Second Saturday Update

I just talked with Davina again, and she sounds wonderful. She has already graduated from a walker to a cane, though she feels very awkward, and they are sure she will regain the strength in her left leg with time and physical therapy; they've scheduled her to do therapy very near where she lives. She will be try tomorrow to see if she can get off the major pain medication, as she has to be off it in order to go home. If so, and if all else continues to go as well as it has, she could go home as early as Monday. Today's medical science is amazing!

The children got to come see her today so they are more reassured now that Mommy is really all right. Her church has scheduled meals for all next week, and her friend who is a nurse came today to wash the grunge out of her hair; she said it doesn't even look like they shaved it at all. A nice surprise!

I told her about all of you who came up to me today before and after commencement to ask about her, and she is so grateful. We appreciate you all more than we can say.

Saturday Update

Davina reports that yesterday was very difficult with pain, and they did an emergency CT scan to be sure everything was all right. The doctor said the scan was "fantastic." So it was just a matter of not having enough or the right kind of medication, and now that they've adjusted that she's feeling much better. She's frustrated of course with not being able to walk very well, but this will come with time.

Friday Update

I TALKED TO MY GIRL THIS MORNING!

She talked a little, laughed a little, sounded very much herself except extra tired.

Unsurprisingly she has a very bad headache. This of course will subside as the brain heals.

She says her left leg feels very strange; she can't move it much. But she can already feel improvement in it.

Again: thanks to all for your prayers. Now for, we hope, an uneventful recovery!

Update

Davina's surgery, according to the neurosurgeon, went very well. She has been moved to the ICU and has been waking up a bit now and then. They know that she does have some weakness in her left leg, but believe that will correct within a few weeks. I suppose they will be able to better see any other side effects after she is awake and aware.

Thanks to everyone for your prayers, and I will continue to let you know if there is more news.

Thursday: Thank you for your prayers!

Our lovely Davina

with Daniel & kids

with Devin, Abby, Emma, and Alex

Pre-op: 5:30 a.m. (MRI, brain-mapping, etc.)

Predicted Completion: late afternoon

Hospital Stay: 3-7 days

Recovery: 2 weeks - several months

Prayers: wisdom and skill for the surgeon

peace for the children

smooth recovery

Praise: for a wonderful church family and good friends

for the prayers of so many across the country

UPDATE: Surgery Date Set

Davina's surgery is scheduled for 5 May. Thank you for the many, many responses and we appreciate your prayers so much.

Prayer Request

I have posted before about our older daughter's difficulties with an angioma: a cluster of blood vessels in the brain that bleed occasionally and, in her case, cause seizures. She has had some grand mal seizures in the past year, and today she saw a neurosurgeon who strongly recommended that she have surgery to remove the angioma. It has enlarged and has been bleeding inside itself, causing the greater pressure on the brain tissue that brings on the seizures. The more times this happens, the higher the chance that the angioma will hemorrhage.

Brain surgery is a serious and frightening thing. Davina's angioma is located in the motor skills part of her brain which affects the left side of her body. Surgery could cause a loss of strength on that side of the body, and of course there are many possible side effects. We would so appreciate prayers as she finalizes this decision.

If you are interested in knowing more about angiomas, the Angioma Alliance site is very helpful.

http://www.angiomaalliance.org/

For my youngest

You have chosen a Navy career, at least for the short term, and tomorrow you begin in earnest. I’ve watched you embrace this choice over the last few months as you have waited to begin Basic Training, and I’m proud of the way you’ve prepared yourself mentally and physically.

For us, it’s the empty nest at last; you leave just a few days before your oldest sibling’s 35^th birthday. I tease about wanting your room and being ready for this new stage of your dad’s and my lives – but I will miss you, my tag-along who has brought so much joy, lifting my heart with laughter, offering words of encouragement on difficult days, offering me hugs and sharing photos and songs and films . . . making me grateful every day for the gift of your life.

Yes, I will miss you, however I may pretend otherwise.

