The Thanksgiving Report - Part 1

So, the story of my Thanksgiving starts last Monday, when I woke up with something of a "tickle" in my throat. That's precisely how you do NOT want to start a short, holiday week, but it is the hand I was dealt. As I got up and began to get ready for my day, it was confirmed, I definitely had a raw throat that was the result of sinus drainage. I do have allergies, but this seemed like pretty much the wrong time of year for those, so I figured I was probably on the verge of a cold.

This was confirmed when I woke up Tuesday morning, so I cancelled a planned early morning 2 mile run. However, I really didn't feel THAT bad. I felt worse when I got to work, and took some medicine in the morning. By the afternoon, everything had dropped down out of my head into my nose, and I was sounding terrible, but actually feeling a bit better. I was encouraged by this - as a general rule, the worse I sound the better I feel when I'm dealing with a cold. I don't know if that's a universal rule, but it pretty much works for me. I didn't have a fever, and so in the evening I was feeling well enough to attend my first Thanksgiving dinner of the week - with the young adults at my church. I have to say, very high quality meal, although the dessert portion of the event did not measure up to the "real" Thanksiving dinner on Thursay (that's not, however, an insult to the Tuesday night dessert, just wait) As expected, I was feeling a little bit worse off after being out and socializing, but still not too bad when I got home. I didn't take any cold medicine to go to bed.

That was my first in a series of mistakes. I had a miserable first part of the night until I gave in and drank some NyQuill at about 1:30 AM. Morning, of course, came too soon, and I was feeling worse than I had felt the night before. After batting around what I wanted to do in my head, I called in sick to work. I was meeting with my pastor in the morning, so I was going to be late anyhow, and thought I'd probably need to leave early since I was planning on heading home that night and hadn't done any packing yet, so that made the decision a little easier.

After meeting with my pastor (he came to me), I began the remaining series of mistakes - all of which, like the first one, fell into the category of me just not taking my illness seriously enough. I had been convinced since Tuesday afternoon that I was on the downside, and perhaps I would have been - had I taken better care of myself. When I'm seriously fighting something, I'm almost obsessive about making sure I take in plenty of fluids, and I had been so all day on Tuesday. Wednesday, however, was a different story, and after some OJ with breakfast, I really didn't drink anything for the rest of the morning and early afternoon.

Nor did I do a I particularly good job of resting. I tried to get some packing done as I felt like it, and spent a lot of time watching TV in the basement, with a space heater running right at me to make up for the sometimes drafty nature of that room. Not the best move when sick, apparently. Whatever the combination of factors that led me to it, by early afternoon, as I thought I would make the push to pack the car and drive home, I was pretty much laid out, with a fever now pushing 101. I called my Mom and told her I would likely not be home yet that evening. After that, I did what I should have done about 6 hours earlier - drank down a couple bottles of water, took a shot of NyQuill, and climbed into bed for a long nap.

I awoke several hours later, feeling much better, though still sick, and feeling really stupid for having not taken care of myself better the previous night and earlier that day. I was also much more optimistic than I had been earlier about whether I would be able to make the trip home the next morning. At that point, if I had had to, I probably could have made the drive that night, and I figured given a good night's sleep, I was only likely to feel better first thing in the morning, even if that would fade.

And I was right, I did feel even better in the morning, though I was hacking and coughing and sounded even worse, which falls right in line with the principle I laid out earlier. I loaded up the car and Chaser and I made the drive to the folks.

When all that's left is to believe

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If you've been a regular visitor to my blog, you might know of my recent commitment to fitness. One of the results of that was a long period of time when I would take my dog for long (30-45 minute walks on most evenings). That pattern has slowed in recent weeks, due to a combination of diminished evening light, and the accompanying diminished warmth, but while that was going on, I often found myself with lots of time to my thoughts, and obviously, while I was walking through everything I described, my thoughts often turned to Lynn while I was on these walks.

