I hope this makes sense...

One of the saddest parts of this illness is having to quit working. I understand the medical reasons but still, its hard not to see your friends.

The directors of the IT department where I had worked for nearly 10 years in the world's most perfect job came by a while back for a visit and I enjoyed the visit immensely. It was good to see them again and they brought news of a "farewell gift" due to arrive some time next week. It would be, or so they said, a robotic chicken! Now THAT'S impressive.

I knew that a chicken of any sort would not cluck it's way to my door, but something would be arriving. My friends said so. I had that hope.

Hope is absolutely essential for a healthy soul. Without hope a person falls into depression, despair, anxiety and feelings of worthlessness. Hope is like light in all that darkness. For someone with cancer, it can be a motivating force to pursue whatever needs to be done for recovery.

It seems to me that there are three sorts of "hope" running about and two are not friendly.
One can be accidental or it can be fraud. It occurs when someone latches onto false information.
"If I continue this diet of leftward rotational crumberry pods and sleep in a yogurt encrusted sweatshirt I'll be ok in 3 weeks".

It happens all the time and probably should be it's own infectious disease. Dieing from false hope. Believing something to be true when it's not.

Just as frequent is the mistaken idea that merely believing something makes it true. People do this all the time. If I want it to be true it will be true.

"Did you make reservations at the restaurant?" she asks.
"No... but there should be an empty table" he reply's.
"With reservations we could have parked in valet parking!"
"There are some alleys a few blocks away, we'll be ok" he mumbles.
"I hope so" she whispers

Trusting in the imaginary, in a wish, is deadly. It's not real hope.

Hope does not depend on what we believe. Hope is built on the trustworthiness of someone or something. I have the hope, I can expect, to find a package delivered to me. My hope is because the Directors said so and they are my friends. Its based personal experience, they are truthful and dependable people.

I have another hope. It is built on the trustworthiness of God. I didn't make this up, it is just one of the truths of the Universe like gravity. The wonder of this hope is that God loves me! Because of that I know that whatever happens with this cancer thing God is waiting in delighted anticipation for me to be with Him.

"The steps of a man are established by the LORD,
And He delights in his way.

When he falls, he will not be hurled headlong,
Because the LORD is the One who holds his hand" Psalm 37:23,24

I see dead people

There are zillions of people who believe that after they die everything just stops










This is because they figure a human is just the physical body; what passes for a "soul" is nothing more than electrical impulses.

There are another zillion people who think that the "soul", a different part than the body, gets absorbed into the identityless collection of former souls and the body just stops.








There are a smaller tribe of people who believe that the body and soul are intertwined and a "human" needs both to be human. What happens to them when they die is the crucial question.

Christians believe that the disposition of your parts depends on your choice. One group has your refreshed soul joining your freshly created body living in a place designed to bring you joy by the One who knows you best and the other has the miserable old soul sent ingloriously to the other place.

One group has chosen to delight in the ways of the Eternal High King and His Kingdom, the other has chosen to follow the broken urges of the body despising the King and His ways for the chance to be a sort of Ruler of their own deplorable domain. They are sent off to manage their fiefdom along with everyone else who has made this choice - sent off because there can only be one King and the position is occupied.

Its natural to think that you have plenty of time to study the issue and make your choice. While watching a funeral procession, Jesus gives an analysis of our default condition. "Let the dead bury the dead" He says.

Being dead is our natural condition! Our choice becomes either Follow the King or stay as you are. David, in Psalm 116, writes about looking forward to walking with God in the Land of the Living. It devides up like this then...

There are dead people living their lives as though they were alive, they don't know they're dead and merely existing And there are those who have joined the King and been made alive and will some day walk in the Land of the Living.

Jesus said that Life is knowing God. Life is a measure of one's experiential relationship with God. Its possible to know a bunch of stuff about God and be dead. Choose the Kingdom of the Living, follow the King

dark night of the pillows

One of the stranger phenomenons I've been experiencing is related to the way I use a pile of pillows to find a comfortable position to sleep in. It usually turns out to be a complex construction that would make a pack of beavers jealous. Now here's the strange part. I've actually been loosing sleep because I have been dreaming about secret designs and patterns that have the key to the "Official Pillow Pile Construction" In one dream there was a diagram in a sort of Victorian pen and ink which was printed on the pillow case, and this caused me to actually wake up and try, in the dark with my eyes closed, to locate it; another time it was a Monopoly game board on the pillow.

I woke up muttering my dismay at not having an approved regulation pillow stack. After a week of this goofiness my wife very patiently and wisely suggested that I just use the pillows as pillows and not media for secret messages and just sleep.

The whole process was tiring, frustrating and confusing from analyzing too much. I was trying to sleep by my cleverness and ability to think logically.

I write this partly because I've been reading through the classic book "Dark Night of the Soul". It describes a condition Christians can find themselves in where their communication with God is disrupted or even broken.

One occasion which produces this silence from God is described this way. In Hosea 5:15-6:3 we see God responding to a lifestyle of ignoring Him and His ways. God breaks the communication and effectively hides Himself.

"I will go away and return to my place until they acknowledge their guilt and seek My face; In their affliction they will earnestly seek Me."

"Come, let us return to the Lord, for He has torn us, but He will heal us; He has wounded us, but He will bandage us. He will revive us after two days; He will raise us up on the third day, that we may live before Him."

"So let us know, let us press on to know the Lord."

Everything seems dark and despairing. Nothing seems right no matter how we struggle to know Him.

If God seems missing or far away it might be time for you to repent and run; run like crazy back to God and He will restore the relationship!

But there are times when you haven't been all that depraved. You've read your Bible faithfully, gone to two Bible studies a week, had long and serious prayer times and yet God remains a mystery.

The reputable Christian Mystics remind us that it is Gods way to hide from His people on occasion; Especially the genuinely spiritually mature. Whats up with that?

The reason is that although God has given us a mind to vigorously use to know Him, there are truths unknowable. A strong relationship between two people depends on knowing each other for having spent time with each other learning the otherwise unknowable about them.

C S Lewis uses a different metaphor. He discusses the difference between someone who has carefully studied a map of an area of the world. Your neighborhood for example. He might be able to tell you the relative locations of your house and the convenience store. But who really knows the area the map reader or you. You live there, have seen the sights, possibly know the neighbors.

Put it this way - who would you want as a guide to Yosemite National Park... a map expert who has never been there or someone who vacations there every summer. Of course you want the person who has stood in the valley and seen Half Dome or El Capitan or Yosemite falls. The one who has smelled the smells and seen the sights and walked the trails.

God desires to have a relationship based on personal interaction, not mutual study. He does not want to be a god of paper and ink found in books.

At the end of the story of Job, after Job endures a great many troubles, Job addresses God and says, more or less, "Before I had heard about you, now I know you."

The Dark Night of the Soul is dark because God wants us to know Him because we have been told by Him. He wants our hearts to be filled with Joy because He is here. We share secrets. He will give us each a new name that only He knows. We sit and stare quietly at Him in His presence because He is delighted we are there!

The Dark Night of the Soul is hard; it's confusing, it can be discouraging, it goes against our nature to want to have reasoned it out ourselves. It is the way to Him for anyone, there is no one who cannot simple respond in joyous love and wonder. Think of a newborn baby's responses to familiar faces. It is eternal life.