I pray for you, my son, as you go into an environment containing – as all the world contains – so much of good and so many temptations. I pray that you will embrace every opportunity offered you to grow in honor and courage and selflessness and service, to become every day more and more the man God created you to be. And I pray that you will pursue wisdom above all else – wisdom that will protect you from the temptations to follow mere self-serving, momentary pleasures that will turn to ash; that you will be courageous to stand for that which is honorable in every area of life, unafraid to turn away – joyfully, and with a smile and laugh perhaps, never self-righteously – from that which would drag you down into behavior that will harm you and those around you, now or in the future. I pray for your mistakes – because we all make them – to be ones from which you can recover, having learned to be that much greater a man.

You will be different when next I see you. I look forward with joy to finding how you will have grown, to begin knowing you not merely as my youngest child, but as a man in your own right, becoming more a man after God’s own heart every day.

God be with you, son. I love you.

(And maybe I’ll let you crash in my new study when you come home. :))

photo credits: Keiller Impson; Steven Franklin

Quick Update

Daddy's memorial service was lovely, and Mother is surrounded by friends who love her and will walk this journey with her (many have already made it, as men tend to die before their wives).

Thanks so much for the sustaining prayers of all of you. We appreciate your loving concern so much.

I will try to post a bit about the service and the week when I get caught up at work.

Prayer, Please?

I don't often use this space for prayer requests and merely personal information. However, this is a gravely important situation, and I know that those few of you who read here regularly would want to know and to pray. Our older daughter has just discovered that the cavernous angioma in her brain has enlarged. She is seeking a neurologist to discuss whether surgery is necessary, which is obviously a sobering and frightening prospect. A cavernous angioma is a tangle of blood vessels, in her case almost certainly congenital, that causes seizures when it bleeds. It was first diagnosed 6-7 years ago; the last time it caused seizures was last summer and this MRI was a follow-up. There is no treatment for the angioma that I am aware of except surgery; the fear is that it will begin to hemorrhage at some point, but of course there are also tremendous risks to the surgery and the angioma is deep in the brain. Please pray for wisdom on the part of all, and grace and peace for our daughter and her three young children.

Prayer Musings

Now that I am back in the land of the living and have graded enough homework to justify procrastinating again for a few minutes, I see that I have written nothing here in quite some time. Many thanks to all who have prayed for and encouraged and helped me out these past three weeks; you have reminded me of the unmeasurable value of this family God has given us.

A friend gave me a couple of books by Lauren Winner recently, and I've read through Mudhouse Sabbath over the course of the weekend, between grading bouts. Winner converted to Christianity from Judaism, and this book explores Jewish traditions that she has found to usefully inform her Christian walk. Each chapter is titled with a Hebrew or Yiddish word, and she addresses the following: the Sabbath, food, mourning, hospitality, prayer, the body, fasting, aging, candle-lighting, weddings, and the marking of doorposts. She carefully recognizes essential differences between the two traditions because of Christ's sacrifice to save us by faith, but thoughtfully and beautifully shows the essential likenesses and how we can be strengthened by recognition of the tradition that, after all, gave birth to our Savior.

This morning an acquaintance posted a link concerning the Rosary, and shortly after reading that article, I read Winner's chapter on prayer. These reminded me of a tension and frustration I have experienced with prayer for many, many years.

I am not well disciplined to pray. I'm attracted to thoughts like Coleridge's in "The Pains of Sleep":

Ere on my bed my limbs I lay,

It hath not been my use to pray

With moving lips or bended knees ;

But silently, by slow degrees,

My spirit I to Love compose,

In humble trust mine eye-lids close,

With reverential resignation,

No wish conceived, no thought exprest,

Only a sense of supplication ;

A sense o'er all my soul imprest

That I am weak, yet not unblest,

Since in me, round me, every where

Eternal Strength and Wisdom are.

Of course, the attraction lies in the ease of it -- no need to think, to actually articulate confession or supplication or praise -- just feel the love of God and be at peace. Fine as far as it goes, I suppose, but it can't be the end-all and be-all of prayer, not if we are to be in thoughtful relationship with God.

But little that I do seems to help me with formal, disciplined prayer. I take a walk determined to pray but my surroundings or my thoughts take over within minutes (or, more likely, seconds). I write lists of things to pray about but think about them instead. I try to visualize but my brain refuses. And on and on.

