I have always kind of steered away from that, because it seemed
like it is prayer for God to heal
if
it’s his will, and I cannot imagine
healing and wholeness
not
being God’s will for anyone. But I
don’t know how that fits into God’s plan, because death and
suffering do happen and it has often been a vehicle to bring
other things to pass. I would really appreciate the prayer with
hands laid on me, if it could be done in the sense that I find new
courage and joy and peace. I do not want to be the focus of attention. There is such a tremendous struggle going on in so
many places all over the world, and so many other people are
sick and dying, so really I would like it to be a laying on of hands
for all the suffering people in the world.
Later Carole wrote to my wife:
As I understand it, my cancer is already quite widespread, which
Dale and I have suspected for quite a while. If chemotherapy
gives only a small chance of recovery, we don’t want to sacrifice
the last months of my life with days and nights vomiting and
being totally out of it. It is not an easy decision. We all want to
“do something.” But perhaps the best thing may be simply to
look to God for strength, peace, and courage to face whatever
comes, which we want to do in any case. You know, my faith is a
bit like a damp dishrag. I don’t have any question that God can
heal…I never read in the gospels that Jesus said, “I don’t want to
heal you.” But I don’t – and can’t – have any idea how God plans
our lives. The only thing we know for sure is that Dale and I want
our lives to be in God’s hands. And whatever form that takes, we
are not only willing but eager, with heart and soul, for that to
happen.
I really must witness to the power of prayer. My whole life
has been one tremendous fight against depression, against
suicide, and I even had to be kept under strict watch at times.
There were also times when my spirits were very high and I was
unpredictable. The members of our church have prayed for me
continuously, even when I had no courage whatsoever to even
go to worship meetings, and in these last years I’ve also been
faced with the fight against cancer. All I can say is that for me the
battle was won five years ago when tremendous victory was
given over my mental illness – when the darkness of depression
had been so thick that I could even visualize death. This is completely gone now, and it is making my fight against cancer much
easier. No one should feel sorry for me, because I can only say I
have tremendous joy, and what I experience now in my fight
with cancer is nothing compared to that fight against depression and suicide years ago.
Over the last year of her life, Carole was continually in our prayers.
She still had her ups and downs and shared them openly, not only
with my wife and me, but also with other members of our congregation. A few months before she died, she wrote to me again:
With a free and very relieved heart, Dale and I want to stop the
whole medical process now, even if the cancer has spread to my
liver. Medically there is really no chance for me, and to go into
heavy-duty chemo next week would just be the end of things. I
don’t want to waste any more time in that way. None of us
knows what God has in mind for us, be it life or
Life,
and with or
without chemo, all we want is God’s will for us. What means so
very much to me in these days is to be up and around, working
when I can, and to be in constant contact with young people,
people who are enthusiastic for life. All of that will not be possible if we undergo another round of chemotherapy.
Just to say again – we have not been able to, or even wanted
to, ask for healing in our personal prayers. This doesn’t come out of
any “holy” conviction, but it’s just that we feel deeply that God’s will
is
going to be done, with or without medicine.
And in another letter:
I just want to tell you that these last few years have been the
happiest of my whole life, in spite of the cancer. I’ve always been
so frantically afraid of death, and now I’m just waiting for it,
whenever it happens. Dale and I have both been given this
indescribable gift – the prayer of the church. I don’t think in all
our lives we have experienced so much peace and happiness
and very deep joy. It’s just a wonder to us both. The physical pain
is sometimes hard to bear, but even that is relieved, knowing
that help and prayer are always there.
We’ve talked together about dying many, many times. Dale
said that the time when he really faced losing me was when I
went into the lock-up ward during a bout with depression. He
said he feared I would never be able to “come back,” and now
we’re so very much more together, even though we’ve had a few
rough patches since then, but who hasn’t?
Dale and I feel that we need to really make use of the days
and the minutes we have left together. We have often talked
about how we wasted probably
years
of our lives with grudges
and things we couldn’t work out, or we had trouble in our
marriage because we couldn’t find humility with one another.
