I have many blessings, I readily admit. Too abundant to count. Statistically, my existence puts me in the top privileged 1% of the world. On this Thanksgiving Day, though, I'm particularly struck by the blessing of my vocation. How thankful I am that I did not choose to follow the path of mechanical engineering, as my parents wanted, or the path of a children's author as I originally wanted. I ended up as a physical therapist, and I am so so so so glad for that apparently random decision years ago.
I remember the moment. I was at Washington State University, a sophomore walking down the hill to my next class, realizing that I had no idea what I wanted to be when I grew up. Engineering was so impersonal, so "at a desk staring at a computer", and I knew that my introverted personality and tendency towards sedentary pursuits would only flourish under such a career. It would be too easy to be a brain in a jar, an inert blob, as an engineer. I knew I needed a career that pushed me outside my comfort zone, or I would never grow. I did well in my engineering classes, but I did not enjoy them at all. They inspired no passion, and I remember sitting next to an upper classman in Fortran and hearing him say "I hate engineering, but I'm senior now, and it's too late to switch." I refused to let myself get in the same situation. Plus, I realized that I missed kids! Little kids were missing on college campuses. Everywhere I looked, there were only seas of young adults, and the whole place seemed so monotone, so FLAT without the energy and laughter of little kids. I just remember being struck profoundly by that. Where are all the kids? So I switched majors to family studies, in an effort to find the kids. I discovered within about a week, though, that THERE WERE NO RIGHT ANSWERS in that field. It was way too squishy. There was no intellectual challenge at all in family studies. It was pure emotion as a field, and that did not sit well. I'm much too logical for that. I HAVE a brain, and family studies did not use it at all.
So, walking down the hill that day in Pullman, Washington, it hit me. I remember the moment so distinctly. "I want to teach kids how to walk". Just that thought. It was overwhelming. Who taught kids how to walk as a living? Whose job was that? I guessed a physical therapist, but I'd never met a physical therapist before, and I had certainly never BEEN to therapy. At that moment, though, the way forward was crystal clear. I needed to be a physical therapist. And I skipped class, walked straight to the admin building, and changed my major within minutes, without consulting another human being. I never looked back. A pediatric physical therapist it was.
It's been 25 years now. Can't believe that. The time has literally flown by. After all these years, though, I still love my job, haven't regretted a single day of it. I love getting to enter into the imaginations of children on a daily basis. I love getting to laugh at the funny things they say and do. I love the relationships I get to build with families. I love being able to help them come to grips with the delays and disabilities of their child. I love being able to support them as they grieve, but also give them hope, too. Mostly the hope. Getting to show them the potential of their kid. I love getting to be chief cheerleader. I love watching kids defy odds, shatter expectations. I love that parents send me videos of their kids' first steps, their first time at the beach, their first time riding a bike, of them going on a hike in the woods with their family. I love getting to celebrate achievements with them. I love that parents WANT to share their kids' achievements with me, because that means I was a part of helping those achievements become a reality, and that is the best feeling in the world. I love being in the background of countless social media posts, of parents bragging on what their kid can do now. The "behind the scenes" person that helps the kid shine. That's the best. I love being surprised when a kid does something that I honestly didn't think they could do, even if I never said it. There's a whole bunch of humble pie in that, and I have learned to "never say never" in regards to a child's potential. We just work towards the next step, and see what happens.
Most of all, I love getting to be a part of people's lives, through the hard and the struggle and the tears and the triumphs. Through it all, I get to be there, right along side them. Yes, there's paperwork, and insurance, and sometimes not enough resources to do what needs to be done. There's the monotonous stuff, and the frustrating stuff, too. But that's minor compared to the joy. How many people get to experience actual JOY in their job? I do. What a blessing that is!
These are "my kids". These families become part of my own. I don't know how to do it any other way - it really can't be "just a job" because there's no leaving it behind when I get home at night. It's my vocation, who I AM, not just what I do.
What a blessing to find a vocation that brings such joy, such purpose.
"In the old days, people demanded 'an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,' and to repay evil for evil. Patience was not yet on the earth, because faith was not on the earth either. Of course, impatience made full use of the opportunities the Law gave it. That was easy when the Lord and Master of patience was not here. But now that he has come and put the grace of faith together with patience, we are no longer allowed to attack someone even with a word—not even to call someone a fool without facing the danger of judgment. The Law found more than it lost when Christ said, 'Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven' (Matthew 5:44-45). This most important commandment summarizes in a word the universal discipline of patience, since it does not allow us to do evil even to people who deserve it."