The article and the chapter I read this morning pointed up something that I've thought about often and seemed to confirm -- that I've been cheated out of a liturgical foundation of common, memorized and repeated prayer that could help me with this sad lack of discipline.

I was raised in a mainstream Protestant denomination and have attended evangelical churches all my life. There seems to be almost a horror of any but absolutely spontaneous prayer. A written prayer lacks true feeling or sincerity, it is feared. A repeated prayer is mere rote repetition of no value -- because repetition can be vain, it must therefore always be vain, seems to be the thinking. So we endure spontaneous, sincere prayer everywhere: "um God, we'd just like to, um, you know . . . just ask You, um . . ."

I remember being startled at a challenge I read somewhere to actually ask God our questions -- pose them in the form of questions. We always say, "We'd just like to ask you to . . ." But what if we said it as a question: "God, will you . . .?" It changed my understanding of supplication and made me realize just what it means to ask God for something. It's a great deal more awesome and frightening to be direct, and it's helped me to begin avoiding a bit of my silly and selfish "asking."

But what about repeated prayer? I went to a funeral for one of my professors when I was in grad school. He had been Episcopalian, and I fell in love with the prayers we read from the prayer books stocked in the pews. They were profound, they were eloquent, they spoke truth. Where have these prayers been all my life, I thought. But a friend tried to set me straight -- oh, they don't really mean anything, they're just rote because people say them all the time -- vain repetition, you know.

I wondered why such repetition had to be vain. Couldn't someone repeat these prayers day after day and mean them? Repeat them and be comforted by them, challenged by them?

Winner addresses what she calls liturgical prayer in the Jewish tradition, explaining the many memorized and constantly repeated prayers throughout the day, the week, the year. Of course the prayers can become rote, she admits, but if this "is a danger," she goes on, "it is also the way liturgy works. When you don't have to think all the time about what words you are going to say next, you are free to fully enter into the act of praying; you are free to participate in the life of God." She adds that when she has set aside her prayer book (a Christian prayer book now, of course) for weeks or months, she finds that she slides into narcissism, and a return to the set prayers "places [her]" in "words that ask [her] to confess [her] sins [. . .], to pray for [others . . .], that praise God even on the mornings when [she] wonder[s] if God exists at all."

I long for this experience. I try -- I own the Book of Common Prayer and the Divine Hours books, but I lack the discipline to stay with them. Mostly this is my laziness. But I blame it in part on never encountering liturgical prayer, never memorizing anything but the Our Father, and now it's harder and harder, on my own as a good Protestant is expected to be in his quiet time, to know how to do this and to do it well. But I need it. I need to praise God whether I feel like it or not, bring my loved ones to Him whether I really believe He will act in their lives or not, confess my sins when I'm arrogant enough to think they haven't been all that bad. And I need prayers that I can rely on when my own words fail me . . .

There's no special point to this rambling, I suppose. Just thoughts that dog me and a desire to say them and hope that in the saying maybe I will find more courage and more discipline to act as I believe would help me. I wish to observe Lent in some meaningful way this year. Perhaps I can somehow make the discipline of prayer a part of that.

Pray for Rifqa Bary

I copied this from my friend Lydia McGrew's FB status:

"Praying for Rifqa Bary, Christian convert from Islam. Now returned to Ohio, to foster care; doesn't look good. Ohio judge has ordered her held incommunicado: No phone or Internet. Cut off from Christian friends and Christian lawyer. A real danger of being returned to her parents and dragged to Sri Lanka to be (parents' quote) 'dealt with.' Jesus said he will never leave nor forsake his own. May Rifqa be very conscious of that now."

Please, please pray for Rifqa to have the comfort of the Lord she has sacrificed so much for, and that He will release her from the martyrdom that begins to look inevitable. No matter what happens, may she stand firm in His love and power, and may He be mightily glorified in her. She is, remember, 17 years old and facing possible torture and execution for her faith.

Seeking Peace . . .

This world is certainly broken. Sometimes this is evidenced in minor irritations and annoyances, or what one reads in the papers that doesn't touch one directly. Those days it's easy to shrug and coast a little, maybe rest a little.

