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| I haven't written on here in over a year. Since my last post, I've married the woman of my dreams. We also got pregnant a month after we were married. Last month our beautiful daughter was stillborn. It has been a rough road, but God has been gracious. I'm not going to go into all of that because my wife has done so quite eloquently on her site. I am writing this to update all those who know me, but do not know Allison. I also wanted to share the following story. It is only a subplot from a Ted Dekker book, but it has ministered to me.
They’d come to the long, cherrywood check-in counter, and Kent stepped up to a Hispanic dark-haired woman, who smiled cordially. “Welcome to the Hyatt,” she said. “How may I help you?”
Well, I have just become rather important, you see, and I am wondering if you have a suite…
He terminated the thought. Get a grip, man. He smiled despite himself. “Yes, my name is Kent Anthony. I believe you have a reservation for me. I’m with the Niponbank group.”
She nodded and punched a few keys. Kent leaned on the counter and looked back toward the men laughing in the lounge chairs. Several were shaking hands now, as if congratulating themselves on a job well done. Excellent year, Mr. Bridges. Stunning profits. By the way, have you caught wind of the young man from Denver?
The programmer? Isn’t he here somewhere? Brilliant, I’ve heard.
“Excuse me, sir.”
Kent blinked and turned back to the counter. It was the check-in clerk. The pretty dark-hared one. “Kent Anthony, correct?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“We have a message for you, sir.” She reached under the counter and pulled a red envelope out. Kent’s pulse spiked. It was starting already then. Someone other than the bonehead troop under Borst’s (Kent’s supervisor) command had sent him a message. They had not sent it to Borst; they had addressed it to him
“It’s marked urgent,” she said and handed it to him.
Kent took the envelope, lipped it open, and withdrew a slip of paper. He scanned the typed note.
At first the words did not create meaning in his mind. They just sat there in a long string. Then they made some sense, but he thought they had made a mistake. That they had given him the wrong message. That this was not his Gloria to which the note referred. Couldn’t be.
His eyes were halfway through the note for the second time when the heat came, like a scalding liquid searing through his veins from the top of his head right down his spine. His jaw fell slack, and his hand began to quiver.
“Are you all right, sir? A voice asked. Maybe the clerk’s.
Kent read the note again.
KENT ANTHONY:
YOUR WIFE GLORIA ANTHONY IS IN DENVER MEMORIAL HOSPITAL STOP
COMPLICATIONS OF UNDIAGNOSED NATURE STOP
CONDITION DETERIORATING QUICKLY STOP
PLEASE RETURN IMMEDIATELY STOP
END MESSAGE
Now that quiver had become a quake, and Kent felt panic edge up his throat. He whirled around to face Borst, who had missed the moment entirely. “Markus.” His voice wavered.
The man turned, smiling at something Betty had just said. His lips flattened the moment he laid eyes on Kent. “What is it?”
Yes indeed! What was it? Leave these in power about him to their excesses before he’d had a chance to help them understand who he was? Leave the party in Borst’s hands? Good grief! It was a preposterous notion!
Surely Gloria would be fine. Just fine.
Please return immediately, the message read. And this was Gloria.
“I have to go. I have to return to Denver.” Even as he said it, he wanted to pull the words back. He could he leave now? This was the pinnacle. The men laughing over there by the fountain were about to change his life forever. He had just flown two thousand miles to meet them. He had just worked five years to meet them!
“I’m sorry. You’ll have to take the meeting for me.” He shoved the note at his boss and stumbled past him, suddenly furious at this stroke of fate.
“Great timing, Gloria,” he muttered through clenched teeth, and immediately regretted the sentiment.
His bags were still on the cart, he realized, but then he didn’t care where his bags were. Besides, he would be right back. By tomorrow morning, perhaps.
Spencer (Kent’s son) sat next to Helen (Kent’s mother-in-law), across from the pastor, trying to be brave. But his chest and throat and eyes were not cooperating. They kept aching and knotting and leaking. His mom had gone upstairs after seeing Dad off, saying something about lying down. Two hours and an exhaustive run through his computer games later, Spencer had called through the house only to hear her weak moan from the master bedroom. His mom was still in bed at ten o’clock. He’d knocked and entered without waiting for an answer. She lay on her side, curled into a ball like a roly-poly, groaning. Her face reminded him of a mummy on the Discovery Channel—all stretched and white.
