Worlds

Yesterday there was sunshine, but today the day is overcast. It’s supposed to rain. Host dad has been out all morning getting the wheat off the last field before it rains, and when he comes in for lunch, after the last pass of the combine, everyone cheers. He looks like he needs a couple nights of long sleep now to recuperate from harvest. And that’s just wheat. Out the window I see a sprawl of corn like city blocks next to a waving sea of soy beans, still waiting.

Out another window, I see another field, a miniature forest of vines, trunks bound by twine but branches waving freely in the wind and laden with heavy bunches of tiny green grapes. The farmer is riding a small tractor, pulling a sprayer. These look tiny next to the equipment needed for wheat.

In another world, I sit in the chemo lounge once again with a needle stuck in my arm. On the heavy double doors as we walk in, Elai notices the red warning “Cytotoxic.”  I guess this warning is for the staff  because which of us would understand it? I had to look it up. It means, “Watch out! There are chemicals in here that kill your cells!” It’s why the nurses suit up completely when they hook me up to the IV machine and hang the bags of cell-killers. This time it’s just for an hour because I am receiving, not chemo, but a monoclonal antibody called Herceptin. My particular cancer is caused by breast cells producing too many (or overexpressing) copies of a gene, labeled Her2. This gene acts like ears or antennae, listening for signals to make the cell grow and split. So you can imagine what happens when suddenly the cell receives far too many signals to grow. That’s why this form of cancer is so aggressive. The Herceptin blocks the receptors on the surface of the cell, killing the signal. As a type of “targeted therapy,” they do double duty, marking the cancer cells so that the immune system will target them for destruction. Hopefully this is what has been happening in my cells for the last four months: targeting, marking, blocking, and destroying. Over the next eight months, more Herceptin treatments are meant to keep the cancer from spreading elsewhere.

In the armchair beside me there is a woman wearing a bandana and a brand new port in her chest. She told the nurse she had to figure out what to wear to accommodate the port, the area still bruised and sore. The port signals to me that her cancer has spread. Her treatments are going to last longer, be harsher, have a harsher prognosis. This is another world.

Elsewhere, on a screen, a young man sits on a stool in shorts, T shirt, and sandals talking about ancient creation myths. With a lattice of wooden pallets hung over some kind of blue/green lighting behind him, and a video camera in front of him, this guy opens his Bible to Job and Psalms and explains how many of the ancient Biblical writers drew from the science of their day to describe God’s power: Job saying God opens his storehouses of snow and hail up in the atmosphere, as if there could be storehouses of such things. Job saying God shakes the pillars of the earth, pillars that steady a flat earth floating on the sea. David mentioning the earth’s foundations, a solid core underneath the sea, underneath the flat earth that floats on water, steadied by pillars. The young man is tackling some of the difficult things we read in the Bible, where the language of ancient sciences shows up. He says that God could speak through prophets who used ancient notions of science because that didn’t change the message that He was pursuing a relationship with us.

In a sister church just a few miles down the road, the preaching is live, and the preacher is wrestling with how to take back our culture for God, how to stand firm in the face of change. I walk in the auditorium, and the place and the people feel like home, as much as that happens in Oz. This, too, is another world. We move in and out of worlds and catch but glimpses. It's a wonder God gets through from His to all of us in all of ours for all these millenniums. But He does!