LOST AND FOUND

Seattle WA, September 1, 2010, Beautiful weather this afternoon, 74degrees.

We are finishing up all the preliiminary pre-transplant procedures. We had blood work, a PET and CT scan all morning and then a clinical evaluation with Attending Physician, Physician's Assistant,and Rose Team nurse Dot. Got very good results from the heart procedure and even better news that there is no sign of cancer in my bone marrow. The best of all worlds would be no obvious tumor sights when we get the PET/CT results. If you want something specific to pray about, that would be it. We have been cleared to be gone from SCCA until next Tuesday, so we are heading to Walla Walla tomorrow, Thursday, and will be preaching at CPPC on Sunday. It will be the 32nd anniversary of our first Sunday preaching at CPPC. We began Labor Day Weekend 1978. I guess I will be able to get that foot-long hot dog at the Southeastern WA Fair after all. It's a 32 year old tradition and I believe that the heartburn is still included in the cost of the meal. This will probably be the last free weekend that we will have for some time. We need to bring back some things that we realized we could benefit from while we're here and take home some things we don't need. It will be good to see everyone again and then return on Monday. Tuesday, we will have a new Attending Physician, due to normal rotation schedule. With the results from all the tests available, it will be decision time. We will start shots to produce extra stem cells. If there is no obvious cancer hot spots, we can have that without chemo. After getting a central line Hickman Port installed, we will begin harvesting 5 million plus,stem cells that my bone marrow will produce and they will remove from my blood stream through the miracle of modern medicine. They will freeze them in a DMSO solution, well known to all you horse people, and liquid nitrogen. Then starts the 7-8 days of major league chemo, changing chemo every 2-3 days. At that point, they will give me back my thawed out stem cells and I will have a literal renaissance. I will have the immune system of a newborn infant, except that I won't have the miraculous gift of colostrum from breastmilk to jumpstart my immune response. It's like having an Army of soldiers going into battle without any weapons. Over the next two years, those stem cells and other immune resources will have to learn how to protect me from any and every invasive agent. I will tell you in subsequent communiques what that process will look like, including getting to have all childhood and adult innoculations repeated I think we have some bovine colostrum frozen back home in the freezer, I should check and see if that might be of any value to me. Just kidding of course.

Watford City, Mckenzie County North Dakota 1960-1961.
These are the lost years of my life. I can't even remember the name of my 4th grade teacher. Life in town is beginning to take its toll on us. The "old man" bounced from job to job. Selling crop insurance, wheat seed and finally going back to work on the ancestral homestead for Grandpa Peterson until he injured his hand. My mother had decided that she didn't really want to be a classroom teacher, but a Librarian,so she has been taking classes every summer at Dickenson State to become a Librarian. Grandmother Woodard, "Ma'am" moved to Watford City after her retirement and actually bought a trailer house just down the street from ours and worked in the school cafeteria during the school year to supplement her retirement income. By some crazy alignment of stars or planets, both our parents were away from home for most of a summer. We were placed on Public Assistance and the County authorities considered placing us in foster homes, but my parents argued that with "Ma'am" living just down the street, that we could be left alone without any "adult supervision", NOT! Brother Danny had already checked out of the family by getting a job with a local rancher as soon as he got his drivers license and a $50 junker that he kept nursing back to life. Ophie, Tom, Kathy and I were on our own, with $15 per week to feed the four of us in credit at a local grocery store, paid for by Public Assistance and the generosity of the citizens of North Dakota.