“Evil is thus a kind of parasite on goodness. If there were no good by which to measure things, evil could not exist. Men sometimes forget this, and say, there is so much evil in the world that there cannot be a God. They are forgetting that, if there were no God, they would have no way of distinguishing evil from goodness. The very concept of evil admits and recognizes a Standard, a Whole, a Rule, an Order. Nobody would say that his automobile was out of order if he did not have a conception of how an automobile ought to run.” - Archbishop Fulton Sheen
I was having a discussion with some coworkers at lunch the other day, and one of them said "I just want to be happy. Isn't that the purpose of life, to be happy?" We were talking about the suicide of my boys' best friend, which is how the subject came up. He struggled with anxiety, but no one but his family knew. We were blindsided by his death, because we saw a happy, talented, well-liked kid who seemed to have everything: good friends, a loving family, a doting girlfriend. If someone like HIM could take his own life, so unexpectedly... are any of our children safe from such a thing? Which is when my coworker reiterated her thought. "I just want to be happy". And as I thought about this, it occurred to me that if the goal is happiness (which IS a good thing), and we strive primarily for happiness, we can go very far astray. Seeking happiness as the primary thing would lead you to avoid the hard, avoid the sad. You might pursue adventure, or prosperity, or things in an effort to "get happy". Because - what makes you happy? Taken to it's extreme conclusion -- seeking happiness can lead to hedonism, to selfishness. A good, taken to it's logical extreme, leads to a vice. And in the case of my family's young friend... seems unattainable, even if you have all the things that SHOULD make you happy.
The same is true of security. If the aim is to "be safe" in this world (again, a GOOD THING), if safety is our top priority... the extreme conclusion is fear, and existence without experience. Life is dangerous. Life is calculated risk. Our world in a pandemic has taught us this. With physical safety as our #1 priority, we have caused immeasurable harm in economics, social-emotional development and relationships, and spawned all sorts of political discord. Focusing on safety first has NOT improved our lives, even if it has ensured the prolonging of our physical health. Making us safer from a virus has made us safer from a virus - not safer overall, as suicide rates, drug overdoses, poverty, and riots can attest. "If you have your health, you have everything", the saying goes. This is a fallacy.
As I ran this "extreme end" scenario through each good thing I could think of that could apply for the job of "the purpose of life"... happiness, security, safety, contentment, prosperity, esteem, independence, self-sufficiency.... I realized that each "good thing" missed the mark, and actually became a vice if taken to its extreme end. And that's because these "good things" are not ends, but byproducts. If the byproduct is the goal, it mutates. It is off course - maybe by a little at the beginning, but by a whole lot at the end. The trajectory misses the mark substantially.
There is one thing, and one thing only, that encompasses all of the human condition, and is the only extreme end that leads inexorably to sanctity. That is LOVE. Love embraces the hard, the suffering. Love desires the good of the other, empties itself out only to be filled up in return with greater treasurers. With love as our aim, taken to it's final, extreme end... we see the face of God. With love as our aim, the byproducts come: peace, contentment, happiness, joy. But they are ordered as they should be - as byproducts, and not the goal. If you DESIRE joy, don't seek joy. Seek love. There will be sorrow as well, so that the joy is richer, but there will be joy. If you DESIRE peace, then love. Not that there won't be war, but the "peace that passes all understanding", the fortitude to endure life's battles knowing the end before it begins... that leads to internal peace. If you DESIRE contentment, then love. Your life may be tossed around like a ship in a storm, but with your focus on the horizon, with love as your guide, you can steady yourself, and weather whatever is thrown at you calmly. All these goods are the off shoot of a properly ordered existence. We all just need to know where to aim.
The same is true of marriage. We all want a happy marriage. But a happy marriage isn't the goal. It really isn't, unfortunately. Because when the marriage is invariably NOT happy, we think it must end. "I'm not happy. You're not making me happy. You can't make me happy anymore". And so the marriage must die. Happiness as the end of marriage leads only to the death of the marriage. The true purpose of marriage is LOVE; not twitter=pated infatuation. Not lust. But deep, abiding love -which at times hurts, and is hard, and suffers. Hurting and suffering without love is ugly and evil. We avoid it, as we should - run away from it as fast as we can. Hurting and suffering with love is redemptive. It heals the hurt, assuages the suffering. It walks into the hurt, rather than running away from it. Love is the transformative difference in all things. The willing of the good of another person greater than good of yourself - agape, self-giving love - is the most powerful thing on the planet. The most unexpected, paradoxical thing. The person who empties themselves out for others is the fullest. The one who gives away most receives. Through death comes life.