We cannot change those things now, so we just have to keep
making a new beginning every day.
My death will not be easy for Dale, but because of the
togetherness we feel, it is also a tremendous comfort for us both
that we have each other in our hearts. We love the talk and
laughter of the young people in the evenings. Conversation and
laughter are such precious things, and so encouraging to one in
my situation.
If we always think, well, maybe tomorrow we’ll do this, or
tomorrow I’ll follow through on that, it doesn’t make sense. We
actually don’t have tomorrow. None of us has tomorrow. We
only have today and we only have each other, the person sitting
next to us, the person we work with. That’s a tremendous
challenge to me – to really make use of every minute I have.
To Carole, making every minute count simply meant thinking of
others. But that was no mere cliché. Thinking of the loneliness Dale
would suffer after she was gone, she told him more than once that
she hoped he would remarry, and even suggested Ida, a close friend
who was raising an adopted child on her own. Ida had prayed repeatedly for a husband, and a father for her child, over many years.
As Carole explained in one of her last letters to my wife and me:
I know this may seem strange or unusual, but I have given Dale
my wedding ring. I cannot see putting it in a grave. I want it to
be used again. I want him to remarry, and we have talked openly
about this. It is a mystery, something I hardly understand –
giving Dale up and yet feeling so very close to him. But it is also a
joy to be able to be so completely open and honest with one
another. People say love will “find the way,” and we’ve
reminded each other of this too. It’s so true. I am sure that if we
really live and die in God’s will, our hearts will be together
forever.
Following Carole’s death, a friendship did in fact develop between
Dale and Ida, and then a deep love. After some time Dale proposed,
and they are now married.
No matter how remote God sometimes seems,
I believe he is
never far away. Like the angel who stood with the Hebrew youths
in the fiery furnace, he is always there –Emmanuel, God with us. He
joins us in our pain. But what can we say to the despairing person
who feels that God does not hear her cries?
Janine, an acquaintance, sent me the following thoughts last year
during a time of turmoil in her family:
Our four kids are in their bumpy teen years. It is stressful as we
try to balance the freedom we want to give them as they grow
into young adults with the guidance we know they need. Just
the regular parent-teen thing, you know. But my husband seems
to take it all a bit harder than normal. As the conflicts seem to
escalate, his resolve weakens. The kids, insecure, push him further, asking for – yet challenging – each boundary.
A terrifying event many years ago, when our lives were
physically threatened, still shakes my husband badly and haunts
him. Moving from our home of twenty-five years, and taking a
new job for the first time in many years, adds tension. His emotional stability corrodes, and he succumbs.
This is depression with a capital D. Not discouragement, not
just a state of being down, or sad, or low. Depressed: numb, absent, flat, grey, gone. For me, it’s a matter of living with someone
who is no longer the same person I married: where are you, my
husband? Blank.
Our sons react, not comprehending. My daughter grows
quiet and turns inward, confused. I am angry, then frustrated,
then stoic. Meanwhile, as days become weeks, my husband’s depression drags on, and his self-confidence trickles away. We pray
each day, asking for help. We attend worship and prayer services
at our local church, hoping things will improve. Some weeks are
better. Sometimes even a few months go by and everything
seems okay.
When there are bad days, I just tell myself to hang in there.
After all, I’ve always been the optimistic, organized, have-it-alltogether type.
But then I’m stopped in my tracks. One night, while I am taking a shower, my husband realizes my second son is not at his
desk doing homework as we thought. Noticing the attic light on,
he investigates and finds him peering down through the ceiling
vent, watching me, naked.
I am nauseated, devastated. I feel totally betrayed. Looking
at women – every boy and man has felt that pull. I’m not stupid.
But sneaking into the attic to watch your mother shower?
We take our son to counseling, but it doesn’t seem to solve
anything. In the meantime my husband goes into a tailspin and
drowns in a new sea of depression. I am stranded, left to face the
doubled darkness and the pummeling waves alone.
