Mountain roads

Did any of you go see that movie Inside Out? My daughter dragged me to it, but I’m glad I saw it. The images of those palaces crashing down into the abyss as the girl’s world was rocked struck me. I know what that feels like, having your neat plans and cheery expectations…dismantled.  You know, it’s images you need when all the facts are in, but you are still wrestling with your emotions, because words don’t say enough. It’s why we need music and art and literature—all those symbols and metaphors to picture pain and joy, sometimes together.

It’s like those alarming rides in the back of a truck to the mountain Mixtec village where we lived in Guerrero. Up. Down. Around and around. Shaken, banged, jolted. But surrounded by beauty.

Similarly, I feel a mix of emotions. I now have stuffed on my calendar every medical and traveling event that is planned for the next few months. Don't know how much writing will get done. Sunday, Robert and I head to Oaxaca City, and from the airport, we drive to an Indian market town where we will spend the week training new Mexican missionaries. This is a highlight of my year. Because of our involvement with this program, there are now trained Mexican missionaries living in Guerrero, reaching out to Mixtecs. One of these missionaries is on our team now and expecting! J

A few days after coming back to Canada, I will have surgery on my right hand. L A few days later, Robert leaves for a week in Guadalajara where he will be training more missionary candidates. J L So Janey will be looking after me until my hand works again. Then I have my final chemo (Herceptin) treatment, and I get to ring the gong J (please come join me if you are free noon, April 15^th)

The next day we drive to North Carolina to visit supporting churches and my friend Caroline, a missionary going through the same thing I am. We’ll be comparing war stories and scars. J But I will miss the women’s retreat here. L

The week we come home, we immediately repack our bags, and finally take that 25^th anniversary trip cancelled by chemo last year. Ireland! Yay! And thanks to the anonymous friends that helped make it possible! On the way home, we will be seeing three good friends in England we knew in Honduras before we got married (one was in my wedding). Yay! J

Then, the week we get home, I have surgery on the left hand. L And wait for the stitches to come out after a flurry of doctor’s follow up visits. And then we leave for Mexico. J And leave Manal and Rashad and Bayan and Hammudi and all my friends and family here, L especially my sisters, who have made this year good. J

What a ride! What does God intend to do with this mountainous road of emotions, all those twists and unexpected turns, the ups and downs, and around and arounds of shifted feelings? All of the life he gives us is purposeful, profitable, preparatory. What does he intend, after I’m finished up here, with all this?

Come find out with me.

Where else would we go?

Today I was stacking piles of books that need rides to Mexico with us next week. The piles are high, and still the bookshelf is full. On top I laid three books I got for Christmas, including one called Bad Arguments. It’s an illustrated book that explains logical fallacies, and I plan to show the cartoon examples to my students next year when we are evaluating arguments. As I flipped through the book, of course, the fallacies that caught my attention were the ones I’ve run into most recently. One of them, called the Slippery Slope, goes like this: “If you let Muslim refugees into your country, next thing you know, they’ll all radicalize and shoot and rape your kids.” They will not all radicalize and shoot and rape your kids.

Another similar fallacy that caught my eye was the Appeal to Fear. This one I heard in this form: “If you don’t teach your kids a particular interpretation of a certain passage of the Bible, and if you don’t answer all their questions on this topic correctly and immediately, then they will walk away from the church.” They will not walk away from the church simply because you didn’t answer some of their questions about a passage of the Bible. In fact, my guess is that the facts point in quite another direction: that it’s this kind of dogmatism (definition: the tendency to lay down principles as incontrovertibly true, without consideration of evidence or the opinions of others) that will turn kids away from the church. In this day and age, I bet what they want to hear from us is that we might not know everything after all; we might have doubts, too. When will we learn this?

The harshest fallacy thrown at me recently was the False Dilemma. This is when you are falsely presented with only two possible positions on an issue. If you reject one position, you are assumed to hold the other. It’s also called Either/Or and, also, Unwarranted Assumption. This is the form that it took at first: “You have a gospel with no teeth because you don’t share my interpretation of Genesis 1 (the painful part of this accusation was that it was shelled out by a friend before I’d even said anything. It was based on hear-say.) Now I finally understand where my friend’s assumption lay because I just heard this False Dilemma fallacy again more recently. The assumption about me is that if I believe a certain way about Genesis 1, then I cannot believe in the fall. Hence the weak gospel. Wow. False. I have told the gospel story, beginning with creation, to hundreds of people, and the fall of man weighed heavily in that story every time. There are not just two positions on how Genesis 1 relates to Jesus.