One day, and I don't exactly remember when in all of this it was, but it's not really important, as I was thinking about Lynn and processing everything again, the hook of a song came into my head. It was a song that I know I hadn't heard in at least 7 or 8 years, quite likely closer to 10. And I'd be willing to bet that most of you have never heard the song, because as best as I can tell it never made its way onto the radio. It was an album cut off a CD by a guy named Clay Crosse. I'm pretty sure the only reason I ever heard it was because I own the CD. The chorus of the song goes like so:

When all that's left is to believe
I give my doubts and fears to You
And fall down on my knees
I may not have the answers now
But You give me what I need
So Father I will cling to You
When all that's left is to believe

There I was again, fighting back tears. There may have been times in my life when a song or lyric spoke as directly to my heart as this one did in this moment, but there certainly haven't been any where one spoke more directly to me.

When you boil everything I've shared over the last number of posts down - when you strip away all the nuances and complexities of circumstance, when you look through everything that has or hasn't happened since September 10, 2007, the simple fact of the matter is that I've been left with a choice. It's the choice Abraham faced when God promised him a son, and then later faced when God asked him to sacrifice that very son; the choice that Shadrach, Meshach, and Abendego faced before the fiery furnace; the choice that Daniel faced before the lion's den; the choice that Stephen faced before the angry mob; the choice we read about time and time again Hebrews 11 - the very same choice we all face in any crisis of faith - the choice to believe, or not to believe.

Over the last two years, anything else that myself, or anyone who cares about Lynn, could cling to for hope has been stripped away, and all that is left is our Father - His Word, His promises. Do I believe that God spoke to me 2 years ago? Do I believe (or better yet, am I "fully persuded") that He is able to do what He promised? The answer to both those questions for me is "Yes." And so I cling to my Father, because there's nothing else left to do.

You know, the doctor's visit where Lynn was given 3 to 6 months to live was in mid-August. If you do the math, you'll quickly understand that we are moving into the early part of that range. When I was with him this past Saturday, he told me how fragile he felt - that one big coughing or gagging spell could do him in, that this was really coming into the final few weeks. That paints a very bleak picture. His response to that was "My healing is right around the corner." And you know what, sitting here today, I can tell you that I believe that too.

Are we fools for such belief? To be honest, I've stopped caring about the answer to that question. The Scripture is full of people who looked awfully foolish for believing God - right up until the point where He stepped in and fulfilled his promise. I acknowledge my imperfect ability to comprehend God, my bias in the situation, and the accompanying fact that I could have read this all wrong, but that's not what I believe, and I choose to cling to what I do believe until circumstances compel me to do otherwise. That time has not yet come.

Not that any of this makes it easy. My eyes were wet yet again as I pulled away from Lynn's house on Saturday - they've been wet at various times as I've been writing over the last many days, and they heading that direction right now. The physical reality hasn't changed, and the picture I can see with my eyes gets worse day by day. But I stand in the spirit of those 3 Hebrew captives I mentioned earlier as they were before the fiery furnace in saying that I know the God I serve is able to deliver Lynn from this disease, and I believe that He will, and yet whether he does or doesn't, He is still God, and there is no one else worthy of my worship.

So that's it, the full story, and perhaps now you understand why I'm sharing it now, even as things look their bleakest. This is where I've been, and I'm driving this stake in the ground to say that, come what may, this is what I believe, and I'm not ashamed of it, at least not anymore.

A new perspective

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This summer was a big one for me in terms of my walk with God. Regular readers of this blog (all 3 of you) might remember my tale of my attempted trek up Half Dome in Yosemite at the end of June. That trip sparked a period in my life where a lot of spiritual matters across a variety of fronts - although I think it was all pretty well connected, and at some point maybe I'll attempt to piece it all together in something coherent. Today is not that day, however, and so I stick to the front I've been dealing with - my friend Lynn's condition.

As stated, I was struggling. To be quite honest, I was probably back to square one, in a place where I had lost hope and was resigning myself to what I had become convinced was the inevitable. There was only one problem with that - the whole thing about believing God had spoken to me telling me something different. So I re-evaulated those events of 2 years ago over and over again. At first, I believed I was just going back over things to re-affirm my belief in them, but later on it became clear that I was really trying to find a way to convince myself it hadn't happened, or that it hadn't meant what I thought it meant. I figured if I could do that, I could let all of this go and deal with what was ahead.

