A DANGEROUS OPPORTUNITY-CRISIS TIME

Seattle, WA, September 16, 2010, Cloudy with intermittant rain 67 degrees.

In our Stephen Ministry training at the church in College Place, one section talked about the nature of crisis. It showed the two Chinese characters for the word crisis, a combination of the words danger and opportunity. Every crisis holds both of those elements in balance and they showed an inverted triangle teetering on its apex which could fall either direction, toward danger or opportunity. That is where we are at in my Medical Crisis. Today I started on that new journey which will inevitably lead us through the valley of the shadow where we will either perish or persist. The first step in that journey was an entire afternoon and early evening of RCHOP chemotherapy. Five different chemos were infused through my new PICC line into a vein near my heart over a six hour process. I am taking anti-nausea medication daily, but it will take a toil on my body in a few days. It takes three weeks for you to recover sufficiently to have a second dose, so they are sending us back to Walla Walla for 6-8 weeks to have the second RCHOP infusion and give us time to find a stem cell donor, hopefully from one of my 9 living siblings. Then we will return to Seattle for another work-up and harvest the stem cells from the donor and put them directly into me. Meanwhile, I will have had another regimen of chemo here in Seattle to suppress my own immune system to its weakest level possible and still be alive. The miracle we are praying for is that the immune system from the donor will eliminate any remaining mutated stem cells in my body, as well as send out T cells that will seek out and destroy any residual small and large cell lymphoma that persists after the RCHOP. As Dr. Oliver Press described it in our consultation with him on Tuesday, the donor stem cells will create an entirely new immune system that can overcome my cancer that is too strong for my own immune system to handle. Dr. Press had just returned from the weekly Patient Care Conference where 50 of the heads of various departments and specialties meet to discuss difficult cases like mine. Dr. Till and Dr. Press presented my history and after an hour of deliberation, they unanimously agreed on the course of treatment that we began today. It's a minor miracle to get 52 people in any line of work to agree on something as complex as this, and we considered that to be a very good affirmation to go forward, despite the danger side of the triangle. The donor immune system might not just seek out and destroy cancer cells, but in one third of the patients, it also creates what is called a Graft vs.Host complex that can start attacking skin, intestines and internal organs. I will have to take medication to counteract and control whatever level of Graft vs.Host activity I develop for the next two years. In one third of patients, there is a complete cure of the cancer. We are praying for God's mercy and that the Great Physician will use this treatment to restore my health. There is, of course, a profound spiritual application in this process. In the face of our sinful nature, we are literally like my immune system. Utterly incapable of overcoming the dis-ease or sin within our souls. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God is how the Apostle Paul describes it and the inevitable result of that condition is death. The miracle of God's love is that Jesus willingly took our sins upon himself, and that gift is eternal life. We receive a new Spirit, the Holy Spirit which functions like an immune system and accomplishes in our souls what we cannot accomplish on our own. God's Spirit systematically seeks out pockets of disobedience, unrighteousness and rebellion in our lives and brings them to our attention for repentence, and then applies the power of the Resurrection to make us alive again. I want to to share with you a passage from Paul's letter to the Philippians that is my epistle to all of you in College Place and beyond who read these words: "For I know that through your prayers and the help given by the Spirit of Jesus Christ, what has happened to me will turn out for my deliverance. I eagerly expect and hope that I will in no way be ashamed, but will have sufficient courage so that now as always Christ will be exalted in my body, whether by life or by death. For to me, to live is Christ and to die is to gain more of Him. If I am to go on living in the body, this will mean fruitful labor for me. Yet, what shall I choose? I do not know! I am torn between the two; I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far; but it is more necessary for you that I remain in the body. Convinced of this, I know that I will remain, and I will continue with all of you for your progress and joy in the faith, so that through my being with you again your joy in Christ Jesus will overflow on account of me.    Whatever happens, conduct yourselves in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ. Then, whether I come and see you or only hear about you in my absence, I will know that you stand firm in one spirit, contending as one person for the faith of the gospel." Phil. 1:19-27. At the end of the Stephen Ministry training on how to minister to people in crisis, it described the roll of God's people in tipping the balance of crisis towards opportunity and away from danger. There was an illustration of a stick figure pushing the inverted triangle so that opportunity won out over danger. That is what your prayers, love, communications and acts of graciousness are doing in my life and in the lives of all those with whom we share in overcoming life crisis'. Robin

