Changing Lenses

A good friend recently asked me about relating to people in broken places like the church, family, work, etc. Here is a little bit of what I shared with them (after doing a little bit of editing and adding a bit more context):

Over the years I’ve gone through a paradigm shift in how I see people and their circumstances. I used to see people as either more important / way smarter than me (which most are anyway) or lower than me (which does nothing for my humility). This lens would set me up to be either severely disappointed when the smarter folks failed and let me down (which they often do) or angry at them when they wouldn’t treat me right or make a decision I didn’t agree with. Viewing people as lower than myself just fed my need to feel important – to be like the smarter folks.

Today, I’m seeing more people through a lens of hurt – whether its’ a self righteous person, a single mom, some parents at their wits end, someone sitting at a table with me during Sunday School, the secretary at a doctors office, or a customer I’m meeting with. I try to imagine what they think about when they lay in bed at night. What are they worrying about. When was the last time their spouse or son just held them – just because. Part of changing lenses comes with learning to just shut up and listen and watch. Part of it comes with circumstances being sovereignly dealt our way and being around hurting people. Part of it comes with God humbling me and reminding He’s God and I’m not. It’s all God, though, no matter how you look at it.

Having a different perspective in how I see and listen to people impacts how I relate to them. It doesn’t change the fact that I may disagree with them on something, but I’m less likely to hold a grudge or be angry when I honestly know, in one way or another, they are likely hurting deep inside. As a result, I’m more likely to want to serve them. I’m trying to relate to that person the way I hope God is seeing me – a man full of sin, sometimes angry and frustrated at the circumstance He’s sovereignly placed me in, but desiring to love and serve Him.

Wrapped In a Blanket of Moisture

Fog is a strange thing.

From a distance, we see a formidable wall of gray and white that we’ll go to any lengths to try to avoid. It’s thick, unknown, and thoughts of navigating through it make us queasy. There is no other path of travel to get from point a to point b, though.

As the fog gets closer, a well defined wall becomes softer around the edges, it’s lines less defined. Patches of white here and there draw us in without us even knowing it. Before long, we’re  in the middle of a canopy of white – and it feels welcoming, yet still uneasy.

Traveling through fog requires a slower pace. It’s the only way to see that sudden bend in the road or the flashing red light ahead.

It’s because of the fog that a distant white light now becomes visible.

Faces become softer when viewed through this lens of moisture.

A red barn nestled away in a valley becomes a place of rest.

Wrapped in a blanket of mist, a church on the top of a hill beckons us.

Climbing the Pikes Peak Incline

Kathi, Dawn Rockett, Lanie Thompson, Ann Pacheco, and Kelly Schwab climbed the steep and grueling Pikes Peak Incline today. I cheered them on from the comforts of bed.

Yesterday…

Some things are difficult to convey in words, but I’m going to try to describe how big yesterday was for Maggie and the rest of our family.

Some background first: over the past 9 months, Maggie’s physical health has been in a slow, but steady, decline. Food was making her nauseous again and, consequently, she wasn’t eating well. This is typical of temporal lobe problems. Since December ‘08, she’d lost 12 – 15 pounds, and she didn’t have it to lose. Maggie’s weight loss finally got the attention of her doctor several months ago and ordered last weeks hospital stay.

Well, in between that last doctor appointment and last week’s hospital stay, Maggie had a follow-up with her oncologist. Her weight loss caught his attention too. Hoping to just help Maggie until she could get admitted for testing, he prescribed an appetite stimulant that is common for oncology patients, which I’ll call “X”. I can’t get into the specifics of the “X”, but needless to say, it worked in some extra-ordinary ways. Within several weeks she gained four pounds.

What no one expected, though, was how much “X” helped her brain, nerves, anxiety, and struggles with over stimulation. Suddenly, she could communicate more clearly, interact, process, solve problems. She had a natural glean in her eyes that we hadn’t seen in years. Her teachers, speech therapists, physical therapist, etc all remarked that they had not seen this side of Maggie in a very long time, if ever. Things the speech therapist had been working for years on with Maggie were suddenly clicking. “X” does not normally  have this effect on patients. However, it had a rare positive paradoxical effect for Maggie. Whereas Maggie usually experiences the worst rarest side effects in most of her medications, she experienced the rarest best side effect in this medication. She stayed on this medication up until last weeks hospital visit.

Jump to last weeks hospital stay: two positive things came out of last weeks hospital stay. 1) We learned that Maggie’s seizures are largely under control. 2) the anxiety, nerve pain, and over stimulation she suffers with are common problems with people who have had temporal lobectomy’s. The biggest struggle for temporal lobectomy patients is treating the anxiety and nerve pain, which is usually done with anti-depressants. Her doctors were quite amazed at the positive effect “X” had one Maggie, but were very concerned about the long term effects and other risk factors. In no uncertain terms, they wanted her off of “X” and wanted to begin experimenting with other drugs. They didn’t even want to talk about putting her back on “X”. We had finally found a drug that was doing more for Maggie than anything else done over the past several years and they wanted to yank it and begin experimenting. We would have to go up to Denver every week to meet with the doctor, let them examine Maggie for side effects, tweak the drug or try a new one.

We knew where this was going and knew that the next year was going to be quite the trial for Maggie – a roller coaster of emotions, rashes, not feeling herself, etc. She came home from the hospital on one of them, and was clearly not herself. Her speech therapist remarked to Kathi this was like watching Maggie deteriorate all over again. After a few days of that nonsense and consulting with some other doctors, I decided to put her back on “X”. Within 4 – 6 hours, she started feeling much better. By Sunday, We had Maggie back.

Our first followup was yesterday and we knew the doctors would not be happy that we put her back on “X”. In fact, they had already decided what new drug to begin Maggie on, and for all they knew, this meeting was about starting her on that. However, over the weekend, Kathi and I had decided to pursue a different route, and again, after consulting with some other doctors, decided that the benefits of taking “X” far outweighed the risks and improved Maggie’s quality of life better than anything that had been done before. We went in to yesterday’s meeting wanting them to keep her on “X”, and we knew the odds of that happening were greatly stacked against her.

The first 3/4’s of the meeting went as we expected – they listened to us, but were clearly not budging. They had their protocol all layed out and it wasn’t matching up with what we wanted to discuss. Then, something happened. The head doctor’s mind suddenly changed. He said “Well, $%!#, if its’ working, let’s keep her on it for at least the next 3 months and watch her closely. I don’t understand how this is helping Maggie, but clearly she is benefiting in a way we don’t yet understand. If you’ll bring her in for a consult every month, then I think this will be ok. I still want to consider switching to something else down the road, but let’s take this time to learn more about Maggie and give her this stability.” Like that, his mind was changed and Maggie was saved, at least for now, from a roller coaster year of emotional and physical  experimentations. God’s promise of protection was over that meeting and we saw it play out before out eyes.

All of this may sound like a minor thing – a medication issue. However, this was a huge win for Maggie, and for us as a family. As Kathi and I were discussing this morning, we can’t remember a victory like this since her doctor decided to remove the tumor six years ago. We were battling for Maggie’s quality of life, her day to day, and God protected her.

God is always working in all situations, but sometimes He allows you to watch Him turn the head of a king mid-meeting, and then gives you an unexpected gift. That is what happened yesterday, and “thankful” doesn’t even come close to describing our hearts. Our pastor’s sermon this past Sunday on Abraham and Abimilech and the outcome of yesterday’s meeting are not coincidental. We watched Mark’s sermon play out  and it was beautiful thing to behold. Praise be to God.