There was only one problem - I couldn't do it. No matter how many ways I looked at that night of September 10th, 2007, and the weeks that had followed, I couldn't deny what had happened. I'm not sure I can describe what it's like to be in that place - having somehow managed to lose hope that something was going to happen, while being firmly convinced that God had, in fact, told me that it WAS going to happen. Yeah, seriously, figure that one out. Somehow, that's where I was at.


In order to get there, I'm pretty sure you have to have trust issues with God, and the fact that I did was something else I was learning throughout the summer. I was basically feeling like God had told me something while fully intending to do something different. Not that I would have admitted that to anyone else (or even myself) at the time, but its where I was at. Is it any wonder I was feeling like I was hitting a wall in my relationship with God at about this time?


Anyhow, September rolled around, and it had been a couple months since I'd last seen Lynn. In the interim, I'd heard via their newsletter that the doctors believed that he had about 3-6 months to live based on the way his breathing ability was being diminished. Let's just say that didn't help me anyhow. Lynn sent me a personal e-mail in mid-September, and I realized again just how long it had been since I had seen him, so despite my discomfort, we began discussing getting together, and I wound up making plans to see him on the first Saturday in October.


A few days before this visit, my Dad was up here for a visit, and in the course of our conversations, I confessed to him that I was having a hard time finding peace with Lynn's situation, and asked for prayer. As we talked about this, I articulated a lot of what I just shared for the first time. At one point, Dad asked me point blank "Are you mad at God?"


At the time, I said I didn't know, but the next two mornings, I basically spent my morning times with God yelling at him about this. "How could You let this go on so long?" "Where have You been in all of this?" "Why did You tell me You were going to heal him if You weren't?" "Why didn't You just leave me out of all this - it would have been easier." And then, though I don't know that I knew it at the time, I got down to the heart of the matter: "God, I feel like I've been made a fool for believing this for so long." All of it things that I had been feeling for so long, but hadn't been willing to allow myself to say, even to myself, let alone God. Remember that thing I said previously about how bad it is to keep feelings bottled up just because you don't think God would like them? Second time I dealt with that on this journey in a major way.

As I vented on and on, I didn't sense God speaking to me, in terms of giving me some great answer to my specific questions. And to be honest, I didn't expect Him to. I'm only now fully reading through Job for the first, but I've known for a long time how that story ends, and that I was asking questions of God to which I wasn't really entitled an answer. What I did sense was an acceptance, kind of an "Okay, Scott, now that you're being honest with me, we can deal with this" As I took off my mask, the lines of communication were open again.

So the next day, Dad and I made our visit to Lynn. I said before how Lynn makes it difficult to be discouraged when you are with him, because his own faith remains so steadfast, and this particular visit was probably the best personal experience I have had to confirm that. There he was, confined to his recliner, using the movements of his head to type out phrases on his computer, and yet as convinced as that day over 2 years ago that healing was coming. He shared with us a story about how God had spoken to him on the very day that he had gotten the report from the doctor that he had 3-6 months to live. My own struggles with what was going on weren't gone, but here was the other side of the story, the side that was so easy for me to forget - and that I desperately needed to hear. I was seeing God's hand in this again, in a way that had been obscurred for so long. It was so evident that God was with Lynn in the midst of all this, even if at the moment, it didn't look the way I wanted it to.

There was something else that happened that day that was pivotal in what God was doing in my heart, beyond my specific response to Lynn's illness. I saw in Lynn what Paul spoke of Abraham in Romans 4 - beliveing in hope against all hope, facing the fact that his body was as good as dead, without weakening in his faith, without wavering through unbelief regarding the promise of God, being strengthened in his faith and giving glory to God, being fully persuaded that God had the power to do what He has promised. I saw Lynn, even with his body on verge of complete failure, as someone who was more alive than I, in my near perfect health, had ever been. It was humbling, to say the least, and it made me think on all of this in a new way.

In the days that followed, I found myself saying to God: "Now, this isn't a request, but I believe if I had to through what Lynn has to get to where he is with You, it would be worth it. And so if walking through this alongside Lynn in the way You've chosen me to do is part of what you need to do to make me into the person You designed me to be, and to bring me into a a deeper relationship with You, then I'm okay with that too." It's probably the most realistic picture I've ever had of what's really being said in Romans 8:28.

