Why an Angiogram Doesn't Scare Me

I'm having an angiogram in the morning, and it doesn't worry me. I had one almost 4 years ago, and it spooked me that time. But this time I feel quite different, and it's all because of what happened the day of that first angiogram.

The angiogram I'm having tomorrow is a precursor to probable open-heart surgery for me in perhaps a few weeks. I have a couple of heart valves that just aren't up to the job any more. But even the prospect of the open-heart surgery is not daunting to me in the long run, and it's all because of what happened the day of that first angiogram.

Maybe you'd like to know what that was. If so, take a look here: http://takingthering.blogspot.com/2007/05/how-god-started-my-cancer-journey_15.html.

Unknown Future, Known God

This is a scary time here in our country, and even around the world. True, many people have been rejoicing in the last few days over the inauguration of President Obama. But that hasn't made the economic crisis go away. I work for one of the most well-known companies in America, generally regarded as safe and secure: Microsoft. But yesterday, two days after the inauguration, Microsoft laid off around 1000 people, and announced that more jobs would be eliminated in the next 18 months. My job is still intact. But who knows what the future holds?

My husband lost his own job four months ago. The non-profit Presbyterian renewal group he worked for was a victim of the economic climate, and had to eliminate several positions. Now I'm our sole breadwinner, working for a company that is planning reductions in staff. And there are so many other families like us.

The papers are talking about the possibility of a second Depression. We're approaching retirement age. What does that mean for us? What does it mean for our children, for our three-year-old granddaughter, or the other grandchildren still to be born? It's easy to feel fear thinking of this possibly cloudy future.

At work yesterday, the Christians at Microsoft were talking via e-mail about the layoffs. Some of them were among those who had been let go. One of our Christian brothers in India sent the words from a poster he used to have. The poster had said this:

Never be afraid to trust an unknown future to a known God.

We certainly have an unknown future right now! But we also most certainly have a known God. His constancy, love, and care for us are known from the Bible. But they are also known from our experience with him. I know from going through cancer a few years ago that I can absolutely rely on him to get me through any hard time, to sustain me and support me and give me what I need to get by. He doesn't leave us when we're in need.

In fact, God's goodness and love are so great that, when I had cancer, I found that he can make a hard time into a time of blessing and relationship with him that can bring joy beyond imagining. It was a surprise; I hadn't expected it. But it was a wonderful surprise! Others have had this same experience. The hardness of the hard time fades away next to the joy--the joy that comes with the deepening of the relationship with God that happens in the hard time.

So, yes, he is a known God, and what is known about him is so wonderful that, when I read that sentence, "Never be afraid to trust an unknown future to a known God," it actually gave me a thrill. It made me remember that I don't need to fear. In any future, he'll be there. So even if that future is hard, we'll have him with us, and that will make it good.

Whatever--and I mean it

When I wrote my second health update yesterday, I mentioned that I was still "hanging on to that 'whatever.' But it actually took writing it to make it true. In the past 3 days or so, I had gotten caught up in the frustration of feeling that my cardiologist was not taking my symptoms seriously, and I felt cast adrift. I started becoming anxious and focused on my problem.

However, yesterday when I wrote my second update, I remembered my previous experience that I had written about, where I had been utterly trusting God for my health situation. I remembered that I had known that God would be there in whatever the situation was, good or bad. And I realized that at the time I had thought of the situation in a sort of binary way: either the doctors would tell me I was fine, or they would tell me I had some specific problem and would get to work on solving it.

What I hadn't taken into account was a situation where I would still be having troublesome symptoms, but the doctors might seem indifferent. And when this situation came into being, I forgot about trusting God and started getting upset.

But when I wrote the second update yesterday, I remembered my "whatever". And then I remembered that God can handle this situation, too. That doesn't mean, now that I am handing the problem off to him again, that it will instantly be solved. But it does mean that I can fret less and remember who is holding me in his arms.

I saw a series of cartoon drawings yesterday where a bunch of people were carrying crosses, and one of them kept asking God to make it lighter for him to carry, so God kept chopping a bit of the end of this guy's cross off. But eventually they all came to a chasm that they had to cross, and everyone else was able to get across by making their crosses into bridges, but this guy couldn't because his cross was too short now. So maybe there is some way in which an instant solution to my problem would not be helpful to me at this time. Or maybe it will be solved soon. I don't know--but I do know that God is trustworthy.

Trust

I have been dealing with some worry in recent months. My husband Jim works for a renewal group that has been fixated on by theologically liberal factions in the greater church as the root of all that they consider wrong in the mainline denominations today. They have built up a mythology about his group (IRD) that has taken firm hold among mainline denominational leaders, seminary faculty, the National Council of Churches, etc., and these people believe that Jim and his colleagues are actually not really Christian activists, but instead are ultra-right-wing political operatives bent on destroying the mainline denominations in order to silence their liberal social witness. These false ideas are spreading more and more widely. See www.talk2action.org for many examples.

This has worried me in many ways. I'm afraid that these untrue things will become widely believed and that it will become impossible to refute them. I'm afraid that my friends who are politically liberal will hear about it and will start looking at us askance. I'm afraid that if Jim ever wanted to leave IRD and do something else, such as return to pastoral ministry, he would be unhireable, because working for IRD would attach a stigma to him and everyone would be suspicious of him. And my worries go on.

Yesterday I was thinking about it more intensely due to a letter sent to all SMU faculty in which some other website had been falsely attributed to IRD. We had been to Maundy Thursday service, and I was getting to bed late. I usually read the Bible every night before bed, but last night I thought I might skip it, since I'd read Scripture during the Maundy Thursday service. But I kept getting this nudge feeling that I ought to read it anyway. So I decided that if God was telling me to read the Bible, I would. And here's what I found: I'm currently reading through the Psalms, and in the Psalm I had gotten to last night, the Psalmist was writing about people lying about him, and how God would eventually make sure that justice would be done about that, and that meanwhile God would bless those who had been lied about. Wow! How appropriate was that? I was very grateful to God for nudging me into reading that Psalm and showing me that he cared about our situation.

However, today I was still in worry mode. Tonight, though, during our Good Friday service, during the last of the seven meditations on the seven last words of Christ, our senior pastor was speaking about "Into your hands I commit my spirit." He talked about how Jesus was trusting God, and about how God could be trusted even when the situation felt the least like God was trustworthy. And I started remembering how trustworthy God has always shown himself in my life. He has seen me through breast cancer in a wonderful way, and has done many other good things for me all throughout my life.

I realized that I have been being very inconsistent. All my life, I have always trusted God that I would never lack for anything I really needed, and so I have never really worried about money or jobs. So why didn't I trust him in this situation? And when I started thinking of it that way, the burden lifted. I realized that I can trust him to be with us in this just as much as I have trusted him in any other situation. He's big enough for this problem, too. What a great feeling that was! It's still going to be hard to deal with all these slanders and lies that are being told about IRD. God isn't going to make it easier all of a sudden. There may be rough times in store for us. But I know that I can trust that he is in control, so that it will all come right in the end, and that means I don't have to worry.

Thanks be to God for his great mercy in showing us how he cares for us!