never be in excess.” C. H. Spurgeon And if your prayers, in the next few days, include Dotsy and my other friend (unnamed by request), I'd be even more grateful. ********* Some photos of the past couple of weeks: choir, the first costuming day for the school play (Nov. 13, 14), and a dinner at my place. 
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| (NOTE: This site will soon be permanently replaced by my newly redesigned website. Please click on the following link to be taken there, and bookmark it for future perusal or subscribe by clicking the "syndication feeds" button to the right. I add new entries about once a week. http://michelephoenix.com/blog. You will need to click on the pink title ["Pain with a View"] at the top of the page to be taken to the full entry.)
A year ago this week, I entered the hospital in Ann Arbor for my tenth (and hopefully final) de-cancering surgery. I marked the anniversary last weekend by taking a quick, overnight trip to Switzerland with my dear friend, Mari Ellen. It started out wonderfully—a beautiful autumn day, a charming (and affordable) Bed & Breakfast nestled in an alpine valley with a breathtaking view of the surrounding mountains… 
(That's our chalet!) The small town of Kandersteg is as Swiss as they get, and that mountain rising up behind the chalet on the above picture was our destination that afternoon. Now, I’ve come to realize that the reason the Swiss have built cable-car lines along the sides of their steepest mountains is that climbing them in any other fashion is tantamount to “suicide by effort.” Sadly, that realization dawned only after Mari Ellen and I had decided that we’d tackle the impossible incline and call it our challenge for the day. 
The path was narrow, uneven, sometimes treacherous, and consistently so steep that we often used our hands AND feet to make the ascent. By the time we’d made it a third of the way up, I was doing my best impersonation of an asthmatic heifer running a marathon and trying very hard to fill my lungs with thin mountain air. We took a breather at the foot of one of the giant cable-car pylons, ostensibly to enjoy the view, and I wheezed, “I don’t think I can do this,” while gazing disgustedly at the small distance we’d traveled. A minute later, we were at it again, clawing our way up the 3-kilometer cliff that passed for a walking path. I can’t remember the last time I was so physically challenged. The climb was endless, the altitude was debilitating, and though the views were stunning, they paled in comparison with the colored dots dancing in front of my eyes (oxygen deprivation is a dangerous thing!). 
But we made it. After over an hour of interminable effort and dogged determination, the path flattened a little, then widened, then became a paved road that lead blessedly DOWN to an azure alpine lake, fed by glaciers, and magnificently lit by the mid-afternoon sun. The view was almost too much to take in as we sat…and breathed…and absorbed. 
I received two emails, this week. One from my friend Dotsy, a fellow MAC-sufferer who will be having her second facial surgery this month. And one from a new friend who somehow found me online. She received word yesterday that the surgery that was supposed to heal her of cancer didn’t. It’s back, and her immediate future holds more surgery, chemotherapy and radiation. Both of these women are strong and hopeful. Both have a faith that will be their fiercest ally during the challenges ahead, and both have no idea yet of what their “mountain” will truly entail. 
(Swiss chalets are horticultural masterpieces.) I was writing to them yesterday and struggling to conjure up something meaningful to say. How could mere words possibly make a difference, given the enormity of what they face? In many ways, their battles against this disease are much more taxing than mine was, which leaves me with little other than prayers to offer…except that I am a survivor. I’ve been there, climbed that, and now have the “view” to prove it. That alone, even without words put to it, carries a victorious message. 
Thinking back on my Swiss excursion and the many times when all I could say was “I don’t think I can do this,” I realize that my defeatism had a lot to do with the fact that I knew nothing of what awaited at the top of that mountain. I knew nothing about the distance still to be traveled to get there or the condition of the path ahead of me. I wonder how different the experience might have been if someone had been standing at the summit with an eye on the azure lake and a hand held out to me, saying, “It’s worth it. I can see it. You’re over halfway here. Come on—you can do this!” 
On this anniversary of my tenth surgery, I am reminded of the responsibility we have, as survivors, to stand at the top and call down to those still struggling to the summit. Whether they’re emotional, physical, or spiritual, the mountains we’ve conquered are not ours to own, but ours to share. We might not always want to revisit the pain we’ve suffered or the crippling we’ve endured, but if we don’t offer them to others as a testimony of God’s sustenance and love, our fellow travelers may not have to courage to find their way to the top. 
My encouragement to you? Speak of the treacherous paths and looming precipices you’ve known, tell the story of your climb, the tale of your survival. And when you’ve reached a place that is beautiful and stable and “breathable,” call down to those who follow and tell them of the strength that comes from surrendered weakness, of the peace that comes from vulnerable faith. Tell them that you stumbled. Tell them that you wanted to give up. Tell them that you were bruised by doubt and battered by despair…but that you made it. You. Made. It. And the view from the summit of survival? It’s priceless. 