But make no mistake, none of this means that I've given up on Lynn's healing. And I think I've got one last post in me to talk about that.

Consumed by doubts

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So, over two years have passed since the first part of this story took place. I'm not going to spend a lot of time walking through the whole journey of those two years, but I will give you some of the highlights.

As previously mentioned, Lynn and family had been scheduled to head back to Thailand on September 12th, 2007, 2 days after our team meeting. That was obviously postponed, and over the next few weeks/months, Lynn underwent more thorough testing that confirmed the initial belief of the doctors that he had ALS. There actually isn't (or at least wasn't then) a test that conclusively diagnoses ALS, basically they test for everything else that could cause the symptoms in question, and if they don't find anything, ALS is diagnosed.

Not too long after getting the diagnosis, Lynn began making plans to return to Thailand. At the time, his symptoms were essentially isolated to his face, weakening the muscles of his jaw, mouth, etc and making his speech somewhat slurred. The family returned to Thailand in February of 2008, hopefully that Lynn's healing would come in short order. Unfortunately, that wasn't the case. His condition continued to deteriorate, and at the end of September (right about the time the Phillies were finishing up another exciting regular season finish) word came back that they would be returning to the States in early November.

All the while, I was still processing and dealing with this as best I could, and it wasn't easy. First of all, I didn't really know what to do with the kind of promise I believed that God had made. I mean, seriously, what would you do with it? It was exciting and hopeful, but yet healing hadn't come right away. If you are regulars to my blog, you might remember that I once wrote about going a number of months (until I went back to Thailand with a team from McBIC in June of '08) before I would allow myself to grieve for what my friend was suffering through. I had convinced myself that expressing that pain would be showing a lack of faith in what God had promised. Can I tell you a lesson that I've had to learn a few different times through the years, and in fact, multiple times as I've witnessed what's happened with Lynn? Keeping thoughts, feelings, etc bottled up because you don't think they are "right" in God's eyes is about the worst thing you can ever do. Just because I didn't express the feelings didn't make them go away, and I certainly wasn't successfully hiding them from God - I was just keeping them inside, letting them tear me up without dealing with them. The fact that I was "trying" to keep them from God certainly didn't help that relationship. And in this case, as God later showed me when I allowed Him to, there was nothing wrong with the feelings in the first place. It hurt to see what my friend was suffering through, whether I believed healing was ultimately coming or not.

The real problem I was having, however, as this moved along, was my own ability to trust God. You see, it was really easy to believe that God could heal Lynn when the only thing that appeared wrong with him was some slurred speech. But when I went to join the welcoming party at the Harrisburg airport at their November return, when I saw Lynn being wheeled in on a wheelchair, looking much lighter and more frail, it suddenly became a different matter altogether in my head, and in my heart. When I realized I could hardly understand him at all anymore, the mountain seemed just that much higher. When I went to a prayer gathering for him a few nights after he came back, and saw that he had to be helped to walk back to the room, an ugly word started to play in my head, and in my heart: "Why?"

I thought I was at peace with God on the "why" question, that we had come to terms and I had seen His hand at work in this process when I was in Thailand. It "made sense" to me, but that was no longer the case. It didn't make any sense to me at all why, if God really was going to bring healing, that He continued to wait and allow my friend to suffer, to allow his friends and family to suffer watching him. I mean, hadn't Lynn been through enough? Hadn't he learned enough? Hadn't those of us around him learned enough? What possible reason could God have for continuing to delay? And as the "why" continued to go unanswered, the doubts played at my heart, subtley at first, but continued to build.

There was an all-night prayer time in March that we all believed God had asked for, that afterwards Lynn and others believed there had been a break, and that healing was completed, it was just a matter of seeing it come to pass. But after some immediate initial hopeful signs, things just continued to get worse. There was time at a healing service in March, where we pleaded and pleaded with God, and nothing. I remember checking myself at that point, wondering if continuing to implore God to do NOW what He had already said was done was demonstrating a lack of faith, but not having the first clue about what else to do.

At this point, it got really difficult for me to see Lynn, so I didn't. And it was pretty easy to avoid seeing him without really "trying" to avoid it. He was an hour away, the only times I really had a good opportunity to see him were at these Friday night prayer gatherings, which suddenly I could always find a good reason not to go to.