Wapato, WA, 1963 Junior High School

My family and I were making progress on the road to MCR (Middle Class Respectability). We had moved from the embarrassing cabins near the School and had rented a house at 705 Tietan in Wapato. In fact we would be able to afford to buy a house at 705 S. Satus within another year or so. The additional income my father earned working at Boeing Aircraft Company in Seattle, coupled with my mother's teachers salary raised us to the heights of home ownership. But in many ways, Junior High School was a series of crisis' that could have derailed my hopes of becoming an upstanding citizen of the State of Washington. The start of this process was a completely innocent event that got blown so far out of proportion, that I couldn't believe it. It all started during a spelling test. This cute girl named Cindy, sat next to me and preferred to talk to her girlfriends at night instead of preparing for boring spelling tests. SO, she started looking at my answers one day during the test and in my righteousness indignation at such blatant cheating, I wanted to confront her after class about this inappropriate behavior. Well, she knew what I was up to, so she walked as fast as she could out of class and I had to almost run to catch up with her. Tragically, she was wearing one of those blouses that you never see anymore that had untold number of buttons all the way from top to bottom. When I got right behind her, she felt me tug on the bottom of her blouse to get her to stop and she sprinted down the hall screaming. I was so startled I stopped dead in my tracks, but forgot to let go of the blouse until I was showered with every single button holding it together. When she felt the cold air engulfing her bare back, she screamed even louder and surrounded by a circle of commiserating girls, she rushed into the first bathroom available and sent scouts out to do two things. First, to find some article of clothing in the lost and found that she could wear the rest of the day and second, to tell the teacher that Robin Peterson had just ripped Cindy's blouse off and it needed to be reported to the Principal's Office ASAP. Justice is blind and I found myself shortly being summoned to the Principal's Office to receive the appropriate disciplinary punishment, hacks. I wasn't even given the opportunity to present my side of the story. It was such an obvious case of stupidity and inappropriate behavior in front of numerous eyewitnesses, that it was an open and shut case. I was guilty and there was NO excuse for any behavior of that sort, so just grab your ankles and thank God that I wasn't expelled on the spot. Corporal punishment was still in vogue in those days in public schools. Every Principal had a favorite Hack Board. They were shaped like a Cricket mallet with a handle and a flat hitting surface that had holes drilled into it so that it had less wind resistence and you could achieve maximum hack speed. I grabbed and he hacked and it must have had its intended results because I have never torn another girls blouse apart since that day.

The real crisis' of Junior High were peer pressures to do what you knew you shouldn't do. The emergence of hormones makes you somewhat crazy. Your body development is way ahead of your emotional and rational development and that inevitably leads to trouble with a capital T. My friend Scott and I decided that we needed a reputation. We weren't known for anything. We were just background noise in the cacaphony of Wapato Junior High School. We weren't great athletes, students or popular people. The only thing we could come up with was to spread false rumors about each other that were complete whoppers, outreagous lies that only 12 to 14 year olds would ever believe. Before long we had a reputation all right, a bad one. But in Junior High School even a bad reputation was better than not having any reputation at all. People started treating us like we were dangerous or something. I was walking down the hall on an errand during classtime one day, and this girl came around the corner and spotted me and ran like a jackrabbit for the nearest door. I guess she still remembered the infamous "Blouse Incident". Once you start down the path of deception, there's no getting the Genie back into the bottle and we were labelled as bad guys you wouldn't let your sister have anything to do with. By the grace of God, I left town the summer after 7th grade to live with my brother Charlie and his family in Fargo, North Dakota. He was the herdsman at the Pig Barn for North Dakota State University and I learned more about swine production and care than I could ever imagine. We lived too far out of town to get into any trouble and they had a couple of boys that I was supposed to help Marge look after, since she was pregnant with their third son, Craig. Those boys just about drove me crazy, I guess it was payback for all the grief I had inflicted on my own big brothers. Boy, was I ever glad that I was the youngest child in my family. Charlie was an ex-Marine and ran the household like a drill sargeant. I was forced to drink milk, brush my teeth, shine my shoes and make my bed. It was like boot camp and I hated it for the first month until fishing season started in earnest.  Charlie and a buddy had concocted this floating disaster of a houseboat or rather shack on 55 gallon drums that we would risk life and limb to snag the elusive yet coveted Walleye. Going fishing every weekend made life bearable with the brats back home. They weren't allowed to go fishing since they were too young, thank God. I learned alot from Charlie and Marge that summer and they helped tip the balance of my Junior High Crisis' back toward the positive side, but there were more challenges to come.