My "new normal" isn't very normal!

My whole life if I wanted to do something, I just went out and did it. I played four sports, broke horses, could work all day. When I was in high school during the summer, I would go play a basketball tournament and play three games in a day. We used to put up 12,000 bales of hay a summer so I'd spend all day out in the field throwing hay. I spent a summer in Wyoming where it wasn't uncommon to put 20-30 miles on in a day out riding horses. That means spending 10-14 hours a day in the saddle.

That was my normal.

Fast forward to today. After seven weeks of radiation and 14 months of chemo I am a different person. I get winded walking a block. I can't push a round bale over by myself. We had a flat tire on Friday coming home from Chicago and it took everything I had to change the tire. I was totally spent for the rest of the day.

When I come home for a weekend it's a constant battle between what I want to do and what I ought to do. I want to play golf, do work around the house, fix fences, go for walks, mow the lawn, ride horses and more! If I felt healthy it would be hard to fit all that in in a weekend. However feeling how I do now means I probably have to choose one of those for the weekend and even then I may spend the rest of the weekend prostrate on the couch.

Two weekends ago I chose to go horseback riding. A good friend of mine hosted a ranch roping day at his ranch and so I saddled up and went over last Saturday morning. It was a beautiful day, and as Ronald Reagan famously said, "There is nothing as good for the inside of a man as the outside of a horse."

I felt great. Ranch roping is a combination of horsemanship and camaraderie. It was a great group of guys and I met some new friends and caught up with some old ones. I'm not a great roper and was doing a lot of learning as well as teaching my new horse how to be a rope horse. We started out well. I caught on my first time in the pen. I worked the cow with Legado (Spanish for legacy). He did great too!

As the morning went on, I started to feel less than 100%. My whole life when I've felt this way I just bear down, grit my teeth and fight through it. I had wanted to spend two to three hours riding. I'd only been there 45 minutes. I fought it trying to convince myself that it was just a blip and I would perk up soon. Instead I gradually slid further and further into exhaustion.

My performance showed. I started throwing horrible shots. I got frustrated with Legado because I thought he wasn't listening. In reality I started to ride worse and worse. I was sending mixed messages and he didn't know what to do. Instead of fighting through the fatigue, and improving, I made the situation worse. The end result is I never caught another cow, had to leave early, and spent the rest of the weekend wasted on the couch.

I often say we're not going to let this cancer rule our lives. I've still been able to work full time even through the radiation the last month and a half. I stayed fairly active going golfing, horse riding, and even playing basketball during last winter. As much as I can I have tried to live a "normal" life, but no matter how much I try to cowboy up, I still have cancer. I still am going through treatment, and I am still beat down physically.

My life isn't normal.

So how do I judge whether cancer is ruling my life?

Not by what I do, but by how I respond. I'm going to live in obedience, with joy and hope and thankfulness. That ought to be my normal no matter how I feel. So if I can't ride for three hours I should be thankful for forty five minutes. If I can't play basketball I should be thankful I can golf. If I can't put hay out, I should be thankful I have a wife and friends who can help me.

I can't control how I feel but I can control my attitude. There will be a day when I feel back to normal but until then I can still live my normal life in smaller doses.

p.s. thanks a lot Kirk Wolters and Way Out Here Photography for some great shots!

Starbucks, Jacob, and Rachel

This afternoon around 3:15 p.m., I stopped at the Grand Haven Starbucks for the second time today and ordered another grande Blonde roast with one creamer and two Splendas.  Now, lest you think that I'm a freewheeling spender, I was gifted a Starbucks mug for Christmas (from one of my students!) that allows me to go to Starbucks the entire month of January and fill it up with brewed coffee for NOTHING.  I didn't even know that such a thing existed.  Now, since I am a quarter Dutch and it's January 30th, you'd bet your sweet bippy that I'm going to get every last drop out of that mug.  I've got quite a reputation around the GH Starbucks for being the blonde that likes Blonde roast and Splenda.  I totally get their marketing strategy though.  They sell those mugs so that people can give them as Christmas gifts, and people like me who normally brew their own coffee at home to save money get totally HOOKED on expensive coffee and become regular customers.  Yeah, I'm onto you Starbucks...and guess what, your evil scheme totally worked.

So what does this have to do with Jacob and Rachel?  Absolutely nothing, except that I'm awake at 11 p.m., no thanks to my Starbucks addiction... and I likely will be awake for quite some time...so why not blog about a topic that's in my head?

So, God taught me an important truth about attitude through the story of Jacob and Rachel as I read it recently.  While I can't relate to bigamous relationships, manual labor, or really anything about their culture, I can relate to certain parts of their story and namely, their attitudes.

