Good Praying OR Bad Doctoring – Grateful to Live Another Day!

Have you ever had a doctor say these words to you, “I’d encourage you to get your affairs in order.” I have. In fact twice, and once just two weeks ago. The good news is that to date I am 0 for 2 in these one way tickets to the next life!

So here’s the deal. Below is a blog that I had written and not quite hit the send button on due to a doctor’s diagnosis of a serious heart condition. After a roller coaster ride of waiting, ultimately the test came back not as grim as “Dr. Grim” had first diagnosed.

Bottom line in those days leading up to what looked like a serious open heart surgery, I put pen to paper, less one detail, the date of the surgery, which thanks be to God continues to remain blank.

In hindsight I thought maybe others could glean some insights from what I thought may have been a walk to the other side. I don’t encourage the circumstances that led to the below, however I think reflection is always a good thing. In reality do we not all need to live our lives in a way that we have “our affairs in order”?

Upcoming Heart Surgery – When Roads Converge – Our Heritage and Legacy

This upcoming ____ I will undergo heart surgery. More specifically surgery to repair/replace my aorta that according to doctors has become dangerously enlarged.

Come to find out, with less notoriety than the heart, the aorta plays a pretty important role! If the heart is the roundabout with roads converging, the aorta is the main through fare carrying the body’s blood supply elsewhere. No aorta — well you get the picture, it’s the end of the road.

As valued friends, I am writing on several fronts to communicate this news. First, if you’re a person of prayer, I would appreciate those! If good vibes and thoughts are your thing, yes please! If encouragement, I could use some. If wired to be a person of helps and mercy, the recovery will offer opportunities. If money, heart surgeries are not a line item in the budget of a small public charity, nor a crowd favorite among health care plans, especially of the affordable care act!

You get the picture. As I (and my family) continue to get our heads around this most recent twist in the road, my nervous energies often are best channelled though my fingertips and the written word.

As many of you know, this is not my first rodeo on the bad medical news front. My siblings and I often commiserate over our seemingly polluted family gene pool from which we arrived. Cancer, diabetes, heart disease, addiction, and depression are part of our family tree. In 2001 at the age of forty-one I was diagnosed with stage 3 colon cancer. Thanks be to God that 16 years later, multiple surgeries and chemotherapy, I live to tell the tale.

As for diabetes, heart disease, addiction, and depression — check, check, check and check. That’s the heritage side of the coin and story, the hand each of us draw. Truth be told, days have come and gone when folding seemed the best option.

However, there’s the other side of the coin, the legacy part of life’s equation. We do get some say in this. As I see it, one can choose to be defined by our genes OR choose to make gains in our future. And that becomes our legacy. Imperfectly and with “fits and starts” as my life has been, legacy has been my Northstar.

President Abraham Lincoln famously said, “And in the end it’s not the years in your life that count; it’s the life in your years.” Pretty good, huh? Our daily lives become the pages of our lives story, and length is relative. Friend and high school principal Tony Fontana reminds his students daily to “make it a great day, or not, the choice is always yours!” Good words to live by Tony!

Now whether the final chapter of my earthly story is being written on not, that falls under the clause of “God grant me the serenity to accept the thing I can not change”.  However what I can choose to do is to continue packing as much life and legacy into the days I have, whether ten or ten thousand.

I have a love of the outdoors, running, back packing, camping etc… This is a love I’ve enjoyed passing down and sharing with especially my kids. We enjoy discussing our latest gear purchases and upcoming trips. With that in mind, I know tents were not meant to live in permanently, much like our earthly bodies. The Apostle Paul said as much:

“For we know that when this earthly tent we live in is taken down (that is, when we die and leave this earthly body), we will have a house in heaven, an eternal body made for us by God himself and not by human hands.” 2 Corinthians 5:1 ESV

This speaks to me, reminding me that for each of us on the trail map of life, our  journey of heritage and legacy converge, leading me to the latter and hopeful portion of Paul’s words.

Jesus understands and in fact created these earthly bodies (tents) with a shelve life! We were never meant to live in these earthly bodies forever. That is and has always been the plan. Friend, each of us has a future date and river crossing of the Jordan River, a picture the saints of old painted for our earthly death.

And yet this is not the end. Far from it! And what I find great hope in and encourage you too as well is what Paul writes next, and that “we will have a house in heaven, an eternal body made for us by God himself and not by human hands”

Human hands, no matter how loving, and life and medicine no matter how magnificent has its limits. We all come from gene pools which include death. In Jesus I have found and chosen one who is limitless and has overcome both death and the grave.

This is the journey I have chosen and the one (Jesus) I have chosen to travel with. The good news is that the story is always continuing and he is always inviting others to come and follow him! Through the good times and bad, on the mountain tops and in the valleys, his comforting words is that he never leaves us.

SO whatever the next section of life’s trail holds, whether vistas or valleys, or even perhaps the crossing of the Jordan, I choose to follow on. For you my friends, my hope and prayer is that you may choose this path as well, and and that I will surely meet some of you as we travel this road of happy destiny together.

Happy trails to you until we meet again,

Jim

SHARE IT: