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.