WE'RE BAAAACK!

Seattle WA, 12/16/2010 52 degrees, partly sunny.

It seems like the movie Ground Hog Day. Bill Murray is a low-life television reporter who is either blessed or cursed with the chance to keep repeating the same day until he gets it right. It leads him through all the emotions of life from despair to delight. He eventually finds redemption in knowing exactly what other people need and meets those needs in a joyful and humble fashion. Of course, he falls in love with his co-star and gets to start a new life with all the knowledge of his past mistakes plus a companion to share it with. We are in the process of doing all the preliminary testing and evaluations that we just did in August/September. We were hoping to be able to use the results of the previous procedures, but they have to be within 30 days of transplant and so it's deja-vu all over again, to quote Yogi Berra. We can tell already that we have benefited from our previous experience here at SCCA. Our present attending Physician, Dr. Storb was born in Essen, Germany and came to the USA years ago. He was at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center before the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance even existed. His name is listed on many of the research studies that we have given permission to participate in and provide information for. He had to admit that my particular combination of Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma that has transformed from small - cell follicular, combined with Myelo-Displastic Syndrome is strikingly unique. They are confident that their treatment plan will address all three of my life-threatening issues; Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma, Myelo-Displastic Sundrome and possible Graft vs Host disease. We spent over an hour with Dr. Storb and another RN today going over all the schedule and details. It was refreshing to be able to ask any question we wanted and know that we were talking to a man who has both the knowledge and practical experience to answer our questions. We will have a final consultation with Dr. Storb and the team after all the test results have been tabulated. That will happen around the 27th of December. That will be the day of decision. We will have to make that crucial decision to go ahead with the transplant, or find another path. If all the results look encouraging, we will choose to go forward. January 5th is still the transplant date. Our donor, our daughter Hanna, will start harvesting stem cells on the 4th of January and finish up on the 5th, just in time for me to receive them.

The process of eliminating my old, deficient and diseased stem cells and immune system sounds more like science fiction than the medical procedures we are familiar with. Essentially, they hope to replace my entire immune system with my daughter's. It will take about two years for that process to be completed. There are many many dangerous twists and turns along that journey. Graft vs. Host disease, organ failure, fatal infections and recurrence of my cancer are just the most obvious ones. Yet, it also  holds the possibility of curing my cancer, eliminating my Myelo-Displastic Syndrome and giving me not only a new 35 year old immune system, but a new blood type as well. Dr. Storb jokingly suggested that I would know when Hanna's immune system had taken control over my body when I started having a compulsive desire to go shopping, heh, heh, heh. In fact, I will have a female chromosomal make up to my bone marrow and stem cells. I told Kriss that I would probably become a much better husband and father. With all those wonderful new genetics, I can't imagine that I won't be a better listener and friend. God finds a way to work all things together for good for those who love Him and are called according to His purposes, Romans 8:28.

I can't help but think of our spiritual condition in relation to my anticipated medical transformation. We all have a diseased and deficient human nature that has been compromised by rebellion and sin. The wages, or inevitable consequence of that sinful nature is physical and spiritual death. Christmas is the celebration of God providing a donor for all of us in the infant baby Jesus. John the Baptist would recognize his true identity and mission when he declared: "Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!" Jesus is our corporate and individual transplant donor. He insisted that unless we consumed his flesh and ingested his blood, we could never share in his eternal life and joy. Everytime we share in the sacrament of the Lord's Supper, Communion, the Eucharist, we receive another dose of God's life-giving grace in Christ. Take eat, this is the Body of Christ; take and drink, this is the blood of Jesus that transforms us and makes us a new creation. Just as it will take months, even years, to fully see Hanna's immune system take control of my body, so it takes a lifetime of trust and obedience to see Christ more fully in control of our lives. As we celebrate God's invasion of our planet in the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, may we reflect on the outrageous depth of God's love and mercy. There was and is no other way to fully transform the human soul and condition. Just as it will take a life-risking transplant to save my physical life, so God has already provided the means and power to transform our spiritual beings. May this eternal and precious gift be the first one we open and embrace in this Season of Gifts and Celebration.