Nature hates a vacuum and so without adult supervision, we gravitated into chaos and anarchy. We formed what we called a "gang", which resembled the Little Rascals Gang more than it does to modern youth gangs. We stayed out as late as we wanted every night playing kick the can or some other form of neighborhood activity. This was pre-television, pre-everything life and you had to amuse yourselves. When all the kids who actually had parents living in their homes had to go home, we were just starting our nocturnal routine. All of us smoked, using my blue dump truck for an ashtray which conveniently rolled under the couch. We played pinocle alot and when vegetable gardens began to produce peas, carrots and various other items, we would go out with the "gang" and raid gardens. It was fairly bizarre to think about stealing peas, carrots and other vegetables, but we were probably driven by sub-conscious nutritional instincts more than just juvenile delinquency. Peas were the overwhelming favorite, carrots came second and anything we gleaned that no one wanted to eat, was thrown into the bathtub at home. It was nearly overflowing by the end of the summer and we had to dispose of it before our parents came home in late August. You remember Mom was studying at Dickenson State and the "old man", was in Bismark recovering from a surgery on his hand that required him to stay there for a couple of months for physical therapy and reconstruction. To take care of bathing, since the bathtub was occupied, we went religiously to the public swimming pool when it opened at 1 pm, after waking up about 11am. Baseball took up the rest of the afternoon and early evening and then it all started over again with kick the can on the street or behind the trailer houses. We did have one major scare one night. A man who lived down the street and who didn't appreciate our sharing in his vegetable production decided to stay up late one night and put an end to the disappearance of his peas and carrots. He hid out in the back porch without any lights on and spotted us in the moonlight harvesting the goodies. We heard the screen door screach open and some words you didn't hear in Sunday School, and Tom yelled to get out of there and run in different directions, so we did. Being the youngest and smallest, he decided that I was the one most likely to be apprehended, so he took out after me. I was running as fast as I possibly could, but he was gaining on me by the second. I headed down toward this junkyard, thinking I could hide under some old car or piece of farm equipment. I guess he was just about to grab me by the scruff of the neck when he blew out whatever footwear he was wearing and hearing various oaths and threats, I managed to escape. We all snuck back to the house in the dark and were glad to be alive and not locked up in junenile hall. The next day it was the talk of the neighborhood and our friends told us all about the close call this guy had in apprehending the notorious garden gangsters. We let on like this was the first we had heard of it, with all the false dramatic exclamations and acting  we could drum up. We all decided that the word was out about us and we closed down the midnight raids permanently. School was about to start in a few weeks and the folks would be home, so we all agreed. The next problem was how and where to dispose of all the evidence against us piled up in the bathtub. I think we finally talked Danny into borrowing his boss' pickup truck and hauling it out in the cover of darkness to someplace in the country where cows or other critters would appreciate some late summer supplemental nutrition. I would guess this was about the lowest point in my life. We were essentially "lost souls", looking for direction and meaning. The ultimate symbol of our condition was when the cops drove up one night and hauled off brother Tom without even letting him take off the football kleats he was wearing. We were out playing catch with the football because he had planned to turn out for freshman football that fall and he was wearing Danny's kleats, without permission, of course. He had been accused, falsely as it turned out, of vandalizing a vacant house with some older members of our "gang" and they took put him in the squadcar and we wondered what would happen next. Well, Tom's girlfriend, Marcia's father was both the town Undertaker and County Judge and when Tom appeared in Court a few days later, Marcia's Father, the Judge, said he would supervise Tom"s probation and so he had to meet with him every week for 3 months. Our parents were never notified, or else we made sure any letter from the McKenzie County Juvenile Court never saw the light of day. They moved back home, we all went to school and the "gang" disbanded due to neglect and the excitement of a new school year. It was during that school year that I got a glimpse of the "Light" that helped me to change direction and begin looking for a new way of living. It was the first step in leaving the wilderness of lost and being found by Love incarnate.

It all started with a couple of weddings. My brother Charlie got married in December of 1958 and my oldest sister Joanne "Patsy" got married in New York City in February of 1959. I was the ringbearer for Charlie's wedding and in the pictures, you can see me in a borrowed white blazer and my lace-up work boots that seemed to play such a significant role in much of my childhood. Charlie married Marjorie Bosserman, daughter of a very Godly christian family that I thought was very different from what I was living. "Ma'am" or Patsy must have paid for the train tickets to New York for her wedding. Out of the blue, one day, the folks told us they were going to New York with "Ma'am" for Patsy's wedding and that we would be farmed out with families for a couple of weeks until they returned. Kathy and I were placed with one of the secretaries at the elementary school and those two weeks began to change my life. You see, this family was a practicing christian family that were so full of the Spirit of God's love that I saw what life could be like in capital letters. They prayed every meal with a zeal and compassion for others that I felt like I was church all the time. They were so hospitable to Kathy and me, treating us like we were their own children, that I secretly wished we could live there forever. I was the only boy in that house, being as though they only had two girls, and I was sure that they would buy me new shoes whenever I needed them and my days of hand-me-downs would be over. The highlight of those two weeks came that first Sunday in their home. They volunteered to lead worship music for a small country church south of Watford City. It was a good 30 minute drive to church, and they sang all the songs they would use in worship that day in the car on our way. I had never heard such beautiful harmony and sincerity in any worship service in my life, and I had been to alot of church services. What touched my life the most was their profound joy in loving and serving God and others. It was the essence of who they were, not just something you did on Sunday, because you lived in the Northern part of the Midwestern Biblebelt. God was so real in their home and lives that I yearned to have what they had. All the fruits of God's Spirit; love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, kindness, longsuffering and hope saturated their lives and I saw what family life could be like at its best. I know that they continued to pray for me and my family and if I could remember their name and somehow get in touch with them, I would thank them from the bottom of my heart. Of course, they would only deflect any praise to Christ and so I will leave it up to the Spirit to bless them and theirs for their faithful witness to Jesus. I had mixed feelings when the folks got back from New York, I was really glad to get the presents Patsy sent from the big city, a painting set with over one hundred watercolor paints and candy covered almonds in these little containers shaped like a Greek Temple, being that Patsy married a true son of Greece, Paulus Pagiotas of The Bronx, New York, New York. I wasn't so delighted to have to move back into our trailer house with the rest of the brood. But I never forgot the seeds of truth and faith that were planted in my heart those two weeks. Some seed takes longer than others to germinate and produce fruit. I saw a glimpse of God's Light and in the coming years, other authentic followers of Jesus would inspire me to one day make that decision for myself. But there was more adventure to follow before that would happen. Mom accepted the position as High School Librarian in Wapato, Washington the Spring of 1961, so we began the process of packing up everything you could possibly get in a two ton stock truck and 40 foot trailer house and move west. It was a combination of Ma and Pa Kettle and the Clampetts, or Beverly Hillbillies on TV, only minus the fortune.