The Chosen Few

Hi I'm back! We took Tim to Texas for orientation and it was 44 hours of fun road trip driving and a short but great visit to his new home in August. My month reprieve to heal from surgery is now over and all is well. I've started the "day before" steroids which will quell any allergic reaction to the chemo drugs and tomorrow is the big day starting at noon. Now that its here I'm even more anxious to get over this first treatment because not knowing how it will affect me is bothering me a bit.

Someone asked what I need to get done. Well, nothing major fortunately,  but I do need to deal with the hair thing. Yikes I am good at procrastination and denial. An amazing thing happened in my mind a few weeks ago because though I cannot sometimes remember the names of people I have known for 20 years, an obscure detail came to my mind about someone in the bible who was told to shave off their eyebrows. Come on, you know that verse! Well, I couldn't remember either, but a quick concordance search on blueletterbible.org brought me right to Leviticus 14:9.  Now we all know for sure that the bible is relevant right?

It was the leper who had experienced a healing who needed to be brought back into the camp, into the life of the community and into the tabernacle to worship shoulder to shoulder with others. Among other things, he was told to shave his head, beard, eyebrows, and wash all clothes and himself. In this case losing the hair was a part of getting clean.  What follows is an amazing part of the bible to me. The priest would then take the blood of a sacrificed bird and place it on the person's ear lobe, his right thumb, and his right toe in order to bring atonement, or forgiveness of all sin, purity, cleanness, a new beginning. It doesn't mean necessarily that the leper had been afflicted because of sin, but my resident bible scholar informed me that leprosy in the old testament is often used as a symbol of sin, and the directions from Moses himself gave these instructions for the atonement.

Can we think of anyone else bent on cleaning up our sin mess who may have had blood on his head near his ear, on his thumb dripping down from his wrist or hands, and again on his toes from his feet? Yet this ritual was done hundreds of years before He was even born.  God is so awesome.

So this elevates the loss of hair and eyebrows (and a beard if I had one) to quite a lofty place of significance. It challenged me to see the good in what looks like a real bummer. It's almost like being a reverse Nazarite.  Samson could not let a razor touch any part of his hair, touch anything from a grape or even be in proximity to a dead person or animal. This symbolized a period of being set apart for the Lord's use. Hmm, so if I reverse the hair growth to hair loss, then this is a symbol to remind me of what?

Did you know that hair is a virtual storehouse of information about you? Forensic scientists can use it to determine where a dead person has been living by the record of what water leaves in their hair and in which part of the strand. It shows what you have been consuming, putting in your blood stream, and your genetic code. It's really like a little history book of your life. I pulled out one from the back of my head just now and its 16 1/2 inches long, or almost 3 years growth at 6 inches per year. If I add on the inches cut off in hair cuts that brings it to roughly 24, which would make my head hair about 4 years old. Significance, symbol?  The recording of my life is starting over. The old is gone, there is a new beginning.

If the last four years had been glorious ones I might just frame it all and remember the good old days. Truthfully, though God has abundantly blessed me in the midst, this past season of life has not been something I would like to repeat.  There are some very significant things I am really happy to cut off and be done with. And that's the point. Being done with something means there can be new beginnings. I know our Father in heaven is generous with new beginnings because He sent His only Son to make them ENDLESSLY possible.

So if you have lost your hair permanently, let it remind you that He separated your sins as far as the east is from the west, they will never come back. If you went through a hair loss season as I am, if you are in one now, or if you know someone facing the shave, think of it as a new beginning, a celebration of God's abundant mercy, a symbol of the truth that God doesn't leave us the way we are but changes us from glory to glory.  Like the leper who is cleaned and brought back into the fellowship of the camp by the blood that is shed for him, we are too by the blood that was given for us.

So now I'm actually feeling a little sorry for the rest of you because only a chosen few have been given this reminder that His mercies are endlessly new when we look in the mirror every morning... that He wants us back in fellowship with Him, that He forgives, that the blood atones.

Roots

I found myself in a surprise situation the other day, and it made me glad I had taken the time to at least powder my nose before leaving the house. My daughter has a friend who is home from college now, and who also found out a few weeks ago that her mother has a very aggressive form of breast cancer. So we brought her mom chocolate, as any well meaning person would do, and we heard her story while watching her fold newly purchased "lounging around the house not feeling well" pajamas.  A few days later she called....a neighbor had a friend who has a ministry praying for the sick, could they come and pray for her, and did I want to come too?

So now the powdered nose part.  I was expecting a neighbor, her friend, and my new friend, but what I found when I walked in the house was a kitchen full of women chatting away,  holding iced tea and waiting for me to get there so they could start...all ten of us! A prayer party, a virtual melting pot of church affiliations from the culdesac; one's church had made a prayer quilt, another brought the minister, all were ready to bring meals, and here they were to pray.  Dining room chairs completed a circle in the living room and we settled in for the extra-ordinary event. Stories of faith shared, hands held, tears fell, and even for me the widow minister knelt down on her seventy-four year old knees and bowed her head in faith.

I was in the presence of virtual California coast redwood tree roots.  They grow to 350 feet in height, wrap your mind around that for a moment, take the high school football field and stack one and a half of them on their edge and on top of each other...the tree. You would need a parachute to jump down, and you can forget bird watching.  How deep do you think the roots would need to go in order to keep these giants upright through rain, wind, fire and earthquakes, for an average of 500-700 years but sometimes even 2,000? The shocking answer is 6-12 feet. Shocking I know. It is like the little pink eraser anchoring the long, yellow shaft of a pencil!