Spencer had run for the phone and called Grandma. During the fifteen minutes it took her to reach their house he had knelt by his mother’s bed, begging her to answer him. Then he had cried hard. But Mother was not answering in anything more than the occasional moan. She just lay there and held her stomach.
Grandma had arrived then, rambling on about food poisoning and ordering him around as if she knew exactly what had to be done in situations like this. But no matter how she tried to seem in control, Grandma had been a basket case.
They had literally dragged his mom to the car, and Grandma had driven her to the emergency room. Dark blue blotches spotted her skin, and he wondered how food poisoning could bring out spots the size of silver dollars. Then Spencer had overheard one of the nurses talking to an aide. She said the spots were from internal bleeding. The patient’s organs were bleeding.
“I’m scared,” he said in a thin, wobbly voice.
Helen took his hand and lifted it to her lips. “Don’t be, Spencer. Be sad, but don’t be afraid,” she said, but she said it with mist in her eyes, and he knew that she was terrified too.
She pulled his head to her shoulder, and he cried there for a while. Dad was supposed to be here by now. He’d called from the airport at six o’clock and told the nurse he was catching a 9pm flight with an impossible interminable layover in Chicago that wouldn’t put him into Denver until 6am. Well, now it was seven o’clock, and he had not arrived.
They had started putting in tubes and doing other things to Mom last night. That was when he first started thinking things were not just bad. They were terrible. When he asked Grandma why Mom was puffing up like that, she’d said that the doctors were flooding her body with antibiotics. They were trying to kill the bacteria.
“What bacteria?”
“Mommy has bacterial meningitis, Honey,” Grandma had said.
A boulder had lodged in his throat then. ‘Cause that sounded bad. “What does that mean? Will she die?”
“Do not think of death, Spencer,” Grandma said gently. “Think of life. God will give Gloria more life than she’s ever had. You will see that, I promise. Your mother will be fine. I know what happens here. It is painful now, but it will soon be better. Much better.”
“So she will be okay?”
His grandmother looked of to the double swinging doors behind which the doctors attended his mom, and she started to cry again.
“We will pray that she will be, Spencer,” Pastor Madison said.
Then the tears burst from Spencer’s eyes, and he thought his through might tear apart. He threw his arms around Grandma and buried his face in her shoulder. For an hour he could not stop. Just couldn’t. Then he remembered that his mother was not dead, and that helped a little.
When he lifted his head he saw that Grandma was talking. Muttering with eyes closed and face strained. Her cheeks were wet and streaked. She was talking to God. Only she wasn’t smiling like she usually did when she talked to him.
A door slammed, and Spencer started. He lifted his head. Dad was there, standing at the door, looking white and ragged, but here.
Spencer scrambled to his feet and ran for his father, feeling suddenly very heavy. He wanted to yell out to him, but his throat was clogged again, so he just collided with him and felt himself lifted into safe arms.
Then he began to cry again.
The moment Kent slammed through the waiting room door he knew something was wrong. Very wrong.
It was in their posture, his son’s and Helen’s, bent over with red eyes. Spencer ran for him, and he snatched the boy to his chest.
“Everything will be all right, Spence,” he muttered. But the boy’s hot tears on this neck said differently, and he set him down with trembling hands.
Helen rose to her feet as he approached. “What’s wrong?” he demanded.
“She has bacterial meningitis, Kent.”
“Bacterial meningitis?” So that would mean what? Surgery? Or worse?
Something like dialysis to grace each waking day. “How is she?” He swallowed, seeing more in those old wise eyes than he cared to see.
“Not good.” She took his hand and smiled empathetically. A tear slipped down her check. “I’m sorry, Kent.”
Now the warning bells went off—every one of them, all at once. He spun from her and ran for the swinging doors on numb legs. The sign above read “ICU.” The ringing lodged in his ears, muting ordinary sounds.
Everything will be fine, Kent. Get a grip, man. His heart hammered in his ears. Please, Gloria, please be all right. I’m here for you. I love you, Honey. Please be all right.