SUMMER OF 1971, YAKIMA VALLEY, WASINGTON STATE

I had met my wife Kriss during my Senior year of High School. We were both involved in Youth For Christ ministries in different High Schools and during my Freshman year in College, I was the Youth For Christ leader of Kriss' YFC club at White Swan High School on the Yakama Indian Reservation. Kriss was my right hand student leader and the most devoted and dedicated christian woman I had ever met. There was strictly no fraternization in any romantic or relational level between leaders and students, so we both felt a freedom to just be christian friends. In fact, Kriss became my very best friend and I could talk to her about anything, including the struggles I had in relationship with other females. She was a wonderful listener and loved me as a brother in Christ. We both appreciated what God was doing in each other's life and it was a great foundation for a life-long relationship.

After she graduated from High School, Kriss accepted the job as the Office Manager for the Youth For Christ Office in Yakima, WA. She continued to help me with the White Swan Youth for Christ Club and we became even more acquainted. When things finally went south with a former "friend", Kriss became more than a colleague and we eventually began to "date" and think about a life together in service to God. I can honestly say that our relatioinship was more old country than the 70's television show. We ultimately came to the conclusion that God could use us more fully and effectively if we were married and in full time ministry than if we were single or married to other people. Certainly, I was more superficially attracted to her for her amazing beauty and charm, but she would have to admit that the most attractive thing about me was my love for and commitment to Christ. We would be engaged before I left for France in August of 1971, but the months we spent prior to that were unforgettable.

It all started the night of the Wapato High School Graduation of the Class of 1971. One of my Young Life Campaigner guys was graduating and he went to the graduation parties and met Del. Del's brother was also graduating and he had brought a sachel full of drugs from Miami, Florida to show the country bumpkins how to party like they did in Miami. Needless to say, Del overdosed to the point of probably needing to be hospitalized, but he didn't want to get busted, so my friend Luis stayed with him all night and shared the love of God with him. Whenever Del would resist or reject Luis' words, he felt like his body was melting and about to die. During the course of that crazy night, he accepted Christ as his saviour and hope. Luis called me early the next morning and told me part of the story and demanded I come over to his house and take this guy off of his hands and show him what to do next in his Christian life. What an amazing three months were to ensue.  Del was like a creature from another planet. Being a Cuban refugee as a child, he had grown up in Miami learning English, survival in the city and a street slang I had no knowledge of. The moment I met him, he introduced himself and said, "Man, I'm glad to meet ya, Luis told me you'd help me get my s### together." I had no good idea what that meant to either of us, but I agreed to take him off of Luis' hands and I took him home to meet my mother.

Del was the incarnation of Eddy Haskell on Leave it to Beaver. As soon as he got around adults his language magically changed into the most respectful and grammatically correct imagineable. He could charm the wool off of a sheep and my mother thought he was wonderful. She would take him places in her car and give him canned fruit whenever he asked for it and I couldn't believe what we were getting into. For the next couple of weeks Del, Kriss and I went through the Bible talking about what it meant to follow Jesus and trying to prepare him to return to Miami and all the temptations he had left behind. We took him to the airport in Yakima and prayed for him to be strong and faithful. I honestly, didn't expect to ever see him again. How wrong I was! As it turned out, one of his friends met him at the airport in Miami with lots of drugs and he immediately said: "Forget it , man, I got God in my life." His old buddies didn't take him seriously, at first. But after a few days, they could see something different about Del and when he decided to come back to Washington State, they all decided to join him and try to find what he had found in the great Northwest.

