Thursday, March 01, 2007

• Currently Reading The Life You've Always Wanted By John Ortberg see related

  Luxury
  
  Sitting here in the comfort of my living room, new notebook computer in my lap, exchanging ideas with you....priceless. 
  
  This notebook allows me to multitask like never before.  I can now be on the computer, monitor the kitchen (read: fridge and pantry) for signs of unauthorized invasion and watch the Bulls beat Golden State....all-the-while looking for Jeremy and Josh in the stands of the United Center.  Jeremy got two tickets to the game tonight...10 rows from the floor behind the visitors bench.  It's Josh's first basketball game.  He was so excited that he ransacked his drawers at 9 this morning in search of basketball shorts to wear to the game tonight.  I can't wait to hear about his night!
  
  An interesting thing happened today.  I began the day by calling my sister, Ash.  She's a new mom recently... 5 months ago she had her third child, Ava and has once again found herself smack dab in the middle of diapers, drooling and the doldrums.  She's a brave lady.  I know that I could have never willingly gone back to the baby days once my youngest had reached 7...but she did and we are all the better for having Ava in our lives.  It hasn't been a easy time.  For the past year or so, her husband has been looking for a new job and she hasn't really been able to work.  With the weight of workless days hanging over their heads they have been forced to look to God to provide and though he has in amazing ways, the blessings, at times, have been a difficult thing to bear.  I respect her courage and pray for easier days to come...or should I? *see story
  
  As we were talking this morning I was praying for some word of encouragement to come.  Then I thought of something I had recently read.  In my weekly small group, we have chosen to study The Life You've Always Wanted by John Ortberg, and I asked her if I could share a story from the first chapter that really touched me.  When she agreed, I began to read it and as I did, it began to touch me, convict me, and teach me....all over again.  It was a story within a story, really.  John Ortberg was quoting a story that a friend of his had written.  His friend learned a deep spiritual lesson at the hands of a very old, blind and crippled lady.  It's a story that has power....power because Truth lies at it's core.  It's a story I had hoped would bless and encourage my sister...yet it possibly ended up blessing me more.
  
  I thought about Mabel's story for quite a while after Ash and I got off the phone, pondering it's implications for my life...and then my life took over and I was off to tennis drills and working out.  My exercise choice of the day was the treadmill.  An unusual choice for me since I can habitually be found on the elliptical (sp?) machine.  I hoped right on, plugged in my headphones, began walking and turned on the TV.  Oddly and instantly, I was greeted by the face and voice of John Ortberg.  Wow.  "That's weird."  Clearly, the person walking his or her way to health before me had been watching the Wheaton College TV station....which is often just still shots of the campus or a previously recorded choir concert...however, at this time of day, on this very day it was rebroadcasting a chapel service that was given a month ago.  I wanted to listen.  I could tell what he was saying was good stuff and I wanted to listen...but I kept getting distracted by the two TVs hung from the wall.  There was no sound, mind you, but one was broadcasting the Ellen DeGeneres Show and the other, Inside Edition.  At first, on Ellen, there were the crazy pet videos...the squirrel hanging onto the whirling bird feeder was quite an attention grabber and the Inside Edition was plastered with bikini clad models, stories of plastic surgeries and several other stories of seduction.  At the same time, my ears were filled with John's words...talking about Jesus.  What did John say about him?  Jesus is Light and in him there is no darkness at all....no greed, lying, gossip, anger, hatred, envy, spite, fear, jealousy.....no darkness.  His words were filled with power.  Truth.  It was enticing.  And yet my eyes were constantly being pulled away from the screen directly in front of me to the trash on the wall. ("Ah...wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from this body of death?")  The contrast between the objects fighting for my attention was nothing short of starkly shocking and just as shocking to my "higher" mind was the fact that there was a fight at all.  How in the world could I be torn between THOSE two things?   Then I heard "The state run convalescent hospital is not a pleasant place" and instantly, the battle was over.  It was the beginning of the story I had just read to Ashley earlier in the day.  It was the story of Mabel.  Clearly, I needed to hear it, yet again.  And so I did.  I listened with rapt attention.  God used this story to pull my heart and mind and eyes back to Him today and to remind me of why I'm really here and what I'm really longing for.  I want to take the time to share it here.  Certainly,you don't have to read it but if you do choose to, you will be blessed.  Of that I had no doubt.  So...without any further adieu...may I introduce you to Mabel....
  
  "The state run convalescent hospital is not a pleasant place.  It is large, understaffed, and overfilled with senile and helpless and lonely people who are waiting to die.  On the brightest of days it seems dark inside, and it smells of sickness and stale urine.  I went there once or twice a week for four years, but I never wanted to go there, and I always left with a sense of relief.  It's not the kind of place one gets used to.
  
  On this particular day I was walking in a hallway that I had not visited before, looking in vain for a few who were alive enough to receive a flower and a few words of encouragement.  This hallway seemed to contain some of the worst cases, strapped onto carts or into wheelchairs and looking completely helpless. 
  