He gazed around and saw white. White doors and white walls and white smocks. The smell of medicine flooded his nostrils. A penicillin-alcohol odor.
“May I help you?”
The voice came from his right, and he turned to see a figure standing behind a counter. The nurse station. She was dressed in white. His mind began to soothe his panic a bit. See now, everything will be just fine. That’s a nurse; this is a hospital. Just a hospital where they make people better. With enough technology to make your head spin.
“May I help you?” the nurse asked again.
Kent blinked. “Yes, could you tell me where I can find Gloria Anthony? I’m her husband.” He swallowed against the dryness of cotton balls seemingly stuffed in his throat.
The nurse came into better focus now, and he saw that her nametag read “Marie.” She was blonde, like Gloria—about the same size. But she did not have Gloria’s smile. In fact she was frowning, and Kent fought the sudden urge to reach over there and slap those lips up. Listen lady! I’m here for my wife. Now quit looking at me like you’re the Grim Reaper and take me to her!
Marie’s dark eyes looked across the hall. Kent followed the look. Two doctors bent over a hospital bed behind a large, reinforced viewing window. He made for the room without waiting for permission.
“Excuse me, sir! You cannot go in there! Sir—”
He shut her out then. Once Gloria saw him, once he looked into her beautiful hazel eyes, this madness would all end. Kent’s heart rose. Oh, Gloria…Sweetheart. Everything will be just fine. Please, Gloria, Honey.
Four faces popped into his mind’s eye, suddenly, simultaneously, with a brutality that made him catch himself, midstride, halfway to the room. The first was that of the wench back there with dark eyes. Grim Reaper’s bride. The second was Spencer’s. He saw that little face again, and it was not just worried. It was crushed. The third was Helen’s sweet smiling face, but not smiling. Not at all. Wrinkled with lines of grief maybe, but not smiling. He wasn’t sure he’d ever seen it that way.
One of the doctors had moved, and he saw the fourth face through the window, lying there on that bed. Only he did not recognize this face at first. It lay still, stark white under the bright lights overhead. A round, blue corrugated tube had been fed into the mouth, and an oxygen line hung from the nostrils. Purple blotches discolored the skin. The face was bloated like a pumpkin.
Kent blinked and set his foot down. But he did not move forward. Could not move forward.
Bile rose into his throat, and he swallowed hard. What this one face here could possibly have to do with the others he could not fathom. He did not know this face. Had never seen a face in such agony, so distorted in pain.
And then he did know this face. The simple truth tore through his mind like an ingot of lead crashing through his skull.
This was Gloria on the bed!
His heart was suddenly smashing against his rib cage, desperate to be out. His jaw fell slowly. A high-pitched screaming set off in his mind, denouncing this madness. Cursing its idiocy. This was no more Gloria than some body pulled from a mass grave in a war zone. How dare he be so sure? How dare he stand here frozen like some puppet when all the while everything was just fine? There had been a mistake, that was all. He should run over there and settle this.
Problem was, Kent could not move. Sweat leaked from his pores, and he began to breathe in ragged lurches. No! Spencer was out in the lobby, his ten-year-old boy who desperately needed Mommy. This could not be Gloria! He needed her! Sweet, innocent Gloria with a mouth that tasted of honey. Not…not this!
The doctor reached down and pulled the white sheet over the bloated face.
And why? Why did that fool pull that sheet like that?
A grunt echoed down the hall—his grunt.
Then Kent began to move again. In four long bounds he was at the door. Someone yelled from behind, but it meant nothing to him. He gripped the silver knob and yanked hard.
The door would not budge. Turn, then! Turn the fool thing! He turned the knob and pulled. Now the door swung open to him, and he staggered back. In the same moment he saw the name on the chart beside the door.
Gloria Anthony.
Kent began to moan softly.
The bed was there, and he reached it in two steps. He shoved aside a white-coated doctor. People bean to shout, but he could not make out their words. Now he only wanted one thing. To pull back that white sheet and prove they had the wrong woman.
