Running from Your Strength

In 2011, I led a four-man team of men from the Spuzzum First Nation in a trail building project, and one of them told me a story.  

A First Nations man had a recurring dream. In the dream, a grizzly bear would come over a mountaintop and chase him.  Each time, the man would run away, barely escaping.  

One day, the man was on a long bus trip.  He dozed off, and had the same nightmare on the bus.  But this time, the bear chased him up a tree, and the man barely escaped its claws as the bear swiped at him. The bus stopped at a rest stop, and the man was still visibly shaken.  

An older Indigenous man asked him what was troubling him, and the man told the elder about his nightmare.  The elder listened, looked at the man, and then walked away, laughing and laughing. 

The man became very angry with the elder.  He said, “Here I am.  I have told you something very personal, something that’s upsetting, something that has bothered me for a long time.  And you laugh at me!”  

The elder looked at his new friend with kind eyes and said, "My son, the grizzly is your protector.  You see, you are running from your own strength.”    

You be the Coffee Tree

Sue and I have decided to take another run at growing hanging potted plants:

Not our house. Not our hanging plants.
Not our circus.  Not our monkeys. 

The trick, we’re told, is to water them every day. No, water them only when the pot feels light.  Use Miracle Gro.  Pinch the buds.  We’ve heard it all, and with our house on the market, if it doesn’t sell it will be because we have not pinched our potted plants. 

Of course, no one who's ever been to Sunday school can hear the pinch-the-plant piece without thinking of Jesus’ assertion that God does the same with us in order to make us more fruitful:

"I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinedresser. Every branch in me that does not bear fruit he takes away, and every branch that does bear fruit he prunes, that it may bear more fruit.  (John 15:1-2)

No offense, but I’ve heard it, lived it, been there.  Sunday School.  Discipleship 101.  But have you ever feel more than “pinched” or “pruned?”  I know readers have, because you’re coming out of the woodwork to share your story with me.  Then I heard from a missionary couple our daughter stayed with recently. 

Hannah traveled with a friend to Guatemala recently to visit missionaries Shawn and Natalie Sagert, who serve with Commission to Every Nation.  Shawn and Natalie’s home church is Southside, in Chilliwack, BC where we happen to attend as well.  (Nice that our oldest kids picked their church and it’s the same one Sue and I go to).  Shawn and Natalie were commenting on the Guatemalan coffee industry in their latest newsletter, and went on to make this observation: 

"I’m from BC so I at least know that all fruit-bearing trees need regular pruning to produce the best yields, yet I have never seen a plant treated so brutally as the coffee tree.  Just as it’s peaking in production output, the tree is not so much pruned but hacked all the way down to just one stem and left to begin life all over again.  Has anyone else felt like that?  It’s God’s business to shape us any way He chooses in order for Him to draw out our potential.  In life, hack jobs can happen at any stage of growth without regard to how you feel you're doing." 

Now THAT got my attention.  Ever feel hacked right to the ground at your prime?  Shawn writes, “It’s God’s business to shape us any way He chooses in order for Him to draw out our potential.”  And you can trust Him.  However hacked you may feel at times, perhaps even now, there’s a deeper meaning, a bigger perspective, a larger narrative of which your story is part.  “Resistance is futile.” Oh, you can resist all right, and shrivel and die and grow bitter with self pity.  Or you can open your heart to the hand of God, who can use the adversity of circumstance in a fallen world to re-shape your heart into something new, with a peace and a purity – fruitfulness more invigorating and lasting than that cup of jo in the morning. 

"I may have cancer, but cancer doesn’t have me."

I met Ann Maree in 2003.  She left us on Friday, July 1, 2011.  She was a warrior.

It was unlikely that we would meet, and it was even less likely that we would stay at all connected for the remaining years of her life.  I barely knew her really.  But what I knew was an example of fight and tenacity and stubborn optimism and sheer refusal to give up or give in.  Ann was diagnosed with cancer soon after I met her. 

She chaired the search committee of a church that considered calling me as their pastor.  If she’d had her way I may have ended up there, but as it happened they called someone else and I came to Canada.  When Ann emailed me that she had a deadly form of cancer I didn’t expect her to last more than a few years.  That was eight years ago.  She extended her life through her tenacity, the love and support of those closest to her, and medical care I can only begin to imagine. 

A cyclist myself, I was refreshed to learn Ann was pursuing cycling as part of her treatment and lifestyle.  It seemed only natural that she would link up with Lance Armstrong’s Livestrong Foundation, and I could only smile when I learned that she shared the cover page of a cycling publication with the seven time Tour de France winner. 

Her husband Al knew better than anyone that “Ann was a firm believer in helping others through their own journey, no matter what life-threatening illness they were battling,” as he wrote on her blog annsjournies, recently.   

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.

2 Corinthians 1:3-4

Ann knew firsthand that suffering, when processed through the eyes of faith, gives birth to the ability to comfort those who suffer.   “As she has always said, ‘I may have cancer, but cancer doesn’t have me.’”  

What is holding you back today? What cancer, what seemingly insurmountable problem, what disability, what affliction, what wound, what injury, what devastation, what terminal illness, what circumstance is confronting you?  How will you respond?  Whatever issues you have, those issues don’t have you.  They don’t define you.  As Canadian poet Robert Service has said in his poem The Quitter, “to fight and to fight when hope's out of sight -- Why, that's the best game of them all!”  And that, most surely, is a “game” Ann Maree surely won.