Here is a link to Genesis 29, which tells their story.  As you read it, notice a couple of things.  First of all, Uncle Laban was in the sheep business.  I don't know how much you have been able to experience sheep, but my best friend growing up had sheep for a couple of years.  Sometimes I'd be at her house, and she would have to do something regarding the care of these animals and I would tag along to their pen with her.  I remember very little about sheep except that they are stupid, that they excreted really foul-smelling stuff, that they were messy and difficult, and and that hers were named Salt and Pepper.  Helping my best friend occasionally feed her sheep (or chase one if it got out of its pen) is really all I ever want to do with them.  So I find it very remarkable and frankly - depressing - that Jacob agreed to work for seven years in a disgusting job to marry the woman that he loved.  However, he put his nose the grindstone and kept a positive attitude during those seven long years (v. 20).  I like that about him.

Contrast that with the woman he married, Rachel.  As lovely as Rachel was on the outside, if you look closely at her character, she has a lot of problems.  Rachel suffered from a condition that I can relate with, the "I want what I can't have" syndrome.  The biggest object of her desire was to have a child.  It wasn't enough to be Jacob's beloved and preferred wife, but she possessed an all-consuming desire to have a child and went to great lengths to procure one.

However, even when she finally had a natural son, she wanted more.  And her greed didn't stop there. If you keep reading in Genesis, she took her father's terephim so that her husband would be the principal among Laban's male heirs.  She was continually discontent in her circumstances, always looking for the greenest grass.  Contrast that attitude with the humility that her husband showed to his deceitful uncle and to his tricky wife, and I'd say that you have a pretty huge divide in their character at this point in their lives.

Sometimes lately I have felt like Rachel.  I have to check my attitude to make sure that I'm not allowing discontent to breed itself within me, and I will tell you that it is hard.  Keeping an attitude of thankfulness is not an easy thing when I feel like my life and my dreams have been ripped away from me.  It's so easy for me to become jealous of others like Rachel was jealous of her sister Leah, and to forget the blessings that God has given me in abundance.

I think that Jacob is the one that I'd rather emulate.  He treated his difficult wife very well, which is an admirable thing in and of itself.  His attitude was good in the midst of his hard labor. Yes, he chose to endure his hard labor for Rachel's sake, and I didn't choose my situation.  But rather than complain about the sheep droppings in my life, I too could focus more on my Beloved (and I'm talking about my Heavenly father here, not just Ryan!) and minimize my self-centeredness.  My attitude in the midst of this journey is positively correlational to the amount of time I spend praying for God's will to be done in my life.  Being like Rachel and continually looking to what's around the corner or how I can squeeze out of a situation that I don't like only leads to discontent, anger, and a loathsome attitude.

So today, after I have had a really long, hard day of feeling sorry for myself, I choose to act more like Jacob and put my nose back to the grindstone.  I'm not sure how long we'll be on this journey, but no matter how long it is, my complaints and pity parties would be better left by the wayside.  After all, positive attitudes sound much more melodious than negative ones.


P.S. Shout out to my grandpa-in-law for the bippy comment!

What do you see in your clouds?

This was Oswald Chambers' "My Utmost for His Highest" devotional for today, and it blew me away.  God's character is unchanging, and His goodness is as evident in the overcast days as it is when the sun is shining brightly.

WHAT DO YOU SEE IN YOUR CLOUDS?
"Behold, He cometh with clouds." Revelation 1:7 In the Bible clouds are always connected with God. Clouds are those sorrows or sufferings or providences, within or without our personal lives, which seem to dispute the rule of God. It is by those very clouds that the Spirit of God is teaching us how to walk by faith. If there were no clouds, we should have no faith. "The clouds are but the dust of our Father's feet." The clouds are a sign that He is there. What a revelation it is to know that sorrow and bereavement and suffering are the clouds that come along with God! God cannot come near without clouds, He does not come in clear shining. It is not true to say that God wants to teach us something in our trials: through every cloud He brings, He wants us to unlearn something. His purpose in the cloud is to simplify our belief until our relationship to Him is exactly that of a child - God and my own soul, other people are shadows. Until other people become shadows, clouds and darkness will be mine every now and again. Is the relationship between myself and God getting simpler than ever it has been? There is a connection between the strange providences of God and what we know of Him, and we have to learn to interpret the mysteries of life in the light of our knowledge of God. Unless we can look the darkest, blackest fact full in the face without damaging God's character, we do not yet know Him. "They feared as they entered the cloud . . ." - Is there anyone "save Jesus only" in your cloud? If so, it will get darker; you must get to the place where there is "no one any more save Jesus only."

A matter of perspective

Many people may not know this about me, but this time last year I was full fledged into a serious depression. I spent the better part of 6-9 months in a dark place emotionally.

Here is the weird part... everything was going right. I had just gotten a great promotion at camp to be the marketing director, my son was born in April, Kendra and I had settled into a new house, and Kendra got a new job at a great school district. Everything was going right, except me. I was going very very wrong.

