6 May 2017
Summer 2016
So. Fear. It's like the ragged bush in the backyard. I cut most of it out last fall. I snipped the new shoots as they came up from the ground this spring. But the root ball, let's just say, is here to stay. Apart from digging up the 100-year-old, different variety of tree, next to it. There's no eradicating the source. Only managing it.
Maybe that's not a good analogy because God OFTEN eradicates the rootball of fear in someone's life.
Let's just say that in my life, fear keeps growing back.
I got rid of it at first on a bed in a cabin in the jungle of Belize. Where I lay most hours of the day praying and writing in my journal and Giving Life and Its Impossibilities Over to God. Indeed. I didn't know I was getting rid of fear to face cancer, but I was. Because I was drawing close to my Creator and the closer you get to Him the less fear there is.
I have a lot of pending death around me now. I won't expound on that. I will just say that it seems like in every arena of life right now, someone might die. Including me. Yes, I'm 5 years this side of cancer - which is called "cancer free" by the record-keepers. But is it really gone? I never wondered at all until now. AFTER the 5 year mark. What is that?
My pups are 13 now. They are elderly dogs with gray faces and sore hips and slow movements. Eli has lost a lot of his hearing, so he doesn't even know when you're in the room unless he feels the vibration of you walking. (If I talk in a high voice, he can hear, but not a normal voice.) I have been realizing that one day soon I will lose one of them, or both of them. It brings a sort of panic to my heart. Everyone dies, that's just life. But they are woven into me. They sniffed out cancer on my leg. They went to Belize with me. They almost died in Belize for me. Eli from being put into a dog fighting ring; Guthrie from his pancreas shutting down. They survived. Now they are old. Some dogs live to be 20, I keep telling myself. Then everyone they meet has a look of awe that they are 13. Most everyone I know who had dogs when I got Elias and the Gute has lost their dogs by now.
They are close to me at all times in ways they never were. Eli was always the one to be in my way under my desk. Now that spot is Guthrie. Eli was always the one to guard me and Guthrie might be nonplussed in the other room. Now Guthrie is beside me and Eli lays in the living room near the air conditioning. They used to run like the wind, like prisoners set free, at the least opportunity to escape my grasp. Now if they get away, and they hear me coming, they run to me like best friends.
There was the rub. Guthrie slipped out of the house when I came home. I was carrying chips and didn't want to Crush them, so I grabbed only Eli and missed Guthrie's collar with my chip-holding hand, single finger extended in a hook to snag the Gute. Ah well, I thought. Don't crush the chips. Put Eli back inside and Guthrie will be in the back yard. He wasn't. If ever he gets loose, the Gute runs away from people and toward creature life. Therefore, away from streets and toward yards and woods and the like. I couldn't find him so I considered checking across the extremely busy four-lane street. I took Elias, so it would seem to Guthrie like we were on a walk and he Belonged with us. It worked too well. I called out to him and he appeared, but I had crossed the street. He came running down the sidewalk with JOY that we were all out on an adventure like this. JOY. I looked left and right. Six cars in two lanes coming from the west. Eight cars in two lanes coming from the east, with more coming over the hill. I couldn't run to him between the cars, and he didn't know not to run to me. I watched him with no strength at all. My subconscious mind thought this was why I kept wondering if they would die. Today was it. Gute could never cross this street alive and I could not stop him. He lunged away from a pickup that roared passed him. Maybe that would scare him away from the road. No. He ventured to cross. A good, good samaritan in a little sedan saw the problem. She braked and honked and honked for the oncoming cars to see him. Gute crossed in front of her and across the yellow line as two cars, side by side came into my field of vision toward him. To say I ducked my head and screamed a blood curdling scream does not describe what happened. Then silence. They...stopped. Maybe they had heard the honking, maybe my scream startled them. Guthrie passed through the traffic like the sea had been parted, and like he was such a Good Dog for finding me through the fray. Traffic carried on. I don't know - I didn't see - who stopped and spared the life of Gute. I fell on my knees and put my face in his fur and I cried from what didn't happen.
It was oddly like when my own life didn't end. When I kept living and living longer when the prognosis from medical doctors was "You Will Die" if you don't do surgery, if you do this unsanctioned natural cancer treatment. I didn't stop living at all. In fact, I realized it was Bonus Life. I completed the first life given to me. This was new time. Bonus round.
I gazed upon the beauty of the Gute and thought: God has purpose left for you, too, small hound. If it were your time to go, you would have been gone, pup. Under the tires of car upon car. But he parted the cars for you like he parted the river for Moses.
Why, I wonder? What is left for the Gute to do on this earth.
I'm not afraid the Gute will die. Because he didn't die. God is still sovereign over creatures, over us. When we DO die, it is not a tragedy, it is a progression. A moving on. A completion, no matter how incomplete it feels for those grieving left behind. God reminded me that he holds life and death in his hands. When Guthrie or Eli do die, it will be because God said it was time. Their time was complete. Same for me. Same for you.
No fear.
Fast forward one year. May 2017. That bonus life has taken a twist. First of all, when you don't die, you feel veritably invincible. Like you had something to do with it. Like nothing else can take you down. Oh, until the next thing.
So. Fear. It's like the ragged bush in the backyard. I cut most of it out last fall. I snipped the new shoots as they came up from the ground this spring. But the root ball, let's just say, is here to stay. Apart from digging up the 100-year-old, different variety of tree, next to it. There's no eradicating the source. Only managing it.
Maybe that's not a good analogy because God OFTEN eradicates the rootball of fear in someone's life.