And so, it was over 3 months until the next time I saw him, at an open house when the family moved in July. I hadn't heard anything positive about his condition, and so I knew that aside from that, all that time was only going to mean he was in much worse shape. I had heard through the grapevine that he was in a wheelchair fulltime now. As I spent time with God that morning, knowing (and yet not really knowing) what I was getting ready for, I remember God asking me the question of the moment: "Do you still trust me on this? Do you trust that I have not been silent, or absent in this, and that what you see as a delay has all been part of my perfect plan?" My honest answer: "I don't think I do, but I want to."

When I got the open house, his condition was as bad as I had imagined, perhaps worse. He was in a motorized wheel chair, and he had to control it by pushing his nose against a joystick, as his hands just didn't have the function. He could barely speak at all - he had a computer that he could type on by using the motion of a dot on his glasses like a mouse, but that wasn't working that day, so communication was incredibly difficult. The most difficult thing for me to watch was when he wanted to hold his nearly year old daughter and we had to move his arms away, set her down in his lap, and then wrap his arms around her, because he couldn't do any of that on his own.

Now, I will say (and I'll elaborate on this more later) that even in the midst of all this, I was still okay when I was with Lynn. His spirit and faith throughout this have been remarkable, and he makes it really difficult to be discouraged when you are spending time with him. (Of course, it also sometimes served to make me feel guilty for my own doubts, but that was my problem, not his.) However, once I left that afternoon to begin the drive home, the physical reality of what I had witnessed began to overwhelm me, and I was fighting off tears the drive home, at times less successfully than others. This was a Sunday, so I had to go to CrossWalk in the evening. As we gathered for prayer with the leaders before the service, I felt the tears coming again and knew that I was going to lose the battle to fight them off at some point, so after the prayer I pulled my pastor aside and we went into a different room. When he asked me what was up, it was pretty much all I could do to get out "I saw Lynn Myers today after not seeing him for 3 months" before it all came loose and I wept bitterly on his shoulder. I just couldn't deal with this anymore, and whatever "brave" face I had had left to put on was gone.

And so, I went back into my pattern of finding "good" reasons not to make the trip down, and it was almost another 3 months before I saw him again. Fortunately for me, God had some work to do in my heart before that time came.

Hope restored

So, I got distracted for a few days, had my momentum broken, and it's taken me over a week to get back to this story. Anyone surprised by this? If you are, you haven't really been paying attention recently...

Anyhow, if you're a Phillies fan, a baseball fan, or probably even a sports fan in general, you generally know how this part of the story ends. The story of how the baseball season ended in Philadelphia in 2007 is not exactly a secret, but here's how I walked through it.

In the immediate aftermath of that Monday night, as I was still going over in mind if what I thought had happened had REALLY happened, the Phillies proceeded to lose their next two games in impressive fashion, to the tune of being outscored 20-2. Let's just say that didn't really help my skepticism. At the end of play on September 12th, they were 7 games behind the Mets division lead with 17 games to play, which made that avenue to the playoffs seem pretty much done with. They were much closer in the wild card, but there were several teams in the mix, and let's just say that the Phillies weren't exactly inspiring confidence. So, the thought that it had been God speaking to me in the car a couple nights prior moved further into the back of my brain.

But baseball is a funny game, and things can change pretty quickly. They came back and won their next 6 games, including a 3 game sweep of the Mets, and suddenly the odds seemed more manageable, while still pretty long. Even as the doubter in me kept telling me that this whole thing was nuts, and that it probably wasn't going to come true anyhow, I remember clinging to it, hoping that it really was true. As a classic example, the 5th game in this 6th game win streak was against the Cardinals, and the Phillies came as close as you can to blowing an 11-0 lead, holding on to win 13-11. I remember being upstairs in my bedroom, following the game on my computer, and praying. It was as close as I'll ever actually come to praying for a particular outcome of a sports event, but that wasn't what I was doing. I wanted so badly for what I thought I had heard from God to be the truth.