Went to Mayo for my 6 month follow up. Wasn't nervous at all this time. Expected "same ol' same ol'", and am fine with that. Turns out, though, that my tumor marker actually went DOWN to 1.4, which is the lowest it's ever ever ever ever been!!! The ultrasound showed again that the one node they can visualize hasn't grown, and isn't well-vascularized, so overall, GREAT news! The doctor was super pleased by these results. So pleased, in fact, that he said "This is as close to a cure as you might get", and then told me we didn't have to follow up for 9 months. If at that time, things still look good, I don't need to come back for a whole year. Super cool.
“The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money.”
“I do not know if the people of the United States would vote for superior men if they ran for office, but there can be no doubt that such men do not run.”
“What good does it do me, after all, if an ever-watchful authority keeps an eye out to ensure that my pleasures will be tranquil and races ahead of me to ward off all danger, sparing me the need even to think about such things, if that authority, even as it removes the smallest thorns from my path, is also absolute master of my liberty and my life; if it monopolizes vitality and existence to such a degree that when it languishes, everything around it must also languish; when it sleeps, everything must also sleep; and when it dies, everything must also perish?
There are some nations in Europe whose inhabitants think of themselves in a sense as colonists, indifferent to the fate of the place they live in. The greatest changes occur in their country without their cooperation. They are not even aware of precisely what has taken place. They suspect it; they have heard of the event by chance. More than that, they are unconcerned with the fortunes of their village, the safety of their streets, the fate of their church and its vestry. They think that such things have nothing to do with them, that they belong to a powerful stranger called “the government.” They enjoy these goods as tenants, without a sense of ownership, and never give a thought to how they might be improved. They are so divorced from their own interests that even when their own security and that of their children is finally compromised, they do not seek to avert the danger themselves but cross their arms and wait for the nation as a whole to come to their aid. Yet as utterly as they sacrifice their own free will, they are no fonder of obedience than anyone else. They submit, it is true, to the whims of a clerk, but no sooner is force removed than they are glad to defy the law as a defeated enemy. Thus one finds them ever wavering between servitude and license.
When a nation has reached this point, it must either change its laws and mores or perish, for the well of public virtue has run dry: in such a place one no longer finds citizens but only subjects.”
“Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom, socialism restricts it. Democracy attaches all possible value to each man; socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number. Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.”
“Americans are so enamored of equality, they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom.”
“Nothing is more wonderful than the art of being free, but nothing is harder to learn how to use than freedom.”
“Society will develop a new kind of servitude which covers the surface of society with a network of complicated rules, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate. It does not tyrannise but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”
“When the taste for physical gratifications among them has grown more rapidly than their education . . . the time will come when men are carried away and lose all self-restraint . . . . It is not necessary to do violence to such a people in order to strip them of the rights they enjoy; they themselves willingly loosen their hold. . . . they neglect their chief business which is to remain their own masters.”
My Grandpa Phil was a dear, upright, honest man who I loved very much, and miss every day, even 21 years later. He died April 24, 2000, at the age of of 81 years old. I was recently cleaning out a closet and found the program from his funeral. In it, I had written the following, and I'm copying it here so it doesn't get lost.
WHAT I LEARNED FROM MY GRANDPA:
1. Kiss anyone who walks through the front door, just in case they're a grand kid.
2. Everyone can have the nickname "honey".
3. Reminisce often.
4. Always get a good night's sleep.
5. When you pray, pray from the heart. It's okay if you tear up.
6. Do the dishes after every meal.
7. Every family gathering is a photo opportunity.
8. People's names may come and go, but music will stay with you forever.
9. Be generous to a fault with those you love.
10. Say "I Love You" often.
11. If you can't remember whether you've said good bye or not, say it again. You'll get another free kiss out of the deal.
12. The meal's not done 'til you've licked the plate clean.
13. A daughter is never too old to call you "daddy".
14. Live and enjoy each moment as it happens. It really doesn't matter if you remember it later.
15. Love Jesus with a humble and gentle spirit.
16. Never miss a chance to dance at a grandkid's wedding. Eighty year olds can still boogie (they just get bursitis afterwards).