The couple of weeks Del was gone back to Florida, Kriss and I started picking cherries together. She would get up about 4 am and make lunch for both of us and then come and pick me up in Wapato so we could get to the orchards before 6 am. There is no better way to discover someone else's true character than picking fruit together. One kindness I did exhibit to her, however, was that I would top the trees and leave the lower limbs for her to pick. Chilvary lives even in a cherry orchard. When Del called and told us when to meet him back at the airport in Yakima, we weren't sure what it all meant. But we felt God calling us to do all we could to help him become the best disciple of Christ that he could be. We just didn't know about all the rest of his Miami Mafia that was on its way to our doorstep. He told us some of his friends "might" come to visit, but we were in no way prepared for the Exodus. Tom and Ralph arrived by plane in a couple of days. Others hitchhiked or took buses. One guy got arrested in Wyoming, mostly for having long hair. After a couple of days in the county jail and some minor league police physicality, he was dropped off outside the city limits and strongly encouraged to never cross Wyoming State borders again. They did give him a free haircut, however. We prayed long and hard about what to do with such an insane group of messed up teenagers.

God called us to love them and teach them how to pick cherries. They bought an old juckheap of a car for $50, mostly because it had a loud sound system. It smoked like a steam locomotive and when you went around a corner too fast either of the back doors would fly open. They rented a dump of a house on the North, meaning bad side of Yakima, and we found some furniture and sleeping bags and set up housekeeping. They had almost all played sports together in High School back in Miami and so everyday in the orchards was intensively competitve. They simply refused to believe that a short little punk like me could out work them in the orchard. I had two overwhelming advantages. One was experience and the other was discipline. I had a strict schedule of filling a bucket of cherries every 15 minutes or 4 an hour. If I got ahead of my schedule, I would take a couple minutes break, drink some water or have a snack. It wasn't long before they labelled me with the nickname, "Speedfreak", because they couldn't accept the reality that I could out work them if I wasn't taking some drug like Speed. Try as they did, none of them could ever keep up with me picking fruit, but they certainly liked Kriss and all the food she would bring with us to work.

By day we went out to find picking jobs. By night we drug them to Bible studies at the House of Elijah, House of Ruth or some Christian Coffee House, which actually served real coffee and provided very local live 'Christian' music. The problem was that we couldn't keep track of all of them all of the time. When we showed up before 6 am to roust them out of their sleeping bags to go to work, we never knew just exactly who else might be in that sleeping bag. We had to encourage many young females to look elsewhere for companionship, and it wasn't appreciated by the guys. I had nightmares about the Yakima Herald Republic featuring a front page article about the Youth Minister who had gotten messed up with a bunch of pot-heads from Miami. In the initial weeks, drugs were commonly used, but rarely in our presence. Del led the charge to get off and out of the drug culture, but these were his buddies and it took several weeks before I felt comfortable that we weren't going to all get arrested some weekend.

By the grace of God, they all began to change. They stopped complaining about going to Bible Studies and listening to 'Christian' music at the Coffee House. When Kriss and I announced that we were engaged to be married, they gave her a hard time for settling for such a loser and vowed that any number of them would make her a much better match, not necessarily husband, however. She knew how to handle them by then, but they were all quite smitten with her and Del never fully got over her. You never know what pearls you might find in the unlikliest of places. Del would graduate from College, Seminary, and Graduate School with a Ph. D. in clinical Psychology. He would marry a missionary's daughter from South America and become one of the country's foremost therapists for Federal Agencies. Ralph would become an Executive for Eastern Airlines and a strong christian leader back in Miami. Tom would eventually become an ordained minister back in Florida and serve God faithfully. I lost track of many of the rest, but Del assured me that all of them were transformed in some significant way from their adventure the Summer of 1971. I learned a lot of new words that I could never repeat in polite company and how powerful God's love could be to change hearts and lives. I began to stop judging people so quickly for their outward appearances and try to see them with the eyes of Christ. What they could be in Jesus became my focus, not what they were today. I would bid them and Kriss a fond farewell in late August and embark on a cross country Oddysey of my own on my way to Provence, light, lavender and liberty.