Little Things As Other-Worldly Moments
Enough little things can add up to big things. In the wake of the Charlie Kirk assassination, anything I might say has already been said. I grieve for what’s become of our nation, and I hope for what might be. That said, these days I am left to see life and death from a minute point of view. Since Kim came home from the hospital in late July and recovered from the sepsis and other things that were taking her down, she has been stable and somewhat functional through August and early September, though her frailty, weakness, and pain are increasing. We…
Streams of Visitors
Have you ever watched streams of people come to visit a sick person? Even prior to the day that Kim went to the emergency room and we found she had almost died of sepsis and half a dozen other illnesses and complications—never mind the stage 4 widely metastasized pancreatic cancer—people visited her from nearby and from various places across the country. Nurses on the floor often asked, “Who are you? You have an endless stream of visitors.” Since she came home on hospice and has amazingly stabilized, the visitors have continued. I have been witnessing the powerful return on investment of a lifetime of…
In God’s Hands, Live or Die
Cancer was always been something other people had. Until it happened to us. Kim has pancreatic cancer, stage 4, widely metastasized. We only discovered it after the fact.After prolonged and stressful struggles with the insurance middle-man company, she started chemotherapy. But that is having complications too. At every test, assessment, or next step everything is worse than we thought. Yet from the very beginning God has spoken to us and sent people to show us that we are in his hands. Though pancreatic cancer has a 1 percent survival rate, and that’s with those who catch it early, we still do due diligence…
Same Person, Different Results
My parent’s first missionary term was in a remarkably inaccessible place. The rough dirt road passed through three rivers, and the largest one still needs a four-wheel drive to cross—amid rocks and boulders no one has bothered to clear in seventy years. And we were told to not even think about crossing it after a rain. No wonder many people moved away from this remote place after a tarmac road was built a day’s walk away. They had a church out there with two humongous missionary houses. Hard to conceive. My mother was only twenty-five and my father, thirty-one. There he…
A Pilgrimage to My Past and to Life
In 1963 my father died an untimely death and was buried in an obscure graveyard in an obscure rural area of what most Westerners consider an obscure country, Tanzania. To go that area, called Ihanja, you must go to what seems the middle of nowhere, then keep going. Yet to the many people who live there, it is home, the center of their world. And my father is legendary. Finally, after sixty-two years, I made a pilgrimage back to visit his grave. I also got to sleep in my childhood bedroom of the home where we lived; I preached in…