17. If you can't remember something, just smile and admit it. "I don't remember things as well as I used to".
18. Catch a wink of sleep wherever and whenever you can get it.
19. Always put your family above anything else.
20. If you've loved and lost, don't be afraid to love again. God just may fill the void with another "soul mate".
I have always been drawn to the tombs of famous people. When I was a student many years ago in Washington, D.C., I loved to visit the graves of the Kennedy brothers on that lovely hillside in front of the Custis-Lee Mansion. In Paris, I frequently toured Père Lachaise Cemetery, the resting place of, among many others, Chopin, Oscar Wilde, Abelard and Jim Morrison. When on retreat at St. Meinrad Monastery in southern Indiana, I would often take a morning to visit the nearby Lincoln Boyhood Memorial, on the grounds of which is the simple grave of Nancy Hanks, Abraham Lincoln’s mother, who died in 1818. I always found it deeply moving to see the resting place of this backwoods woman, who died uncelebrated at the age of 35, covered in pennies adorned with the image of her famous son.
Cemeteries are places to ponder, to muse, to give thanks, perhaps to smile ruefully. They are places of rest and finality. The last thing that one would realistically expect at a grave is novelty and surprise.
Then there is the tomb featured in the story of Easter. We are told in the Bible that three women, friends and followers of Jesus, came to the tomb of their Master early on the Sunday morning following his crucifixion in order to anoint his body. Undoubtedly they anticipated that, while performing this task, they would wistfully recall the things that their friend had said and done. Perhaps they would express their frustration at those who had brought him to this point, betraying, denying and running from him in his hour of need. Certainly, they expected to weep in their grief.
‘Jesus is Laid in the Tomb’ by contemporary American artist Laura James, 2002.
PHOTO: LAURA JAMES/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES
But when they arrived, they found to their surprise that the heavy stone had been rolled away from the entrance of the tomb. Had a grave robber been at work? Their astonishment only intensified when they spied inside the grave, not the body of Jesus, but a young man clothed in white, blithely announcing, “You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him.”
The mysterious messenger’s communication was, to put it bluntly, not that someone had broken into this tomb, rather that someone had broken out. In St. Mark’s version of the story—which is the earliest that we have—the reaction of the women is described as follows: “So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them.”
If the grave of a hero is customarily a place of serene contemplation, the tomb of Jesus is so disturbing that people run from it in fear.
If the grave of a hero is customarily a place of serene contemplation, this one is so disturbing that people run from it in fear—and thereupon hangs the tale of Easter. Especially today, it is imperative that Christians recover the sheer strangeness of the Resurrection of Jesus and stand athwart all attempts to domesticate it. There were a number of prominent theologians during the years that I was going through the seminary who watered down the Resurrection, arguing that it was a symbol for the conviction that the cause of Jesus goes on, or a metaphor for the fact that his followers, even after his horrific death, felt forgiven by their Lord.
But this is utterly incommensurate with the sheer excitement on display in the Resurrection narratives and in the preaching of the first Christians. Can one really imagine St. Paul tearing into Corinth and breathlessly proclaiming that the righteous cause of a crucified criminal endures? Can one credibly hold that the apostles of Jesus went careering around the Mediterranean and to their deaths with the message that they felt forgiven?
Another strategy of domestication, employed by thinkers from the 19th century to today, is to reduce the Resurrection of Jesus to a myth or an archetype. There are numberless stories of dying and rising gods in the mythologies of the world, and the narrative of Jesus’ death and resurrection can look like just one more iteration of the pattern. Like those of Dionysus, Osiris, Adonis and Persephone, the “resurrection” of Jesus is, on this reading, a symbolic evocation of the cycle of nature. In a Jungian psychological framework, the story of Jesus dying and coming back to life is an instance of the classic hero’s journey from order through chaos to greater order.
Novelist and theologian C.S. Lewis at Oxford, 1946.
PHOTO: HANS WILD/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES
The problem with these modes of explanation was well articulated by C.S. Lewis: Those who think that the New Testament is a myth just haven’t read many myths. Precisely because they have to do with timeless verities and the great natural and psychological constants, mythic narratives are situated “once upon a time,” or to bring things up to date, “a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.” No one wonders who was Pharaoh during Osiris’s time or during which era of Greek history Heracles performed his labors, for these tales are not historically specific.