Fast forward a year and it would appear the situation is reversed. Kendra has been laid off, we have been diagnosed with a life threatening cancer, there are days when it is a struggle to be able to put in a full days work, my physical effects are keeping me from doing things I love to do in the summer. Yet emotionally spiritually I'm doing pretty good right now. I have moments and frustrations, but by and large I feel great as a person.

Why am feeling the way I do? It's all about where I put my choices. I can not control my circumstances. I can control my choices. I'm choosing this time not to rely on my own strength and no matter what God lays in front of my, I commit to him to trust him. A silly part of why I felt so bad last year is that I felt God was pulling horses out of my life with my new job. I didn't want to surrender that area. Now there's a very real chance that God is pulling many other things out of my life, and yet because I have surrendered my will to Him, I'm able to be at peace.

We think we have surrendered and learned that lesson. In reality we have proablby only given 95%. That last 5% comes kicking and screaming. It takes catastrophe some giant event to get us over the bubble. I thought I learned the lesson when I was diagnosed in 2007 with the liver disease, and while that radically changed my perception it doesn't even compare to how I view God now through this "high defintion". Yet while it seems difficult to imagine what else God could bestow on me in the forms of trials, what if there is more out there for me to endure? Is it possible to learn this lesson of obedience even more so that I feel I have now?

Yes, I can and I will!

You see Christianity is a process. You haven't ever arrived. If you had fully actualized who God made you to be, then I think you get checked out of this earth. What else is there left for you to do. So long as you have room to grow, there will be trials. I don't want to go through any more trials right now, but I would love to know what it feels like to be even closer to God.

PS

I am sorry I haven't posted more lately. There are may days when my mind doesn't feel like its working completely and it's hard to put my thoughts together. When I do feel well I'm trying to get caught up on everything that piles up while I don't feel so hot. I will try to be a little more regular again on here. Thank you beyond words for your prayer and support. We're overwhelmed and humbled. We are very excited about the rodeo for ryan benefit, mostly to see all the friends and family who are behind us, and meet the new ones we haven't met yet.

Choose your attitude

Wow, what a couple of weeks it has been. I have not gone longer than 12-20 hours with out getting sick, and I have battled constant nausea, diarrhea, and fatigue. We were given an entire week to vacation at a beautiful lodge and I wasn't able to enjoy much of it. I've been in and out of the hospital twice. I've lost quite a bit of weight among other things.

It has been a difficult time. I'm hopeful that I'm starting to come out of it. All the doctors seem to agree this is just part of the chemo and nothing more serious. Thankfully my blood work, and counts, and hydration were all healthy at the hospital.

In the midst of all this I have had to make a choice. Will I choose to focus on my circumstances and all the things that seem to be going wrong, or will I choose my attitude and stay positive? A long time ago I somewhat learned how to choose my attitude and stay positive and focused in the midst of difficulty.

When I was a sophomore in high school, I got moved up to the varsity basketball team. This was something I had worked hard to achieve for many years. I was excited and anxious for our team to do well. That was short-lived. We went 0-21 that season. In the course of that kind of losing streak you will encounter every possible way to lose, distraction, and difficulty. I had to battle upperclassmen for my starting position, had a difficult coach, we lost team chemistry, had bad refs on some nights, and everything else you can imagine went wrong that season. 

Every practice and every game night I showed up ready to work hard and expecting to compete if not win. I knew we were not a good team, but I chose to believe that on any given night we could come out of this slump and turn it around. I had to choose to be positive and kind with my teammates. I had to choose to run my sprints just as hard as I had in pre-season. The only thing I could control that season was my attitude and how hard I worked.

With cancer the only thing I can control is my attitude. I can't control if the chemo is working. I can't control my side effects. I can't control much, but what I can control is so important.

One of my favorite Bible passages for dealing with adversity is Romans 5:3-5

³ Not only so, but we^[a] also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; ⁴ perseverance, character; and character, hope. ⁵ And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.

Another way of saying it is, "rejoice in your suffering". Wow God? Really? Rejoice. That's the last emotion I have right now. Fortunately God isn't calling me to feel like rejoicing, because I don't. He's calling me to rejoice. Which requires a decision, a choice in the face of difficulty. The promises are rich however, as suffering leads to perseverance, then character, and finally hope in Jesus Christ through His Holy Spirit. 

Just how to we make this decision? 

2 Peter 1:3 His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness.

God promises us that if we know Him, He will give us everything we need. Everything, including the ability to remain joyful in the face of difficulty. It is not through my own strength or depth of character that I stay positive. It is through the power that God grants me through my knowledge of Him.

So whatever you're facing today, remember that you don't have to face it by yourself. When everything feels like it is out of control, there is a lot that you can control.