8 - WHAT'S DIFFERENT ABOUT WINDRUNNERS

Their journey did begin with meeting God so let’s start there and then ferret out just what it is that enables some who meet Him to live such amazing lives, even in the valley of the shadow of death.

WHAT’S WITH MEETING GOD?

When patients were coming out of the near corner, induction chemotherapy behind them, in remission or not, I started recommending that it might be a good time to consider a spiritual journey. I was met with a variety of responses from "I'm already on one" to "been there, done that, what a bunch of BS" to "I went to church as a kid, not sure why I stopped, going back now seems like a good idea" or "What's that? What's being a Christian like?” That caught me off guard. My confidence as a physician didn’t extend to leading someone spiritually as I was just getting to know God myself. I kind of knew where they needed to go, but not how to get there.   So after a quick sidestep I told them stories recounted by some runners who were catching the wind on the track ahead of me.

Elizabeth: “For me, believing was a choice, but not just one choice, onetime deal. First, I chose to become open to the possibility of believing: an ‘okay God, I’m open, show me’ sort of thing. I started reading the Bible and listening to others’ experiences with God, then it seemed events unfolded, ideas seemed to crystallize in my head, then they sort of incubated for a while like the ingredients in bread dough, taking on new shapes, getting bigger. My priorities and even my actions started changing and I liked it. Then one day I realized I was starting to believe. I think when I opened the door a crack to the possibility of God, His spirit came in like yeast and pulled the ingredients together and then I experienced belief growing. But I had to choose over and over to invite Him into my world and, when I did, I discovered this God thing was a whole lot bigger than I thought at first.”

Ben was the agnostic son of a Presbyterian preacher. He knew every academic argument for faith and had an academic rebuttal for each. He described himself as "Nowhere Man!"  When he got cancer he told me he felt "lost, adrift and afraid" and for the first time since childhood he prayed. Then what happened was like a J-PEG download of the old sterile god-stuff from his adolescent brain to his adult heart. The information hadn’t changed, but everything else had. “I never believed in the cosmic invisible God in the sky until He met me in the depths of my pain and I could feel His presence”. Against the backdrop of the life he had lived, all of a sudden, it made sense, it felt different - and it made a difference. “My life has changed in ways I would never have imagined, ways that I just plain rejected before. I am amazed!”

Christopher told me that God invites us into a theater of great expectations where commitment is the only price of admission. Once paid, each attendee gets a new pair of glasses, sort of like those yesteryear 3-D ones. Nothing changes on the screen of life, but our perceptions and understanding does. We start to see another dimension of reality through God's eyes. And when we do, our behavior changes, not as a function of arduous discipline, but because seeing things differently leads to different desires and decisions; we hope more, but in a different direction and expect it to happen.

Charlie said he attended church occasionally because it made his wife happy, but   he was pretty turned off by some hypocrites there who called themselves Christians. Then he realized that not everyone given a fishing rod catches fish and everyone who hears the music can dance, but that doesn’t change the truth about the existence of fish in the stream or the rhythm in the music. When he concluded that he had made a mistake by confusing the wannabe Christians with Jesus himself, Chris felt freed up to get to know the real Jesus. "I think I had a faulty mental model of who Jesus is and as a result I couldn't see him even when he was right in front of me. And talking to people who had never met him, but thought they had, didn't help. They just sent me on the wrong course."

Margie described how through the years she had become completely churchified then bagged it all. When I ask her what she meant by that she explained that her faith had been wrought with obligations, should-haves, shouldn’t-haves, better-nots, shame-on-you-ifs, but never about getting to know Jesus. She told me she had confused her church with God Himself and had been marching to the music instead of dancing with God - then rejected both. It was not until she realized that the church, though well intentioned, remains a human creation and, as such, sometimes falls short of God's intention, that she was able to reconsider either one.

 She had found herself another church which nourished and inspired her and actually introduced her to Jesus. When that happened she said it felt like a load was taken off of her back and replaced by an upwelling of passion in her heart. “Want-tos" replaced the “better-nots". Passion about the things that matter to God replaced the dread of breaking God’s rules.

 It didn't happen all at once. She needed to stand in the doorway of every room of her life, fling open each door and invite Jesus in. Then she quoted in Ezekiel 36:26 – 28 "I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. I will put my spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees."

Carol thought she had “PTFD”: Post Traumatic Faith Disorder. When she looked back at the last few miserable months of her life, she realized that her suffering was tempting her to doubt her faith. It didn't make sense. All along she had had faith in the goodness of God and then she came face-to-face with cancer.  Whenever she had observed others suffer she had assumed they didn’t really know Jesus the way she did. She had learned from the Bible to expect suffering and she had read Jesus’ words, "blessed are they that mourn” but somehow she had expected, if she stuck close to God, she would dodge the strife. When she started to experience real suffering and really suffered, she began to wonder if her faith was real, if God was real, – maybe it was all imagined, maybe just wishful thinking?

She realized how easy it had been to sign up for salvation and to experience the joy of worship, but now she wondered whether it was all a charade. It had come so easily at first, but once cancer came, the world turned dark and doubt was everywhere. Much later God had come to her in the darkness and helped her pick up the pieces of her faith that “had collapsed all over the floor like a house of cards blown down.”

She couldn't begin to tell all that she had learned, but she did say that without her suffering her eyes and heart would not have been opened to where God really wanted to lead her. It was as if the wounds of her cancer were the windows that let God’s light shine in deeper that it had ever penetrated before. Now she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt, in her heart, that her God loved her. She knew He was not the cosmic sadist she had called Him; if there had been any other way than suffering to teach her, He would have provided it - and He wouldn't have had to tell her to expect it.

Now He was calling her out of her suffering to a new purpose, a purpose outside of herself and in spite of her illness, one that lifted her life out of the doldrums of focusing on her own limitations. She found in Scripture evidence that those who suffer greatly, but nobly, will enjoy a greater capacity to serve God in heaven, (*Philippians 2:8, Matthew 20:20 – 23, Romans 8:18, 1 Peter 4:13) and that encouragement “called her thoughts out of the present and into the future, away from the physical into the spiritual and toward a purpose beyond the temporal into the eternal.”