But the Gospel writers are keen to tell us that Jesus’ birth, for instance, took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria and Augustus the Emperor of Rome—that is to say, at a definite moment of history and in reference to readily identifiable figures. The Nicene Creed, recited regularly by Catholics and Orthodox Christians as part of their Sunday worship, states that Jesus was “crucified under Pontius Pilate,” a Roman official whose image is stamped on coins that we can examine today.
Moreover, the Greek word used most often by St. Paul to characterize his message is euangelion, which carries the sense of “good news.” The myth of the dying and rising god and the story of the hero’s adventure might be intriguing and illuminating, but the one thing they are not is news. Paul wasn’t trading in abstractions or spiritual bromides; he wanted to take everyone he spoke to by the shoulders and tell them about something that had happened, something so stunning that it changed the world. And at the heart of his euangelion was anastasis, resurrection.In a speech recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, St. Peter tells his listeners about Jesus, a man from Nazareth, who did great things in Galilee and Judea, who was put to death and whom God raised from death. Then he adds, almost as an aside, that he and the other Apostles “ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead.” This is just not the way mythmakers talk.
Faith in the Resurrection does not delegitimize political power, but it relativizes it, placing it decidedly under the judgment of God.
Christians have been teasing out the implications of this good news for two millennia, but I will focus on just three themes. First, for believers, the Resurrection means that Jesus is Lord. The phrase Iesous Kyrios, Jesus the Lord, is found everywhere in Paul’s letters and was likely on his lips regularly as he preached. A watchword of that time and place was Kaiser Kyrios, Caesar the Lord, meaning that the emperor of Rome is the one to whom ultimate allegiance is due. St. Paul’s intentional play upon that title, implying that the true Lord is not Caesar but rather someone whom Caesar put to death and whom God raised from the dead, was meant to tweak the nose of the political powers.
It goes a long way to explaining, too, why Paul spent a good amount of time in Roman prisons and was eventually decapitated by Roman authorities. Faith in the Resurrection does not delegitimize political power, but it relativizes it, placing it decidedly under the judgment of God. The Gospel writers obviously enjoyed the delicious irony of the sign that Pontius Pilate placed over the cross, “Jesus of Nazareth King of the Jews.” Intended derisively, it effectively made Pilate, Caesar’s local representative, the first great evangelist.
A 5-year-old girl prepares for Easter at the Parish of the Epiphany Episcopal church in Winchester, Mass., 2015.
PHOTO: JOHN TLUMACKI/THE BOSTON GLOBE/GETTY IMAGES
A second key implication of the Easter event is that Jesus’ extraordinary claims about himself were ratified. Unlike any of the other great religious founders, Jesus consistently spoke and acted in the very person of God. Declaring a man’s sins forgiven, referring to himself as greater than the Temple, claiming lordship over the Sabbath and authority over the Torah, insisting that his followers love him more than their mothers and fathers, more than their very lives, Jesus assumed a divine prerogative. And it was precisely this apparently blasphemous pretension that led so many of his contemporaries to oppose him. After his awful death on an instrument of torture, even his closest followers became convinced that he must have been delusional and misguided.
But when his band of Apostles saw him alive again after his death, they came to believe that he is who he said he was. They found his outrageous claim ratified in the most surprising and convincing way possible. Their conviction is beautifully expressed in the confession of Thomas the erstwhile doubter who, upon seeing the risen Lord, fell to his knees and said simply, “My Lord and My God.”
A third insight that we can derive from the Resurrection is that God’s love is more powerful than anything that is in the world. On the cross, Jesus took on, as it were, all the sins of humanity. Violence, hatred, cruelty, institutional injustice, stupidity, scapegoating and resentment brought him to Calvary and, it seemed, overwhelmed him. Like a warrior, he confronted all those forces that stand athwart God’s purposes—what the theologian Karl Barth called “the nothingness,” what the author of Genesis referred to as the tohu-va-bohu, the primal chaos.For believers ever since, if the crucified and risen Jesus is divine, there is a moral imperative to make him unambiguously the center of our lives. But we also have the assurance that God has not given up on the human project, that God intends fully to save us, body and soul. One of the favorite phrases in the writings of the Fathers of the Church is Deus fit homo ut homo fieret Deus, which means, God became man that man might become God. No religion or philosophy has ever proclaimed a more radical humanism than that.