But then the brokenness overwhelms. I know four people who have lost a parent in the last two weeks. Illness -- a student with a spinal tumor; the recurrence of bleeding in my daughter's angioma, causing seizures; my own chronic pain suddenly increasing by a hundred-fold or so . . . People I love losing homes, jobs, families . . .

What is one to do in the face of overwhelming brokenness? Pray, I suppose. But I haven't the least idea how to pray. Who am I to presume to know what to ask God in the midst of all this sorrow and pain? He didn't send His Son to die so we could all be happy and well in the darkness of a broken world. But neither, in the face of His sacrifice, is despair an option.

So I turn to Scott Cairns again:

Hesychia*
Stillness occurs with the shedding of thoughts. - St. John Klimakos

Of course the mind is more often a roar,
within whose din one is hard pressed to hear
so much as a single word clearly. Prayer?

Not likely. Unless you concede the blur
of confused, compelled, competing desires
the mind brings forth in the posture of prayer.

So, I found myself typically torn,
if lately delivered, brow to the floor,
pressing as far as I could into prayer,

pressing beneath or beyond the roar
that had so long served only to wear
away all good intentions, baffling prayer.

Polished hardwood proves its own kind of mirror,
revealing little, but bringing one near
the margin where one hopes to find prayer --

though even one's weeping is mostly obscured
by the very fact and effect of one's tears,
which, for the time being, must serve.


*"hesychia" means "peace"
Update: Scott Cairns, in a comment below, graciously tells me that "'hesychia' is more nearly translated as 'stillness,' indicating a deep quiet, of body, mind, and spirit."

"The Heart's Embrace"

Seeing in the dark has been something of a theme lately and so on my mind. I picked up Scott Cairns' Philokalia again this weekend, and found this poem that picks up that theme in a way.

Having Descended to the Heart
by Scott Cairns

Once you have grown used to the incessant
prayer the pulse insists upon, and once
that throbbing din grows less diverting

if undiminished, you'll surely want
to look around -- which is when you'll likely
apprehend that you can't see a thing.

Terror sometimes sports an up side, this time
serves as tender, hauling you to port.
What's most apparent in the dark is how

the heart's embrace, if manifestly
intermittent, is really quite
reliable, and very nearly bides
as if another sought to join you there.

"Be still and know that I am God" -- I am not very good at being still. But this encourages me to seek that stillness and listen for His desire to join me in it. (Yes, yes, I know that "He is always there" -- but I shut Him out quite effectively by my overactive and anxious mind.)

I like this poem especially, I think, because of the way Cairns uses the heart metaphor. I remember listening to my daddy's heartbeat as he held me close in his lap, that steady, sure, mysterious sound that somehow comforted me. I would like to learn to listen to my own heartbeat, to calm down, be still, just listen until I myself am silenced and able to know that He is God and not fear so much the darkness.

Dwelling on God

Anima Christi

Soul of Christ, sanctify me.
Body of Christ, save me.
Blood of Christ, inebriate me.
Water from the side of Christ, wash me.
Passion of Christ, strengthen me.
O good Jesus, hear me.
Within your wounds hide me.
Do not permit me to part from you.
From spiteful enemies protect me.
In the hour of my death call me.
And bid me come to you.
That with your saints I may praise you
In the lifetime of lifetimes. Amen.

Hansen writes a lovely meditation on this prayer which serves as an introduction to Ignatius of Loyola's Spiritual Exercises (the prayer, apparently, not written by Ignatius). The meditation dwells on each line, as I've often done with the "Our Father," and I suspect I will find myself revisiting it often, learning to make this prayer mine. Today, this particular line is making its way to my heart.

O good Jesus, hear me.

Hansen concedes that of course Jesus always hears us. Then he adds, But "hear me" needs saying if only to remind us that a great prayer does not require an 'answer me,' for that implies a reply in our own terms, in our own way. We handicap ourselves with human plans, but improve ourselves by being receptive to God.

I struggle so much with the "answer me" aspect of prayer; we hear all the time about all the wonderful things God has done in answer to prayer, but there seem to be few courageous souls who look at tragedy and say "God be praised." I like what Hansen says here; it is the hearing of the prayer -- the fact that the God of the universe hears me! -- that is of any importance.