A hand grabbed his wrist, and he snarled. He twisted angrily and smashed the man into the wall. “No!” he shouted. An IV pole toppled and crashed to the floor. An amber monitor spit sparks and blinked to black, but these details occurred in the distant, dark horizon of Kent’s mind. He was fixated on the still, white form on the hospital bed.
Kent gripped the sheet and ripped it from the body.
A whoosh! Sounded as the sheet floated free and then slowly settle to the ground. Kent froze. A naked, pale body laced with purple veins and blotches the size of apples lay lifeless before him. It was bloated, like a pumped-up doll, with tubes still forcing mouth and throat open.
It was Gloria.
Like a shaft of barbed iron the certainty pierced right through him. He staggered back one step, swooning badly.
The world faded from him then. He was faintly aware that he was spinning and then running. Smashing into the door, facefirst. He could not feel the pain, but he could hear the crunch when his nose broke on impact with the wooden door. He was dead, possibly. But he couldn’t be dead because his heart was on fire, sending flames right up his throat.
Then he lurched past the door somehow, pelting for the swinging ICU entry, bleeding red down his shirt, suffocating. He banged through the doors, just as the first wail broke from his throat. A cry to the Supreme Being who might have had a hand in this.
“Oh, God! Oh, Gauwwwd!”
To his right, Spencer and Helen stood wide eyed, but he barely saw them. Warm blood ran over his lips, and it gave him a strange, fleeting comfort. The gutturals blared from his spread mouth, refusing to retreat. He could not stop to breathe. Back there his wife had just died.
“Oh, God! Oh, Gauwwwd!”
Kent fled through the halls, his face white and red, wailing in long deathly moans, turning every head as he ran.
A dozen startled onlookers stood aside when he broke into the parking lot, dripping blood and slobbering and gasping. The wails had run out of air, and he managed to smother them. Cars sat, fuzzy through tears, and he staggered for them.
Kent made it all the way to his silver Lexus before the futility of his flight struck him down. He slammed his fist against the hood, maybe breaking another bone there. Then he slid down the driver’s door to the hot asphalt and pulled his knees to his chest.
He hugged his legs, devastated, sobbing, muttering. “Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God!”
But he did not feel God
He just felt his chest exploding.
Kent Anthony held Spencer on his lap and gently stroked his arm. The fan whirled high above, and an old Celine Dion CD played softly, nudging the afternoon on. His son’s breathing rose and fell with his own, creating a kind of cadence to help Celine in her crooning. He could not tell if Spencer was awake—they had hardly moved in over an hour. But this sitting and holding and just being alive had become the new Anthony home signature in the week or so since Gloria’s sudden death.
The first day had been like a freight train smashing into his chest, over and over and over. After sobbing for some time by the Lexus he had suddenly realized that little Spencer needed him now. The poor boy would be devastated. His mother had just been snatched from him. Kent had stumbled back to the waiting room to find Helen and Spencer holding each other, crying. He’d joined them in their tears. An hour later they had driven from the hospital, dead silent and stunned.
Helen had left them in the living room and made sandwiches for lunch. The phone had rung off the hook. Gloria’s church partners calling to give their condolences. None of the calls were from Kent’s associates.
…After setting sandwiches before them on the first day, [Helen] had excused herself and left. When she returned three hours later, she looked like a new woman. The smile had returned, her red eyes had whitened, and a buoyancy lightened her step. She had taken Spencer in her arms and hugged him dear. Then she had gripped Kent’s arm and smiled warmly, knowingly. And that was it. If she experienced any more sorrow over her daughter’s death, she hid it well.
…She was on her way to collect Spencer now. She had made the suggestion that the boy visit her for a few hours today. Kent had agreed, although the thought of being alone in the house for an afternoon brought a dread to his chest.
…Spencer sat in his favorite green chair across from Grandma Helen with his legs crossed Indian style. He’d pulled on his white X-Games skateboard T-shirt and his beige cargo pants that morning because he loved skateboarding and he thought Mom would want him to keep doing the things he loved most. Although he hadn’t actually hopped on the board yet. It had been a long time since he’d gone more than a week without taking to the street on a board.
… “Spencer.”
He turned to face Grandma, sitting across form him, smiling gently. A knowing glint shone in those hazel eyes. She held a glass of ice tea in both hands comfortably.
