Consumed by doubts

I sometimes forget that I have the blog set up to post on Facebook, and so folks that aren't typical visitors to the blog might see a post and not realize that it's part of a longer story. If you're reading this via Facebook, this is the 5th in a series of posts that tell a story. If you are so inclined, you can read the rest either by going to my Facebook profile, or directly on my blog at http://andsoiask.blogspot.com/.

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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.