John, when he first set pen to paper, called Jesus the Logos. The Reason.  The Logic. The living Word spoken by God. God is the source of all clear thinking, all reasoning, and all logic. Satan hates reasoning and logic, so he constantly lies and twists things, and logical fallacies and dogmatism are strictly his domain. (C. S. Lewis, who shares my interpretation of Genesis 1 and does not hold a weak gospel, showed a demon-possessed man in one of his novels using reason as a tool to tempt someone. But once he was finished, he dropped it and returned to his true nature, repeating and repeating and repeating inanities.)  One of the reasons I teach English is to train myself and my students to catch the enemy’s fallacies. I miss dozens of them all the time. Just ask my husband. But I want to be like Jesus, my Logic, my Reason.

Here’s the most excusable of the fallacies: the Argument from Consequences (Example: Nuclear holocaust is unthinkable; therefore no one will go there). Jesus had given people some hard words, and many abandoned him. Jesus asks his friends, “Do you want to leave me, too?” Peter protests, “Where else would we go?” The thought of leaving Jesus was appalling, the consequences of losing him unthinkable, even with the hard things Peter didn’t get. So he just holds on, drowning, begging for help. This was the love cry of a desperado, so Jesus let the fallacy slide. I like this guy. I’ve said those words, too, drowning.

Teaching a machine

I wake in the morning a bear, not in attitude (I’m a morning person) but with fingers crook’d and stiffened like claws. I exercise them (Robert says I look like a baby experimenting with fingers) to release the thickened tendons in their thickened sheaths, and unfold human hands. Doctor Four is surprised that I have five fingers locked in bear mode. He’s not seen this before, an evolution from human to bear so quick, hurried by cancer treatments. He’s offering me surgery. Five fingers. Two hands. One at a time with a month of recovery for each. Where does all this recovery fit in my time scheme?

I liked Doctor Four. He’s the third surgeon I’ve met this year. The first surgeon was all business, appalling me with all the possible side effects and moving on objectively to plan the event. The second was downright cheerful, “You were born with a heart defect. Let’s just take care of that for you right now, shall we?” Doctor Four, tall and lanky with long blond curls, that pale look of an Englishman or Scandinavian, wandered in to the room twice, in his scrubs, looking for something. His nurse’s tone was almost mothering, “Do you need something?” He looked like the kind of man who would go get somethings himself rather than bother anyone. When he talked to me, he never recommended anything. He recognized the problem in my hands, explaining that there is a nodule in the base of each finger tendon that gets caught on either side of the sheath, locking the fingers open or closed, and clicking when it releases. He said he didn’t know why I had five clicks to deal with so suddenly. “We don’t know everything, you know...not the all the ‘whys.’” He added, “There are some options for this,” and stopped. I had to actually say, “I’d like option two, please.” I got the impression he would be much happier quietly working on wrists and thumbs and such than talking, laying out the options.  Monday I find out the date he fixes the first hand. “Which one would you like done first,” he asked. “You can even wait to the day of surgery to make up your mind.” He knows me well. I’m not used to this much say in medical offices.

These places seem to me full of paradox. On the one hand, they represent the synchronized application of so much knowledge. They are like one well-oiled machine, crunching the statistics, spitting out thousands of treatments to match the conditions they encounter, just the right protocol for just the right condition. You can feel like a cog. You can get lost.  But on the other hand, when you talk to a person in the machine, you’re reminded that at the end of the day they have no idea how your body will respond to this treatment. You are unique after all and can surprise them. You have something to add in this discussion. Some doctors do better at communicating this than others, and at listening to what you have to add. Perhaps it’s a learned skill.

You can even see the machine learning. In the last two days I have been in three hospitals, all built in different eras. You can see how bits and pieces have been added on, connected by a maze of corridors going off at odd angles. In one of these hospitals we were helped by some random secretary in a random office to find our way. In the other we had to bother a staff member to open a locked door and let us go. Not visitor friendly. But in the brand new hospital I usually go to, the floor plan is much more intuitive. The newer architects cater much more to human questions and comforts and confusions.