  As I neared the end of this hallway, I saw an old woman strapped up in a wheelchair.  Her face was an absolute horror.  The empty stare and white pupils of her eyes told me that she was blind.  The large hearing aid over one ear told me she was almost deaf  One side of her face was being eaten by cancer.  There was a discolored and running sore covering part of one cheek, and it had pushed her nose to one side, dropped one eye and distorted her jaw so that what should have been the corner of her mouth was the bottom of her mouth.  As a consequence, she drooled constantly.  I was told later that when new nurses arrived, the supervisors would send them to feed this woman, thinking that if they could stand this sight they could stand anything in the building.  I also learned that this woman was 89 years old and that she had been here, bedridden, blind, nearly deaf and along for twenty five years.  This was Mabel.
  
  I don't know why I spoke to her - she looked less likely to respond than most of the people I saw in the hallway.  But I put a flower in her hand and said, 'Here is a flower for you.  Happy Mother's Day, and then she spoke.  And much to my surprise, her words, although somewhat garbled because of her deformity, were obviously produced by a clear mind.  She said, 'Thank you.  It's lovely.  But can I give it to someone else?  I can't see it, you know, I'm blind. 
  
  I said, 'Of course,' and I pushed her in her chair back down the hallway to a place where I thought I could find some alert patients.  I found one, and I stopped the chair.  Mabel held out the flower and said "Here, this is from Jesus."
  
  That was when it dawned on me that this was not an ordinary human being.  Later, I wheeled her back to her room and learned more about her history.  She had grown up on a small farm that she managed with only her mother until her mother died.  Then she ran the farm alone until 1950 when her blindness and sickness sent her to the convalescent hospital.  For twenty-five years she got weaker and sicker, with constant headaches, backaches, and stomaches, and then the cancer came too.  Her three roommates were all human vegetables who screamed occasionally but never talked.  They often soiled their bedclothes, and because the hospital was understaffed, especially on Sunday's when I usually visited the stench was overpowering.
  
  Mabel and I became friends over the next few weeks, and I went to see her once or twice a week for the next three years.  Her first words to me were usually an offer of hard candy from a tissue box near her bed.  Some days I would read to her from the Bible, and often when I would pause she would continue reciting the passage from memory, word-for-word.  On other days I would take a book of hymns and sing with her and she would know all the words of the old songs. For Mabel, these were not merely exercises in memory.  She would often stop in mid-hymn and make a brief comment about lyrics she considered particularly relevant to her own situation.  I never heard her speak of loneliness or pain excpet in the stress she placed on certain lines in certain hymns.
  
  It was not many weeks before I turned from a sense that I was being helpful to a sense of wonder, and I would go to her with a pen and paper to write down the things she would say...
  During one hectic week of final exams I was frustrated because my mind seemd to be pulled in ten directions at once with all of the things that I had to think about.  The question occured to me, 'What does Mabel have to think about - hour after hour, day after day, week after week, not even able to know if it's day or night?  So I went to her and asked, 'Mabel, what do you think about when you lie here?
  
  And she said 'I think about my Jesus.'
  
  I sat there and thought for a moment about the difficulty, for me of thinking about Jesus for even five minutes, and I asked 'What do you think about Jesus?'  She replied slowly and deliberately as I wrote....:
  
  I think about how good he's been to me.  He's been awfully good to me in my life, you know....I'm one of those kind who's mostly satisfied ....Lots of folks wouldn't care much for what I think.  Lots of folks would think I'm kind of old-fashioned.  But I don't care.  I'd rather have Jesus.  He's all the world to me.  And then Mabel began to sing and old hymn:
  
  Jesus is all the world to me
  My life, my joy, my all.
  He is my strength from day to day
  Without him I would fall.
  When I am sad, to him I go.
  No other one can cheer me so.
  When I am sad He makes me glad.
  He's my friend.
  
  This is not fiction.  Incredible as it may seem, a human being lived like this.  I know.  I knew her.  How could she do it?  Seconds ticked and minutes crawled, and so did days and weeks and months and years of pain without human company and without an explanation of why it was all happening - and she lay there and sang hymns. How could she do it?
  
  The answer, I think, is that Mabel had something you and I don't have much of.  She had power.  Lying there in that bed, unable to move, unable to see, unable to hear, unable to talk to anyone, she had incredible power.  Here was an ordinary human being who received supernatural power to do extraordinary things.  Her entire life consisted of following Jesus as best she could in her situation: patient endurance of suffering, solitude, prayer meditation on Scripture, worship, fellowship when it was possible, giving when she had a flower of piece of hard candy to offer...
  
  ....For anyone who really saw Mabel - who was willing to 'turn aside' a hospital bed became a burning bush; a place where this ordinary and pain-filled world was visited by the presence of God.  When others saw the life in the hospital bed, they wanted to take off their shoes....they were standing on Holy Ground.  Do you believe such a life is possible for an ordinary human being?  Do you believe it's possible for you?
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

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