As stated, they pulled out that game, and then the following, but a 3-3 stretch in the next games left them 2 out in the division and 1 out in the wild card with 5 games to play. Very possible, but they were going to need to play very well. Getting the division seemed out of the question, because the Mets were playing 2 very bad teams in their last 5 games - if they just went 3-2, the best the Phillies could do was tie them. But crazily enough, the Phillies won their next 2, and the Mets lost two games to the woeful Nationals, and when the Nationals came to Philly for the last 3 games of the season, the Phillies and Mets were tied for first place, the first day all year that the Phillies had been in first place.

Oddly enough, I had tickets to the first game of that final series, the last Friday game of the regular season. I'd had them for months - I had gotten tickets to 6 games in a package at the beginning of the season, one game each month, and had chosen this particular game hoping to catch a game in the pennant race, and man, had I gotten it right.

From the pure perspective of a fan, this was easily the best experience I've ever had a pro sporting event. The house was packed, the fans were absolutely electric, and absolutely everything went right for the Phillies that night. Cole Hamels was masterful, throwing 8 shutout innings with 13 strikeouts as the Phillies dominated the game 6-0. As an added bonus, the Marlins had jumped ahead of the Mets early, and we were tracking that game on the out of town scoreboard all night as well. It ended after the Phillies game, and so I was sitting in my car with the postgame show on the radio, and the announcement of the final score led to a massive wave of honking car horns, rally towels being waved out windows, etc. For the record, the car horn thing wasn't the best situation when you already had people trying to navigate out of a crowded parking lot and some horn honking going on with that, but to the best of my knowledge, there were no accidents.

From the perspective of this journey I was on, this was the night that I finally fully embraced what I believed that God had said to me 18 days earlier. As I took everything in, even as the Phillies fan in me was going over all the things that could go wrong over the next 2 days, I found myself overwhelmed with the sense that I knew this was going to happen, and the trip home down the Turnpike was almost its own worship service.

The following day, my folks came up to my house to watch the game with me, hoping for the possibility of seeing the Phillies clinch the division. Unfortunately, that possibility had already gone out the window before the Phillies even took the field, since the Mets had won their game (in grand fashion, in fact, by the score of 13-0). They still had a chance, however, to ensure no worse than a tie for the division, which would force a 1 game playoff against the Mets. In true Phillie fashion (it can never be simple or easy), they played their worst game in the recent stretch, lost to the Nationals, and feel back into a first place tie. As frustrated as I was with the result of that game, and as much as the Phillies fan in me was screaming "here we go again", I remember saying several times to my folks: "They're going to do it." It wasn't bravado, it wasn't me trying to talk myself into it, it was just a very flat statement of faith at that point. Admittedly, there was probably less confidence assigned to it than there might have been 18 hours before, but I believed it, nonetheless. I was resigned to the strong possibility that it would require a 1 game playoff, but I believed it would happen.

The next day, I watched as the Mets, who started their game a bit earlier in the Phillies, gave up 7 first inning runs to the same lowly Marlins team they had throttled the day before. (Like I said before, baseball is funny) Realizing that that would likely mean the Phillies could close out the deal today, I hung on every pitch in their game. They jumped out to an early lead, and the final outcome was never in doubt. The Mets game went final during the last inning, and as the Phillies recorded the final out and the celebration began, I was completely overcome with emotion. Now, understand, I'm a bigtime sports fan, and I've been known to have emotional reactions to this sort of thing before - but this was different. This was not simply the joy of watching my favorite baseball team end a 13 year playoff drought. I was overcome with the fulfillment of what I believed God had spoken to me a few weeks earlier, and what I believed that meant about my friend. The Phillies had come back from 7 games down with 17 games to play, the biggest September comeback in MLB history - a baseball "miracle" as it were.

Now, as I finish off this part of the story, let me make one thing clear - I don't believe, and never have, that God was out there manipulating baseball games for my benefit, or that he had some sort of direct hand in the Phillies winning the division back in 2007. I do, however, believe that God sees these things coming - and that he had used this particular event to speak to me right where I was at, and in an arena where he was sure to have my attention. Needless to say, the hopelessness I had felt at that September 10th meeting was now a distant memory.

I wish I could say that the reason I'm sharing this now, just over 2 years later, is because Lynn has been healed. Sadly, that is not yet the case. But it's not over yet either, and so I'll get into "the rest of the story" as I continue on.