Perhaps today, in my uniqueness, I contributed something to the learning: that human hands and overnight bear claws and cancer treatment have some connection. Maybe I made a machine a tiny bit more human. I’ll never know.

Cancer

 Today I am in mourning.

     I am in mourning because people who would never step foot in a strip club feel compelled to vote for a man who makes his living off of gamblers and strippers. I’m sorry it’s come to this. You have to admit. The guy has a nose for where the money is.

     I am in mourning because those who would never use foul language feel compelled to vote for a man who received a standing ovation for being vulgar and could not hide his glee.

     I am in mourning because those who would never smile in the face of a white supremacist believe they have to vote for a man who just doesn’t immediately see the problem.

     I am in mourning because those who support missionaries working among the unreached to bring them to Jesus feel compelled to vote for a man who offends people of other races. We’ve always known the incarnation doesn’t mix with politics. Who could afford such kindness?

angel of grief. Wikimedia

     I am in mourning because people I like feel they need someone who boasts about being able to get away with infidelity and murder to understand them and defend them and make them great. I get it. What are the choices?

     I am in mourning because I may get written off by some for posting this at all, but what do I do with this grief? Don’t fight with me; I understand we’re in a bind. Just let me be sad.

     There are many forms of cancer, and we choose different treatments.

Evidence

Under siege from cancer treatments for a year now, my body has come undone, and in picking up the pieces and stringing them back together, my body has found some things missing, including instructions. If tendons are threads, then my body has picked a weight too heavy, and I find my bones are strung too tightly. I wear my tendons one size too small.

So says Doctor Three. After Doctors One and Two have also had their say.  Doctor one guessed arthritis or some other inflammatory disease equally irreversible and untreatable—just live with it. Doctor Two prescribed braces, which I have worn for months. Tomorrow I see a surgeon, Doctor Four. We’ll see what he says.

As each of these doctors gives me new explanations and new advice, it is up to me to weigh the information and make a decision about what to do. How do I choose between taking meds and getting surgery? What are the risks?  I am reading a book by a pastor who was diagnosed with a brain tumor. She had to choose between surgery that might cut out working pieces of her brain or radiation that would leave a large dead tumor inside her head for the rest of her life. The risks for the two options were similar, both scenarios daunting.  She found out there is even a medical term describing this position: equipoise. She was poised between two choices, equally appalling. Unable to make a decision based on science, she had to check other factors. How did she feel about each option? How would each affect her family?

Sometimes we have to make decisions before all the facts come in. Let me revise that: we are always making decisions without all the facts. And there are many kinds of facts, not all of them scientific or tangible. Feelings. Family. These all matter. And none of us are making decisions based on the same set of facts, so what might look to me (or my doctor) like an obvious choice, might not look so obvious to someone else holding a different set of facts. 

As I swam laps in the pool this morning, my senses occupied by water, and my thoughts free to range, I thought of how we make decisions to follow Jesus. For me, Jesus has been powerfully persuasive. I know that I know I know. I know him in my bones and in the pit of my stomach. I know him in the back of my eyes and in the synapses of my brain. His influence over me is all-encompassing. But I have been gathering evidence on the goodness of Jesus all my life. My parents taught me, my teachers, my reading of the Bible, my experiences, and even my kids have shown me Jesus. But, of course, not all people have such rich evidence available to them. What they know that they know that they know can be very different. What do we do with people so persuaded of something that badly contradicts what we know?

Last night I had two Muslim families sharing a meal in my home. They are devout. I learned something I did not know: Fasting during Ramadan is meant to help people remember what those suffering from hunger must feel. Not only do Muslims fast an entire summer month during daylight hours, many of them, like Manal, fast three days a month as well. I also found out that daughter Fatima is married and has been separated from her husband for four years. She cannot leave Canada because she is ill with something called superior mesenteric artery syndrome (she has an artery and an aorta in the abdomen squishing her small intestine), so he is trying to immigrate to Canada. Fatima is a Sufi, a Muslim mystic.

When you talk over dinner with friends like these, you realize that your certainty is not what will persuade them. They are already as certain as you about something else. You go back to square one. Bottom line, what is the evidence with which Jesus has persuaded you? I doubt it came as an argument.