I pray. More often than before, and more earnestly than
ever. Lord, help me! Help my husband! Help my son! I pray. More
counseling and the encouragement of close friends, and time, all
help us to keep going, and even to heal.
But then everything falls apart again. One day the phone
rings. Answering it, I hear a slimy voice inviting me to take part
in a dirty joke. Sickened, I slam the phone down, hard. Why in
the world would such a call come through to our number?
I call my husband, and together we confront our son. Yes,
he’s been calling 1-800-dirty joke, and quite regularly. Yes, he’s
still bound to voyeurism; yes, he’s still deceiving us. My adrenaline rushes. I’m so angry I don’t know what to do. I try to be loving, but firm. My husband just stands there, silent, the depression crashing in over him again. My heart feels scorched, but I
harden myself, determined to fight with all I’ve got.
Months pass, but our family goes from bad to worse. Our
oldest son becomes rebellious, dishonest, estranged from us. Our
second continues to peep at people in bathrooms and showers.
The youngest becomes demanding, selfish, wants to get out of
the house. I can’t blame him. Our daughter grows quieter and
quieter. My husband loses more ground and tries to compensate
for his feelings of parental failure by giving in to every whim of
the children in an effort to win their love.
When my son lies, my husband even takes his side, separating himself from me, and when I find out the truth, he feels more
of a failure than ever. We go round and round, up and down. I
feel like so many windows of our marriage have shattered, it is
impossible to walk between the shards. What to sweep out?
What to repair? I want to scream, I want to run, but I can’t. I
don’t.
People say, “I’ll pray for you.” Or, “Just pray.” They’re right.
But sometimes those phrases get bloated with the promise of
magic – abracadabra – and then it’s twice as hard when they disperse, empty, into thin air. Of course, I go on praying anyway, all
the time, unceasingly, as the Bible says. Like the widow, I bang
on the judge’s door every day so that God will tire of me and
answer in exasperation. I pray during the long sleepless nights. I
fast, many times, secretly, so my Father will repay in secret. Tears
flow in place of words, for God knows my need better than I do.
I ask. I seek. I knock. I shout, because God is so far away, and I
want to make him hear me!
I begin to get migraine headaches, which isn’t as bad as the
herpes virus I contract; that brings a constant searing pain to the
spinal-cord area of my back. I agonize, day after day, for my family. In between I try to live. I see suffering all over the world – unbelievable chaos and death. My own needs shrink in comparison.
I begin to pray that God’s will be done. After a while I recite
the Lord’s Prayer over and over, while I work, while walking,
whenever I can, because I don’t know what to say to God anymore. I know what I want: I long for my sons to be freed from
the bondage wrecking their young lives, and from the bitterness
eating at their hearts. I long for my husband’s depression to be
overcome. I long for God’s victory in our family life, for his kingdom to break into our lives.
And in this last longing, I begin to see a way forward. Up till
now, I have been too concerned with finding a solution for myself, an end to my struggling. I have tried too hard to run a tight
ship, been a slave too preoccupied with efficiency and perfection. I have been loveless, and lacked sufficient feeling for my
husband’s deep need.
Forgiveness – both asking for it and granting it – now gains
an importance it never had in my life. We go into family therapy.
We try to concentrate on finding the right priorities in our lives,
and we try to seek for God in one another. At a retreat, we
broaden our horizons by opening our eyes and ears to the burdens of others, and through this find new courage to share our
own. I blurt out my despair, and a woman tells me simply, “Hold
firm. And pray.” She says it quietly, resolutely, with a sincerity
that has known suffering, and it fills me with new hope.
And it begins to dawn on me just how powerful true prayer
is. I had no glimpse of it back when life was normal. It was our
helplessness that forced us to our knees. We are as empty now,
as then, but we are certain God will help us. He alone has the
answers we need – to our children’s waywardness, my husband’s
depression, and the despair that attacks me. So we keep praying!
There are still battles, but if there weren’t, how could there
be victories? My husband and I pray that God will continue to
lead us. We pray for the many who have worse needs than our
own to carry. We pray for an earth assailed with unfathomable
suffering.