“Are you okay, Honey?”
Spencer nodded, suddenly feeling strangely at home. Mom wasn’t here, of course, but everything else was. “ I think so.”
Helen tilted here head and shook it slowly, empathy rich in her eyes. “Oh, my poor child. I’m so sorry.” A tear slipped down her cheek, and she let it fall. She sniffed once.
“But this will pass, son. Sooner than you know.”
“Yeah, that’s what everybody says.” A lump rose in his throat, and he swallowed. He didn’t want to cry. Not now.
“I’ve wanted to talk to you ever since Gloria left us,” Helen said, now with a hint of authority. She had something to say, and Spencer’s heart suddenly felt lighter in anticipation. When Grandma had something to say, it was best to listen.
“You know when Lazarus died, Jesus wept. In fact, right now God is weeping.” She looked off to the window opened bright to the afternoon clouds. “I hear it sometimes. I heard it on that first day, after Gloria died. It about killed me to hear him weeping like that, you know, but it also gave me comfort.”
“I heard laughter,” Spencer said.
“Yes, laughter. But weeping too, at once. Over the souls of men. Over the pain of man. Over loss. He lost his son, you know.” She looked into his eyes. “And there weren’t doctors clamoring to save him, either. There was a mob beating him and spitting in his face and…” She didn’t finish the sentence.
Spencer imagined a red-faced man with bulging veins spraying spit into that face on the painting over there. Jesus’ face. The image struck him as odd.
“People don’t often realize it, but God suffers more in the span of each breath than any man or woman in the worst period of history,” Helen said.
Surprisingly, the notion came to Spencer like a balm. Maybe because his own hurt seemed small in the face of it. “But can’t God make all that go away?” he asked.
“Sure he could, and he is, as we speak. But he allows us to choose on our own between loving him and rejecting him. As long as he gives us that choice, he will be rejected by some. By most. And that brings him pain.”
“That’s funny. I’ve never imagined God as suffering. Or as hurting.”
“Read the old prophets. Read Jeremiah or Ezekiel. Images of God wailing and weeping are commonplace. We just choose to ignore that part of reality in our churches today.”
She smiled again, staring out of that window. “On the other hand, some will choose to love him of their own choosing. And that love, my child, is worth the greatest suffering imaginable to God. That is why he created us, for those few of us who would love him.”
She paused and directed her gaze to him again. “Like your mother.”
Now a mischievous glint lit his grandmother’s face. She sipped at her tea, and he saw a tremble in her hand. She leaned forward slightly. “Now, that’s a sight, Spencer,” she said in hushed voice.
Spencer’s palms began to sweat. “What is?”
“The other side.” She was grinning now like a child unable to contain a secret.
“The other side of this pain and suffering. The realm of God.” She let it drop without offering more. Spencer blinked, wanting her to continue, knowing that she would—had to.
Helen hesitated only a moment before dropping the question she had brought him here to ask. “Do you want to see, son?
Spencer’s heart jumped in his chest and his fingers tingled cold. Want to see? He swallowed. “See?” he asked, and his voice cracked.
She gripped the arms of her chair and leaned forward. “Do you want to see what it’s like on the other side?” She spoke hushed, eagerly, quickly. “Do you want to know why death has its end? Why Jesus said, ‘Let the dead bury the dead’? It will help, child.”
Suddenly his chest felt thick again, and an ache rose through his throat. “Yes,” he said. “Can I see that?”
Grandma Helen’s mouth split into a broad smile. “Yes! Actually you would’ve been able to see it that first day, I think, but I had to wait until after the funeral, you see? I had to let you mourn some. But for some reason things have changed, Spencer. He is allowing us to see.”
The room was heavy with the unseen. Spencer could feel it, and goose flesh raised on his shoulders. A tear slipped from his eye, but it was a good tear. A strangely welcomed tear. Helen held his gaze for a moment and then took a quick sip of her tea.
She looked back at him. “Are you ready?”
He wasn’t sure what ready was, but he nodded anyway, feeling desperate now. Eager.
“Close your eyes, Spencer.”
He did.