Let's just say that in my life, fear keeps growing back.
I got rid of it at first on a bed in a cabin in the jungle of Belize. Where I lay most hours of the day praying and writing in my journal and Giving Life and Its Impossibilities Over to God. Indeed. I didn't know I was getting rid of fear to face cancer, but I was. Because I was drawing close to my Creator and the closer you get to Him the less fear there is.
I have a lot of pending death around me now. I won't expound on that. I will just say that it seems like in every arena of life right now, someone might die. Including me. Yes, I'm 5 years this side of cancer - which is called "cancer free" by the record-keepers. But is it really gone? I never wondered at all until now. AFTER the 5 year mark. What is that?
My pups are 13 now. They are elderly dogs with gray faces and sore hips and slow movements. Eli has lost a lot of his hearing, so he doesn't even know when you're in the room unless he feels the vibration of you walking. (If I talk in a high voice, he can hear, but not a normal voice.) I have been realizing that one day soon I will lose one of them, or both of them. It brings a sort of panic to my heart. Everyone dies, that's just life. But they are woven into me. They sniffed out cancer on my leg. They went to Belize with me. They almost died in Belize for me. Eli from being put into a dog fighting ring; Guthrie from his pancreas shutting down. They survived. Now they are old. Some dogs live to be 20, I keep telling myself. Then everyone they meet has a look of awe that they are 13. Most everyone I know who had dogs when I got Elias and the Gute has lost their dogs by now.
They are close to me at all times in ways they never were. Eli was always the one to be in my way under my desk. Now that spot is Guthrie. Eli was always the one to guard me and Guthrie might be nonplussed in the other room. Now Guthrie is beside me and Eli lays in the living room near the air conditioning. They used to run like the wind, like prisoners set free, at the least opportunity to escape my grasp. Now if they get away, and they hear me coming, they run to me like best friends.
There was the rub. Guthrie slipped out of the house when I came home. I was carrying chips and didn't want to Crush them, so I grabbed only Eli and missed Guthrie's collar with my chip-holding hand, single finger extended in a hook to snag the Gute. Ah well, I thought. Don't crush the chips. Put Eli back inside and Guthrie will be in the back yard. He wasn't. If ever he gets loose, the Gute runs away from people and toward creature life. Therefore, away from streets and toward yards and woods and the like. I couldn't find him so I considered checking across the extremely busy four-lane street. I took Elias, so it would seem to Guthrie like we were on a walk and he Belonged with us. It worked too well. I called out to him and he appeared, but I had crossed the street. He came running down the sidewalk with JOY that we were all out on an adventure like this. JOY. I looked left and right. Six cars in two lanes coming from the west. Eight cars in two lanes coming from the east, with more coming over the hill. I couldn't run to him between the cars, and he didn't know not to run to me. I watched him with no strength at all. My subconscious mind thought this was why I kept wondering if they would die. Today was it. Gute could never cross this street alive and I could not stop him. He lunged away from a pickup that roared passed him. Maybe that would scare him away from the road. No. He ventured to cross. A good, good samaritan in a little sedan saw the problem. She braked and honked and honked for the oncoming cars to see him. Gute crossed in front of her and across the yellow line as two cars, side by side came into my field of vision toward him. To say I ducked my head and screamed a blood curdling scream does not describe what happened. Then silence. They...stopped. Maybe they had heard the honking, maybe my scream startled them. Guthrie passed through the traffic like the sea had been parted, and like he was such a Good Dog for finding me through the fray. Traffic carried on. I don't know - I didn't see - who stopped and spared the life of Gute. I fell on my knees and put my face in his fur and I cried from what didn't happen.
It was oddly like when my own life didn't end. When I kept living and living longer when the prognosis from medical doctors was "You Will Die" if you don't do surgery, if you do this unsanctioned natural cancer treatment. I didn't stop living at all. In fact, I realized it was Bonus Life. I completed the first life given to me. This was new time. Bonus round.
I gazed upon the beauty of the Gute and thought: God has purpose left for you, too, small hound. If it were your time to go, you would have been gone, pup. Under the tires of car upon car. But he parted the cars for you like he parted the river for Moses.
Why, I wonder? What is left for the Gute to do on this earth.
I'm not afraid the Gute will die. Because he didn't die. God is still sovereign over creatures, over us. When we DO die, it is not a tragedy, it is a progression. A moving on. A completion, no matter how incomplete it feels for those grieving left behind. God reminded me that he holds life and death in his hands. When Guthrie or Eli do die, it will be because God said it was time. Their time was complete. Same for me. Same for you.
No fear.
Fast forward one year. May 2017. That bonus life has taken a twist. First of all, when you don't die, you feel veritably invincible. Like you had something to do with it. Like nothing else can take you down. Oh, until the next thing.
Epilogue
6/14/22 - I don’t remember tonight which “next thing” happened in May 2017 that I didn’t finish writing about. To cause me to say that bonus life had taken a twist. And I can’t possibly enumerate the twists since then. Elias and the Gute are several years with their Maker now, running like they’ve been set free, among the pups of heaven. I drive a post office mail truck one day a week for my own entertainment (and to deliver parcels for the USPS) and often find myself singing little ditties in the truck. And one day one of the songs I used to sing to Eli and Guthrie burst out of me with glee. And I had a picture in my mind, of two hounds in the heavenly places, who stopped in their tracks, ears perked, eyes intent, watching for me to appear on the horizon.
Not yet boys, I thought, though in their sense of time, just the blink of an eye. In my sense of time, a bit longer.
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