Jesus fought, not with the weapons of the world, not with an answering violence, but rather with a word of pardon.
But he fought, not with the weapons of the world, not with an answering violence, but rather with a word of pardon: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they are doing.” The Resurrection of Jesus from the dead showed that this spiritual resistance was not in vain.
When he appeared to his disciples, the New Testament tells us, the risen Lord typically did two things: He showed his wounds and he spoke the word Shalom, peace. On the one hand, Christians should not forget the depth of human depravity, the sin that contributed to the death of the Son of God. Whenever we are tempted to exculpate ourselves, we have only to look at the wounds of Christ and the temptation evanesces.
But on the other hand, we know that God’s love, his offer of Shalom, is greater than any possible sin of ours. Christians understood this precisely because human beings killed God, and God returned in forgiving love. In achingly beautiful poetry, St. Paul expressed this amazing grace: “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
In the Greco-Roman culture of the first century, the term euangelion was used to signal an imperial victory, the “good news” that Caesar had conquered. With characteristic panache, the first Christians twisted the term for their own purposes. In the Resurrection of Jesus, God has won the victory over sin, over corruption and injustice, over death itself. This is the Good News that issued forth from shock of the empty tomb on Easter morning, and that has echoed up and down the last 20 centuries
So a year ago, for my husband's 50th birthday, we all went to the Big Island of Hawaii. We stayed in Kona and had an absolute blast. Well, one Sunday, as we were walking by the Catholic church, we noticed a bunch of students on the sidewalk praying for the 40 days for Life campaign. We were so impressed with these students, and their calm but determined demeanor as they prayed in public on the street. My attention was drawn to them, and I heard one of the students say that they were with YWAM. I didn't know what that was. Later in the trip, we passed by a college campus, called "University of the Nations", and I was curious about what THAT was as well, and told my husband that I had a feeling the students we saw on the street praying were from this university. Turns out I was right, as a quick Google search showed. It's a Christian University that trains missionaries. We also drove by a "Kalani" street, and I took a picture of the road sign, and sent it to my friend Beth, whose son's name is Kalani. Kalani is of Hawaiian heritage. Long story short - I texted Beth repeatedly from Hawaii about this "University of the Nations", and YWAM, and how I felt like this would be such a great place for Kalani to come for college. Just seemed like such a natural fit.
A year later (tonight), Beth texted me to ask the name of the student group I texted about for her son all those months ago. When I told her YWAM from Kona, she sent me a "mind blown" emoji. Apparently, she never mentioned to Kalani about my texts last year. This past weekend, though, he met up with some Youth With a Mission students from Kona who came HERE to the Keweenaw. They met and talked, and Kalani tonight came to his mother and said that he feels God calling him very specifically to go to school in Kona! Hello. The very same place I felt he needed to be a year ago - even though I really don't know Kalani at all.
Sometimes, God isn't so subtle. Sometimes He uses peripheral people to confirm a message He's speaking into someone's heart. Sometimes, something random isn't random at all.
"The school of Christ is the school of love. In the last day, when the general examination takes place ... Love will be the whole syllabus." — St. Robert Bellarmine
Do not hold tightly to the things of this earth, but know your place in it!
If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too; If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies, Or being hated, don’t give way to hating, And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master; If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim; If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same; If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken, And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss, And lose, and start again at your beginnings And never breathe a word about your loss; If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew To serve your turn long after they are gone, And so hold on when there is nothing in you Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch, If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, If all men count with you, but none too much; If you can fill the unforgiving minute With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run, Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it, And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
"Love is a strong force — a great good in every way;
it alone can make our burdens light, and alone it bears in equal balance what is pleasing and displeasing.
It carries a burden and does not feel it;
it makes all that is bitter taste sweet. ...
Nothing is sweeter than love, nothing higher, nothing stronger, nothing larger, nothing more joyful, nothing fuller, nothing better in heaven or on earth;
for love is born of God and can find its rest only in God above all He has created.
Such lovers fly high, run swiftly and rejoice. Their souls are free; they give all for all and have all in all.
For they rest in One supreme Goodness above all things, from Whom all other good flows and proceeds.
They look not only at the gifts, but at the Giver, Who is above all gifts."