And receptiveness to God. I am encountering this everywhere, Chambers of course majors on it, now Hansen, and this afternoon over and over in the works included in Radiance: A Spiritual Memoir of Evelyn Underhill (excerpts of her works showing her growth in the Lord, edited by Bernard Bangley).


This excerpt will give the idea of what she says again and again:

That's the voice of wisdom -- quietly ignoring the importance we attach to our little selves. Once for all, tonight, let us turn our backs on our niggling self-scrutiny. Let us look at God, at Christ. That will bring us to a state of mind more humbling, more really contrite, than any penitence based only on introspection. It will condemn every failure in love. 'My soul opened' said Lucie-Christine, not 'my soul turned inwards and began to look at itself through a microscope'!

(Underhill doesn't say never practice self-examination, but never focus on self, even to identify sin, instead of focusing on God, where healing and health reside.)

Peace, she says a little further on, means such a profound giving of ourselves to God, such an utter neglect of our own opinions, preferences, and rights, as keeps the deeps of our soul within His atmosphere in all the surface rush, the ups and downs, demands and disappointments, joy and suffering of daily life. We cease to matter. Only God and His work matters.

I long to find this place, to know that only God and his work matter, and not myself.

Discipline and Peace

Our new Sunday School class is on the spiritual disciplines. Great teacher. Great, and for me very needed, subject. But I already find myself in avoidance, making excuses.

I am not disciplined in these areas. Partly it’s just human laziness, of course. There’s an element of having had folk in my life who made me feel like an evil person because I hadn't cloned their habits. Some of it’s irrational fear of drawing too close to Him – maybe He is waiting for me so He can shoot me down, chew me out, tell me how really a worm I am.

All of it’s just excuses. And part of me wants to embrace this class and maybe find ways to void those excuses. And part of me is afraid to find more rules and instructions and methods of organization that I can’t possibly follow, so that I will feel once again a miserable failure.

Thinking on all this last night, I was struck with the realization that it’s not just “discipline” – making myself do certain things at certain times in certain ways and amounts. But it’s desire – desire not for the disciplines but for the One the disciplines help us to know. All the prayer and Bible reading and fellowship and sermon-listening in the world mean nothing if done for their own sakes. (And I know they can be so done.)

And there is the heart of my reluctance and failure in the disciplines. For all my reliance on relationship, I do not rely on relationship with Him. Oh, I rely on Him. But I do not rely on relationship with Him. I do not love Him and long for Him as I do for my earthly father. And I want to, and I am afraid to, and I am so lazy . . .

And here’s another Scott Cairns poem that somehow speaks to this frustration and failure in me and comforts me. The title is, I understand, a Greek word for “peace.”

Hesychia
Stillness occurs with the shedding of thoughts.
– St. John Klimakos

Of course the mind is more often a roar,
within whose din one is hard pressed to hear
so much as a single word clearly. Prayer?

Not likely. Unless you concede the blur
of confused, compelled, competing desire
the mind brings forth in the posture of prayer.

So, I found myself typically torn,
if lately delivered, brow to the floor,
pressing as far as I could into prayer,

pressing beneath or beyond the roar
that had so long served only to wear
away all good intentions, baffling prayer.

Polished hardwood proves its own kind of mirror,
revealing little, but bringing one near
the margin where one hopes to find prayer –

though even one’s weeping is mostly obscured
by the very fact and effect of one’s tears,
which, for the time being, must serve.

Under Conviction, Again

I just got a boxload of books (the day 42 freshman essays came in, too . . . how unfair is that!). I can only afford the time to glance through one in the next few days, so I chose poet Scott Cairns' Philokalia. The first poem I chanced across took my breath.

"Possible Answers to Prayer"

Your petitions -- though they continue to bear
just the one signature -- have been duly recorded.
Your anxieties -- despite their constant,

relatively narrow scope and inadvertent
entertainment value -- nonetheless serve
to bring your person vividly to mind.

Your repentence -- all but obscured beneath
a burgeoning, yellow fog of frankly more
conspicuous resentment -- is sufficient.