It came immediately, like a rush of wind and light. A whirlwind in his mind, or maybe not just in his mind—he didn’t know. His breath left him completely. But that didn’t matter, because the wind filled his chest with enough oxygen to last a lifetime. Or so it felt.
The darkness behind his eyelids was suddenly full of lights. Souls. People. Angels. Streaking brightly across the horizon. Then hovering, then streaking and looping and twisting. He gasped and felt his mouth stretch open.
It struck him that the lights were not just shooting about randomly, but they flew in a perfect symmetry. Across the whole of space, as if they were putting on a show. Then he knew they were putting on a show. For him!
Like a million Blue Angel jets, streaking, hair-raising, perfect, like a billion ballerinas, leaping in stunning unison. But it was their sound that made little Spencer’s heart feel like exploding. Because every single one of them—one billion souls strong—were screaming.
Screaming with laughter.
Long, ecstatic peals of barely controlled laughter. And above it all, one voice laughed—soft, yet loud and unmistakably clear. It was his mom’s voice. Gloria was up there with them. Beside herself with joy in this display.
Then, in a flash, her whole face filled his mind, or maybe all of space. Her head tilted back slightly, and her mouth opened. She was laughing with delight, as he had never seen anyone laugh. Tears streamed over bunched cheeks, and her eyes sparkled bright. The sight did two things to Spencer at once, with crushing finality. It washed some of that joy and desire into his own chest, so that he burst into tears and laughter. And it made him want to be there. Like he had never wanted anything in his whole life. A desperate craving to be there.
The whole vision lasted maybe two seconds.
And then it was gone.
Spencer slumped in his chair like a blubbering, laughing, raggedy doll.
When Grandma Helen finally took him home two hours later, the world seemed like a strange new place to him. As if it were a dream world and the one he’d seen in Grandma’s house was the real one. But he knew with settling certainty that this world, with trees and houses and his dad’s Lexus parked in the driveway, was indeed very real.
It made him sad again, because in this world his mom was dead.
| | |
| need to rest my tired brain for a moment
working on my final paper for the semester
what a relief to have this almost done
i'll be up until 3 doing this
then i have a theory exam to study for
praise God for grace
oh, here's an excerpt from my paper
on C. S. Lewis's "Letters to Malcolm"
Even when we are in corporate worship, our heads are often filled with thoughts and feelings that have very little to do with what is happening in the service. This can get frustrating, but attempting to shut out all of the “non-worship” thoughts doesn’t ever work. When we try so hard to get rid of these thoughts, we only succeed in distracting ourselves more. Then we condemn ourselves for the added distraction. Therefore, the practical outworking of the above principle is simply bringing whatever is inside us to the feet of Jesus and giving that to Him as worship, our honest worship. This honest worship could be expressing joy and loud praise for what God has done and who He is. It could also look very much like a Psalm of Lament that always resolves with a statement of confidence in the Lord no matter what happens. The point here is to be completely honest with the Lord in all situations, even if those thoughts do not seem extraordinarily worship-like.
Lewis has some incredible books out there.
I was in a class that read six of them.
I don't know about the rest of his books,
but these are definitely worth checking out:
The Great Divorce (a picture of what the nature of Heaven is perhaps like)
Miracles (somewhat "New Seeds" like)
Pilgrim's Regress (Lewis's own spiritual journey in alagory form)
Weight of Glory (collection of 10 of his essays-introduction has cool stories about what Lewis was like)
Screwtape Letters (opens your mind SO FREAKIN' MUCH to the spiritual realm)
Letters to Malcolm (currently writing about this one-all about prayer)
This was an extra long post for me. 100 MILLION EPROPS FOR ME!!!!!
Hey, whenever you read this, pray for my paper i'm currently writing about
according to Lewis, as long as you don't know the outcome
of my paper-writing endeavor, you can still honestly pray for me
because God does not live in time
HE LIVES IN THE ETERNAL NOW
What an amazing God | | |
| hey.
God answered!
and this is a perfect
Thanksgiving Day
so thankful
| | |
| hi this is really mike
i figured it was time to post
this is gonna be quick but important:
can you please pray for my family
i don't know what elxe to say about it right now
but i need you all to stand with me
if you want to pray specifically
call or email me
thanks | | |
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