"There are ultimately only two possible adjustments to life; one is to suit our lives to principles; the other is to suit principles to our lives. If we do not live as we think, we soon begin to think as we live. The method of adjusting moral principles to the way men live is just a perversion of the order of things." Archbishop Fulton Sheen
“The first direct, human limitation of infant life in the history of Christianity took place in the village of Bethlehem through an infant-controller whose name was Herod. The prevention of infant life was simultaneously an attack upon Divinity in the person of God made man, Jesus Christ our Lord. No one strikes at birth who does not simultaneously strike at God, for birth is earth’s reflection of the Son’s eternal generation.” Archbishop Fulton Sheen (Three to Get Married)
Went back to Mayo last week for a 6 month (well, 7 month because of COVID) follow up. We're four years into this cancer gig... starting to think it's just going to be a part of my life from here on out. Rob went with me, and we made it a little mid-week getaway, which was nice. He did ALL the driving, and luckily the roads were good, even in mid-January. We did a little shopping, went out to dinner (restaurants are open in Minnesota! They aren't in Michigan - so we took advantage). Had an ultrasound, some blood work, and then met with Dr. Stan the Man.
Results: Status quo. Which means good. The one nodule they can visualize with ultrasound stayed essentially the same size and is poorly vascularized, which means that radioiodine in June of 2019 effectively stunted the growth - which is AWESOME. Tumor marker went from 1.9 to 2.2, but that's not much of a change. Basically, the stuff is there but behaving itself, and that is GOOD NEWS. I asked the doctor about the COVID vaccine. I know this is an mRNA vaccine that hijacks a cell's own "factory" to create the COVID spike protein for an immune response. What happens if the vaccine enters a cancer cell? There's no research on the effects of this vaccine on cancer patients, so I've held off, even though I could get it through the hospital. Was just hoping for a little more research and data to be determined before taking it, but Dr. Stan said "either the cancer cell will make the spike protein or it won't. There are no other things that it can do with the mRNA".... such as make the cancer go super active, which is what I was afraid of. So, I guess there's no good reason NOT to get the vaccine at this point, although I'm still a tad nervous about how new it all is. There is no research on long term effects for a vaccine that took 10 months to create. But... it should be good. This is all besides the point.
Dr. Stan also asked if I wanted a referral to an ENT to see about a procedure to "bulk up" my paralyzed vocal cord. "Well, " says I. "My single working vocal cord is super loud. I can yell at my kids just fine. I can swallow most things most of the time. The only thing I can't do very well anymore is jog."
"Do you want to jog?" asks he?
I thought about it for a hot second. "I'm almost 50 years old. No. I don't want to jog anymore. I can walk and ski and snowshoe and hike. That is fine. I don't need to jog anymore."
So that's that. He said if I ever did want to take up jogging again, to let him know and we'd do the procedure, but at the moment, I feel like I'm very functional and we should just leave well enough alone.
So good report, good little mid-winter getaway with my husband, and all is well in cancer land!
If we thought 2020 was bad... 2021 is starting to one-up it, and it's only been around for a week and a half. Tensions in the country are running uber-high, the pandemic proceeds as it will - even with a vaccine - and many businesses are struggling. Quite frankly, our country is a mess at the moment. An utter mess. Thankfully, though, school began again for the kids this past week, which means that I get to be back working face-to-face with kids, which is how I prefer it.
I asked one of the kids I see for therapy how his Christmas break was. He was full of tales of Legos and new watches, and being out on the frozen lake. It made me smile. The darkness hadn't encroached on his little world, and that made me happy. We were walking along the school hallway, he in his walker, coming up to maybe my upper thigh - me towering above him, bending down to try and here his quiet voice muffled behind his mask. And then he stopped, looked up at me, and said in his high-pitched way...
"Did you see the Star of Bethlehem right before Christmas? It hasn't showed up in like 800 years. But it came this year! I know it was cloudy so we couldn't see it so well, but it was still there. And it was God telling us that Jesus is still here with us, that He'll never leave us!"
It was so out of the blue, so unexpected, and so what I needed to hear, that I had to turn my head so he wouldn't see that I had started to cry. And then he went back to talk of Legos and school, and other mundane things, completely unaware of how he had just pierced my heart.
God talks through these little ones. He really does. And He hasn't left us alone, even in 2021....