The power of these roots isn't magical, its relational. What they do is interlock with one another under the ground and hold on for dear life. Their relatively thin roots travel shallow but 50-80 feet sideways to their close growing neighbors, twisting, wrapping, interlocking, and creating a rock solid base on which they all stand. I guess that must mean that they depend on each other for life; one growing alone would be like the ones you see laying on their sides with roots in the air.

A stack of cards two inches high, phone calls, bear hugs, chicken casserole and salad, vases and baskets of flowers, prayer bracelets, conversations on the porch, tears...they all hold us up.  The trees know it without trying. I think we forget sometimes how much we need each other and how much just expressing our thoughts towards one another keeps the forest standing upright.

As I strive to abide more fully in God I am making the effort to see Him more clearly in the people around me.  An ancient church father taught his monks to "examen" their day in the evening to reflect on all of the ways God's grace was present in people and places, but might have been missed.  Here is my "examen" list" for the past few days:

1) painted on the side of a delivery truck with an arrow pointing to the driver. "Our company's most valuable resource"...I felt the heart of God in that!

2) phone call "When can we get together and pray for you again before chemo?"

3) my dad, "How are you doing Molly we've been praying for you"

4) kindness of my doctor at the surgery follow up visit

5) extra long hug in the kitchen from my husband

6) an arm around my shoulder and "I'm so glad you aren't going to die mom"

7) a card signed by the Poway wrestling team with all their thoughts and prayers for me

8) a lonely yet faithful widow and daughter of the Most High, on her knees and holding my hand as she prays for me

9) old friends offering their beloved mountain cabin retreat to Ben and I for a get away any time

10) opportunities that keep coming my way to reach out and be an intertwining root to others who are going through trials and tribulations right now too

11) seeing prayers for my kids answered in front of my eyes, and some of these prayers have been waiting for years and years to be answered

12) a happy chance (serendipity) meeting with a friend at Nordstrom Rack who hugged me and said she has been praying for me daily...daily!

I did start to feel discouraged about some things the last few days, but I took the time to stop and talk to the Lord about it, and felt reminded to examine my life to see His love for me in ways that I don't always take the time to consider well enough. Now if you could see me today, you would see a tree standing straight and tall, weathering a storm with the strength of intertwining roots, God's hands and feet and words holding me tightly in place and upright.
                 

Faith for the KLYFS

Kids Leaving You For  School

Maybe you've been through it, are thinking about it as a future event sure to come, or you have memories of doing it yourself.  It feels like my son is going to start running, get up some speed, and then jump....I can't breathe. In a rare moment this morning I found myself alone in the house for a period of time. I courageously picked my way into his room and found a place on the floor with the dresser behind my back and looked. I hadn't noticed how museum-like his decor was...trophies from childhood karate on a dusty shelf in the corner, Pop Warner team photo on the bulletin board next to 8th grade lacrosse team photo, a framed picture of his only high school year of football behind me,  and a bulging pile of medals hanging precariously and unceremoniously from the neck of a well anchored trophy.  Since he gave them all up to wrestle all through high school I thought he would have put them away a long time ago...go figure.

"Lord, how do I pray for this boy? How many things await him out there, on his own. Faith has to be fed...will he starve or eat?  Will he overdose at the cafeteria soft ice cream machine, will he find the right kind of friends, will he say no enough times?  I decided to flip the bible open and let my eyes focus on the verses that happened to be there (Jeremiah 35:5) to get started.."Then I set before the men of the house of the Rechobites pitchers full of wine and cups, and I said to them 'Drink wine!'" Oh lovely. As the story goes, the Lord wanted Jeremiah to see what these men would do, and they wouldn't drink a drop! Why? Because their deceased patriarch had sternly instructed them not to drink wine, build homes, or plant vineyards, but to live only in tents, and they faithfully did so. "Jeremiah, go ask my children why they will not do what I command them to do even though I tell them over and over and over, yet the children of this man Rechab obey him completely?"

As followers our job is to walk in faith. I never knew there were levels to this. I thought faith was faith and not was not, but as time goes by I'm finding that there is great faith and little faith, full faith and partial faith. From experience, sorrow, frustration, disillusionment, hopelessness, confusion, I'm seeing just how detrimental partial faith can be.  Partial faith doesn't build a house maybe but it puts up a barn. Partial faith might trust for some things, but not for all. Partial faith relies on personal strength still with some sweet faith mixed in to make it all feel right. It's a warrior using a shield so small that it leaves body parts exposed and vulnerable.

Partial faith feels like there is a foundation but still worries. It looks for the gray areas which will allow the flesh to follow its inclinations without relinquishing its standing in the public square. It doesn't even realize how partial it is and fancies it is doing quite well, despite the inner turmoil. It's really a miserable place to be because it doesn't belong anywhere, its a fragment of two worlds grating against each other. No faith might find a feel good antidote, while partial faith suffers the load alone and longs for peace.

Will my son have a full shield of faith?  Forget him, what about me? God was awfully pleased with the uncompromising obedience of the Rechobites and He promised them an eternal posterity of faith for their descendants because of it. As for His own faithless children, their punishment was excruciating and it broke His righteous but loving heart.

I got my answer, I know how to pray. "Lord, may he have the heart of a Rechobite. May all that has been poured into him flow out as a river of living water. May his faith protect him from the coming onslaught of life changing decisions. Deliver him from mediocrity,  from just a glass of wine, from building houses where he was told to only pass through in a tent.  Weave him together with other Rechobites into an unbreakable barrier against pride, self sufficiency and compromise.  When he jumps off those  KLYFS may he spread his wings of faith and fly.

So what does this have to do with cancer? I'm finding that full shield for cancer,  but I am having to focus more on being ready to fight with a full shield for other things. But in ALL things, (as you know if you have been following), I want to abide in Him, and today I felt like He really helped me to do that through His word. Thank you Lord for letting me hear Your voice in Your word.