Crystal and I were fascinated, as usual, with Arizona's doves. They flutter up almost everywhere you go, hiding in tree branches or alighting on rooftops where they perch, like this one,
a living, gentle symbol of peace against the tangled wires of life.
Jonathan and I needed that peace today, after a rough week and weekend. Jonathan was shocked at how the cancer had blown up in the week since I left South Dakota, despite the chemo, and we were both distressed that we had to wait through the weekend and possibly into next week before being allowed to know the results of my Friday PET scan, even though the results had arrived to the clinic before I had!
We knew the results were there because I was told so, but even though it was my body, my cancer, and a scan that I had paid nearly $2000 for out of my own pocketbook, I am not allowed even the smallest heads-up about what the results were.
"Could they just let us know if there is metastasis?" I asked the patient coordinator.
Nope.
She explained very softly and humbly that the one doctor wanted to confer with the other one before going over the results with me (never mind that we had a whole weekend to struggle through without knowing).
Unless I chose to trust through the weekend instead of struggle, frustrated and upset.
"I hope that doesn't mean it's bad news!" I said to the nurse who was de-accessing my port.
"No!" he said firmly. "It just means they want to talk about it and go over things."
I could tell he wanted to calm me. The nurses at this clinic are so incredibly compassionate and caring.
I decided to trust God, even if it all seemed distressing.
Even if it would be easy to let people know just exactly what you think of the medical protocols that leave in the dark people who are in pain and distress.
"But God knows the results," my friend Eileen Mitchem texted.
And another friend, a disabled friend, Karen, also friend of my sister-in-law Anita, called just to pray with me.
The one person who called--another sufferer who had been through a terrible accident 20 years ago leaving her disabled but still smiling and a blessing to a lady with cancer who dissolved into tears as the lady who struggled even to speak clearly
prayed with me over the phone.
And then there was this morning, as Jonathan and I got online at 7 a.m. our time here in AZ to listen to Beavertown God's Missionary Church. Something was telling me that if I listened this morning, I was going to be refreshed and uplifted.
"Behind every dark cloud shines the smiling face of Jesus," was one of the first songs the musicians chose for the prelude, and the heart of a lady in Arizona standing over the kitchen sink making the first of her morning drinks knew that the song was for her.
Then before I knew it, the musicians were playing, "Jesus, Name above all names,
Beautiful Savior, glorious Lord and Master..."
And I was wafted back 31 years ago to the year I was in Ukraine, excited despite being lonely and single, teaching English and Bible to four classes of Ukrainian students in a public school. I had taught those students this chorus in English. Suddenly, 31 years later, I am in a small kitchen of a little house under the sky-full-of-noisy-jets in Phoenix, fighting blown-up cancer pain, joining out loud the last two lines of this precious, adoring chorus.
"Emmanuel! God is with us!
Precious Redeemer, Living Word!"
Jonathan coming out to the living area of this little house caught me in the middle of that song, hands raised--me in anything but my Sunday best, not looking too great,
but caught away with memories and worship too deep for words.
Some of the happiest memories of my life--in the middle of my deepest loneliness over there--teaching my Ukrainian students the words of this worship chorus that meant so much to me.
God always with us. Always.
To the ends of the earth and the end of the world.
Always.
Emmanuel.
Didn't
Pastor Solomon Shaffer add the name of Anna Morley Lucas to the prayer
request list, making me feel even more a small part of the service there
2000 miles away. Then
a men's trio went up to sing, a beautiful, simple worship song saying,
"If I had a thousand tongues to sing...If I had a thousand hands to
raise... in praise...."
The service melted as Pastor Shaffer invited anyone who had a need to go up and pray. The chorus was sung softly, again and again.
People with needs praying, us watching, worshipping, waiting on God.
The voice of someone with an unusual accent suddenly lifted up in praise with "Alleluia! Alleluia!"
weeping, again and again. We were quite sure it was a dear man from Papua New Guinea, a place we'd ministered with Mission Helps about 8 or more years ago now.
That simple, humble, uninhibited praise resounding with our own quiet tears, listening.
One man sharing that God had called him to go up there just to "snuggle with Me." And up there he had heard God ask him a question. "Have you surrendered your children to me who are moving to Colorado?"
Right away we knew who he was talking about--the MacDonald family who are moving out to western Colorado to pastor the church where our young son Tim attends,
our trucker boy who loves the Lord and attends this church that is in need of a good pastor.
Our boy needs a pastor, and the father back east is surrendering his children to move there--and God is letting him know it's "going to be okay." God is going to be with both him and the children he's releasing to God.
And me, the mother of the boy needing a good pastor, knows that God is going to be with my boy, too, and with his mother wherever she ends up in the next little while.
During testimony time, someone asked for a song number, and as the musicians began to play, I was amazed.
Not another of my favorite old hymns that is so rarely sung! Yet it had been sung a couple Sundays ago at our church in South Dakota, and now again in Beavertown, a hymn I had sung once in Ukraine when I had been asked to sing at a Messianic congregation where my missionary friends the Durfees attended.
"From every stormy wind that blows,
From every swelling tide of woes,
There is a calm, a sure retreat,
Tis found beneath the mercy seat.
There is a place where Jesus sheds
The oil of gladness on our heads;
A place than all beside more sweet:
It is the blood-bought mercy seat."
Jonathan's beside me shaking with tears, not just crying. He's bawling. We keep slipping our arms around each other.
"There is a scene where spirits blend,
Where friend holds fellowship with friend;
Though sundered far, by faith they meet
Around one common mercy seat.
Where sin and sense molest no more;
And heaven comes down our souls to greet,
And glory crowns the mercy seat.
And the Dove of the Spirit has slipped into a little house underneath the jets, surrounded by concrete and electric poles and wires and block buildings and poor wilted bushes with dead roses,
has slipped inside by a lady with blown-up cancer and her husband with blown-up distress,
and walked with us--
Emmanuel.
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