“The gravest danger to American democracy is not from the outside; it is from the inside – the hearts of citizens in whom the light of faith has gone out. Keep God as the origin of authority and you keep the ethical character of authority; reject Him and the authority becomes power subject to no law except its own.” Archbishop Fulton Sheen
Amid the bombardment of images of what took place at the U.S. Capitol Wednesday, too little time has been spent thinking about why it happened. Anyone who is trying to understand the significance of what’s going on right now ought to watch video of the last moments of Ashli Babbit, the woman who was shot and killed in the chaos.
Footage, which can easily be found online, shows Babbit standing in a hallway right off the House floor with an American flag tied around her neck. The scene around her is chaotic. People are bumping into each other, yelling, trying to get through the door into the chamber. Suddenly, with no warning, there is gunfire. You hear a shot and Babbit falls. People in the hallway scream. The camera closes in on her face. Babbit looks stunned. She’s staring straight ahead. You can see that she knows she’s about to die, which she did.
So what can we learn from this? It’s not enough to call it a tragedy. Imagine for a second learning that was your daughter. The last time you spoke to her, she was heading to Washington for a political rally. Now, she’s dead. You’ll never talk to her again. That’s what we’re watching, and we may be watching a lot more of it in the coming days.
Political violence begets political violence. That is an iron law. We have to be against that, no matter who commits the violence or under what pretext, no matter how many self-interested demagogues assure us the violence is justified or necessary. We have a duty to oppose all of this, not simply because political violence kills other people’s children, but because in the end it doesn’t work.
No good person will live a happier life because that woman was killed in the hallway of the Capitol today. So our only option, as a practical matter, is to fix what is causing this in the first place.
You may have nothing in common with the people on the other side of the country (increasingly, you probably don’t), but you’re stuck with them. The idea that groups of Americans will somehow break off into separate peaceful nations of like-minded citizens, is a fantasy. The two hemispheres of this country are inseparably intertwined, like conjoined twins. Neither can leave without killing the other. As horrifying as this moment is, we have no option but to make it better, to gut it out.
The second thing to consider, and it’s related to the first, is why Ashli Babbit went to the rally in the first place. She bore no resemblance to the angry children we have seen wrecking our cities in recent months — pasty, entitled nihilists dressed in black, setting fires and spray painting slogans on statues. She looked pretty much like everyone else.
So why was she there? We ought to think about that. If you want to fix it, you have to think about that.
The only reason this country is rich and successful is because for hundreds of years, we have enjoyed a stable political system. The only reason that system is stable is because it’s a democracy, responsive to voters.
Democracy is a pressure relief valve. As long as people sincerely believe they can change things by voting, they stay calm. They don’t burst into the House chamber. They talk and they organize and they vote. But the opposite is also true if people begin to believe that their democracy is fraudulent, that voting is a charade, that the system is rigged and it’s run in secret by a small group of powerful, dishonest people who are acting in their own interests. Then, God knows what could happen.
Actually, we do know what could happen, because it’s happening right now. It’s happened in countless other countries over countless centuries. And the cycle is always the same because human nature never changes.
“Listen to us!” scream the population.
“Shut up and do what you’re told,” say their leaders.
In the face of dissent, the first instinct of illegitimate leadership is to crack down on the population, but crackdowns never make it better. They always make the country more volatile and more dangerous. The people in charge rarely understand that. They don’t want to, they don’t care to learn or listen because all of this conversation is a referendum on them and their leadership. So they clamp down harder.
This is the Romanov program, and it ends badly every single time. But that doesn’t mean they won’t try it again. Of course they will, because it’s their nature. It’s how we got here in the first place.
Millions of Americans sincerely believe the last election was fake. You can dismiss them as crazy. You can call them conspiracy theorists. You can kick them off Twitter. But that won’t change their minds. Rather than trying to change their minds, to convince them and reassure them that the system is real, that democracy works — which you would do if you cared about the country or the people who live here — our new leaders will try to silence them.
What happened Wednesday will be used by the people taking power to justify stripping you of the rights you were born with as an American: Your right to speak without being censored, your right to assemble, to not be spied upon, to make a living, and to defend your family.
These are the most basic and ancient freedoms that we have there. They’re why we live here in the first place. They’re why we’re proud to be Americans. They’re what make us different, and they’re all now in peril.
When thousands of your countrymen storm the Capitol building, you don’t have to like it. We don’t. You can be horrified by the violence, and we are.
But if you don’t bother to pause and learn a single thing from your citizens storming your Capitol building, then you’re a fool, you lack wisdom and self-awareness, and you have no place running a country. We got to this sad, chaotic day for a reason.