(Many more photos of the Swiss adventure are posted on Facebook!) | | |
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In my mind, I’m a world-class body builder who can bench press a VW bug. My biceps are so large my arms can’t hang straight and my six-pack has morphed into a twelve-pack. That’s how buff I am. 
All fantasy, of course, but it sure would have come in handy a week ago, when a fantastic Christmas present from my mom demanded that I drive to France and move a LARGE piece of furniture to Germany with the help of only one other person. I lifted, I pushed, I pulled, I twisted…and I did something nasty to my lower back. The onset was slow in coming, but once the full-fledged damage made itself known, my average morning commute from my bed to my couch went something like this: “Ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch and oh-please-make-it-stop OUCH!” The only position in which I was comfortable was flat on my back. Everything else, whether it demanded moving a fraction of an inch or driving a mile, was excruciating. I briefly asked God if I could go back and repeat any of my surgeries rather than be put through this much greater discomfort, but I think He dismissed the plea as the ramblings of a pain-killer-warped mind! Pain. C. S. Lewis called it “God’s megaphone to reach a deaf world.” I think it was Bon Jovi who called it “a burning fire that screams your bleepin’ name”! It’s a constant in life. From our first stubbed toe to our last pulled muscle, from our first broken heart to our last wrenching loss, pain is inevitable. 
I’ve been receiving emails lately from BFA students who have graduated in the past few years. The pain they describe is something much less tangible than what I’ve been living with since last Tuesday. Theirs is a pain that can’t be remedied by eight ibuprofens a day and a strategically placed hot pad. It’s a pain that found me speaking, at five a.m., to a young woman I love. At the time of the call, she was sitting in the rain on a rock beside a dumpster outside her dorm, utterly bereft and convinced that she would not make it through the torturous transition into adulthood. The emails, the phone calls…they all point to the same certainty that the pain will never ebb, that the wrenching will never ease, that the lostness will never find a sense of recognition. I’ve known that dark abyss. I’ve wallowed in its misery and clawed at its slick walls and come to the same debilitating conclusion these former students have reached—that life will never get better, that joy will never return, that wholeness will never be mine to grasp again. 
From the bottom of the abyss, there is little perspective and even less ability to envision a brighter future. Our vision is crippled by the impossibly tall, hostile walls of fear and helplessness as they narrow inexorably and threaten to crush us. We long for healing—for that miraculous moment when the darkness will swirl away like coffee down a drain. Healing seldom comes in a burst of miraculous wholeness. One of the biggest mistakes we can make is to hope for something that sudden. I think we sometimes assume that a gradual healing isn’t healing at all, but that an instant wellness is proof of God’s intervention. I disagree. And my spasming back and weak legs, this week, reminded me of that fact. For days, it was all I could do to fold myself, wincing and cringing, into my car for the short drive to school. In class, if I dropped a board marker, one of the students had to pick it up for me, and if I stood from the piano stool too fast, I had to grasp the edge of the instrument until the screaming pain in my back and leg subsided. 
I got home from school today, intent on plopping down on my heating bad again, and was inserting my key in the front door when I realized that I’d made it out of my car without mumbling idle threats to rusty vertebrae and pinched nerves. I realize AFTER the fact, that for the first time in a week, I’d walked down the steps to my apartment without having to pause and allow my back to rest. Looking back, I’m not sure when the change happened, but it did. It did. 
The lesson here? It’s very simple, really, though I temporarily lost track of it in my post-furniture-moving pain. It’s a truth I’ve been repeating to pre-graduation seniors ever since I’ve been at BFA. The bad days will make themselves known in unmistakable ways. There’s no need to waste time looking for those. But those small inklings that things are getting better? Those tiny brightenings, those almost insignificant and random acts of kindness we might miss because we’re so overwhelmed by grief? They’re much more difficult to see than the darkness, but so much more important to acknowledge. So if you’re one of those people whose pain is so overwhelming that you can’t fathom it ever getting bearable, would you please consider these actions? 1. Allow more time to pass before concluding that your life will always be this way. 2. Make it a regular exercise to acknowledge the smallest of good things that have happened to you each day. Write them down to give them more weight. 3. Every couple of weeks, look back. See how bad things were a while ago. Consider what small progress you’ve made—however small it is (like me getting out of my car without pain for the first time) and be grateful for that. I still can’t put on my pants without someone shoving a cattle-prod into my spine, but I can lean into my bathroom mirror to apply my mascara without hitting the ceiling and yelping—that’s progress. It’s not full healing, but it’s PROGRESS. And that’s cause to celebrate. ********* Some pictures of a recent Sunday afternoon tea... 
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