Your intermittent concern for the sick,
the suffering, the needy poor is sometimes
recognizable to me, if not to them.

Your angers, your zeal, your lipsmackingly
righteous indignation toward the many
whose habits and sympathies offend you --

these must burn away before you'll apprehend
how near I am, with what fervor I adore
precisely these, the several who rouse your passions.


All I can say: Lord, help me.

Humbled

We are in the midst of faculty workshops. Monday, Jeff Myers, founder of Passing the Baton, International, inspired, convicted, encouraged us in our mentoring of young people. He is a gifted speaker and wise believer, passionate about the Lord and His work in people’s lives. I came away with a notebook full of insight that it will be a joy and a challenge to reflect on and consider.

But Jeff most humbled and encouraged me in a simple exchange when I greeted him before the seminar began.

Humbled not in the sense of humiliated or made me feel like a worm. Rather, humbled in the sense of making me understand the grace and loveliness of my Lord.

I haven’t seen Jeff in months. He no longer teaches at the college, and though he lives in town, our paths rarely cross. We were both involved with a national conference a few years ago, which had us on the same plane a couple of times in travels to Dallas for planning and Denver for the conference itself, and in the airports and between sessions, we got to know something of each other’s dreams and gifts and ways of knowing our Lord.

When I greeted Jeff Monday morning, the first thing he said was, “I prayed for you several times this summer.” Now, those of you who know me know that prayer is the most difficult of the disciplines for me. I try not to be a “get me out of this” pray-er, but it’s close. And I certainly haven’t been praying for Jeff. I’d thought of him now and then with gratefulness for his work and hope that his family was doing well, but not prayer, not speaking to God on his behalf.

But he had prayed for me several times. And I was humbled. Because his graciousness showed me once again the grace of the Lord, how He cares for us even when we don’t pay much attention to Him, upholds us when we are just sort of wandering along, calls us by His very kindness to remember Him.

It was a good summer. And Jeff reminded me that one reason is the prayers of people who love me enough to lift me up whether I know it or whether I have the discipline or love to do the same for others. To all of you, thanks. May God bless you richly for allowing His love to flow through you in this very special way.

A Prayer for Terri

for my students, who joined me in the many prayers and petitions of the past weeks, who cared to tears and fasting for the life of a disabled woman they had never met.

Creator and Sustainer of Life, we have prayed without avail for Terri to live, but we trust Your perfect love and we trust that she is now free and joyous in Your very presence. You defeated Death through death, the death of Your Son, and we know that Your purposes can also be fulfilled in the physical death of Your loved ones. We pray that Terri's death will draw seekers to You, that out of injustice and horrific suffering, You will bring good. And we thank You for the commitment to Life seen in Terri's loving parents and siblings, who never believed hers was a life unworthy of life.

God of mercy, we remember too that Your mercy is for sinners, and that we are all sinners. We pray for the souls of those who have, beyond all reason, sought Terri's death, and at the same time acknowledge before You our own continued frailities and sins, the murders we have committed in our hearts through anger and selfish desire. Teach us to speak the truth in love but to eschew hateful, bitterly spoken condemnation that wins no one and repels many. Remind us that if such as we are can learn to love and serve You, so may anyone.

God of justice, we pray for our country, our culture. We have indeed become a culture of death. For far too long the unborn have been considered expendable in the name of convenience; and already many others quietly suffer the same agony Terri so publicly suffered these past two weeks; already medical professionals help the suffering and even the merely disenchanted to take their own lives; already they deem imperfect newborns to be worthy of neglect so they will die; already some suggest routinely starving Alzheimer's victims who have become demented or incognizant of their surroundings. May those who know You awake to the desperate need to be salt and light, to stand for Life, that Terri's death will not be in vain.

And, God of all comfort, be the supreme Comforter to Terri's family today and in the days and years to come as they face life without a beloved daughter and sister. Give them faith and courage to follow whatever path You lay out for them -- to be comforters themselves, to be voices for others like Terri who depend on the good will of others for life itself. Spare them from any bitterness that would drive them from You and mar their witness to Your love and grace.

In the Name of Jesus who died and rose again to give us life and mercy, justice and comfort, we pray these things.

Amen.