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Exchanged Glory IV: A Time for Every Purpose
I was born into a family shaped by destructive forces that I didn’t know how to handle, so I had imitated my mother in order to find some way to survive. Unfortunately, she was in many ways emotionally damaged, and I had adopted her disabilities.
In the year 2000, about a month after the prayer I shared in Chapter Fifteen, “Sobbing through the Neighborhood,”[64] a number of us joined my mother for a vacation by the ocean. During our time together, we noticed that she wasn’t doing well. She shuffled when she walked and was dropping objects. She was also thin – a trait we had noticed a few weeks earlier – but we had decided to wait until after vacation before pressing her to go to the doctor. Now that we saw her other symptoms, we wondered if that had been a wise choice …but we didn’t want to ruin her vacation (or face her reaction), so we decided to wait until we got home before saying anything.[65]
After arriving home from vacation, my mother immediately went to bed. When my sister came to see her twenty-four hours later, she was still asleep. She woke up and said that there seemed to be something wrong with her left hand. She wondered if she was having a stroke. My sister said, “Mom, you have been that way for two weeks. Didn’t you notice?” She hadn’t.
The two of them went to the emergency room, where I joined them. We had an eerie feeling as we sat in the same room in which we had learned about my father’s death fourteen years earlier.[66]
The doctors performed tests to try to determine what was wrong. At one point, they asked my mother if she was having trouble breathing. She said she wasn’t, except for a little bit of a smoker’s cough. My sister then corrected her and pointed out that her breathing had been bad for years. They wanted to take a chest x-ray, but my mother said, “If they do that, it could all be over.” My sister and I talked her into letting them do it.
The x-ray came back showing a large cancerous tumor in her lung. A CAT scan of her brain showed several small tumors there also. The brain tumors had caused her brain to swell, which was why she had difficulty walking and using her hand. The fact that the cancer had spread from her lungs to her brain indicated that she was in the final stage of the disease. Without a miracle, there was no hope for recovery.
We all pushed ourselves through the procedures required by the rest of the day. We talked to doctors and learned about what my mother would be facing. Finally, we drove home.
I arrived at my house operating on autopilot – not sure of what I was feeling or should feel. I prayed. After a short time, I felt the Holy Spirit impress on me that this situation was part of the mystery of God’s plan. I should look to see what He was doing and to try to be a part of it.
I knew I couldn’t predict what would happen. My mother might be miraculously healed, which was what I sought based on His word, but no matter what happened, this situation would serve some purpose. I should trust Him, listen for His voice, and try to follow His leading.
My mother’s oncologist estimated that with radiation and chemotherapy she might live a year. She began treatment immediately and stayed with my family during the first part of this process. For about two weeks, she spent time reflecting on her life, and my wife and I were fortunate enough to be there when she talked about it. Her words allowed me to piece together a much clearer picture of my family history:
My great grandparent’s marriage had fallen apart because my great grandfather had taken up the habit of going on drinking binges. He would disappear for days at a time, so my great grandmother divorced him. As a result, her children grew up without much support or money.
My grandmother tried to build a better life by marrying a talented man (my grandfather) who had come to the United States from France. He had an interesting story of how he almost didn’t make it across the Atlantic. He was scheduled to travel on the Titanic, but a frightening dream caused his mother to cancel their reservations and book a trip on a different boat. If she hadn’t, it is likely he would have died.
My grandfather, unfortunately, became an alcoholic and an adulterer. When my mother was five years old, he spoke in his sleep about his mistress, and my grandmother confronted him about the affair. When he didn’t deny it, she divorced him.
It was such an ugly split that my mother rarely saw her father, and the family resentment remained until after his death from lung cancer. He was so disliked that I never met him. I don’t even remember seeing a picture of him or hearing him mentioned while I was growing up.
This was during the great depression, and my grandmother had to work. Since she couldn’t be home for most of the day, she put my mother into a Catholic boarding school. My mother lived there during the school year and spent the summer at her aunt’s. Though she was treated well at the school, she felt like no one wanted her. Her father especially, showed little interest. Though he became a wealthy businessman, he paid only a dollar a day in child support.
At the Catholic boarding school, my mother developed a belief in God. It wasn’t well formed, and she didn’t go to church for most of her life, but I could tell that He had touched her in some way. I believe her faith influenced my decision to accept Christ when I was fourteen years old. She told me she used to pray for me with tears when she saw the emotional difficulties I faced as a child. I am grateful that God heard her and brought me into His kingdom.
One piece of history that was totally unexpected was that my mother had been molested on two occasions. (Neither incident was related to the boarding school she attended.) She had never before told anyone about these incidents, and we might not have found out about them except that my wife walked in on her one day while she was crying. My mother told her that her tears were from gratitude that her life had turned out as well as it had in spite of her beginnings. Though she had been abandoned and abused, God had blessed her in many ways.
I cried when I found out. I was grateful that my mother had protected me from the kind of childhood she had endured. I had always thought of her as a generous woman; now I was even more impressed. She certainly had her problems, but she had worked hard to spare her children from the worst of what she had faced.
I talked with my mother for a few minutes about the times she had been molested. I’m sure I will always remember that conversation, because it was one of the only times we had talked heart to heart. When I realized how seldom I had connected with her in this way, it surprised me. I began to see that though my mother was kind and generous, she was usually about the business of getting work done. She didn’t seem to know how to become close with her children. The forces that had shaped her had left her with serious emotional scars.
I came away from our discussions with a better understanding of the prophetic message from Chapter Ten that I had broken generational curses when I came into the kingdom. The issues I struggled with for most of my life (addiction, sexual sin, emotional difficulties …) had plagued my ancestors for at least three generations.
At first my mother peacefully accepted the news of her approaching death. I had read about the steps of the grieving process: denial, bargaining, anger, depression, and acceptance – and I expected her to go through them. She seemed to jump right to acceptance, and I didn’t know what to make of that.
After a couple of weeks, however, she changed her mind. She decided she wasn’t going to die any time soon, and she began to plot her recovery. She became irrational as she came up with creative ways to get around the doctor’s diagnosis. My sister and I thought that the brain tumors, chemotherapy, and steroids were combining to take away her ability to think, but even when these influences faded, she continued to insist that cancer wasn’t going to stop her.
At the same time, however, she acted as if she had very little time left. Many of the desires she had been waiting to fulfill suddenly became extremely important to her. One of the first was to sell her house and move into a condominium. She put so much effort into working around her house to make this happen that she sometimes almost fell asleep standing up. (I don’t even know how that was possible.) She refused to take time to rest.
I saw something that had always been in my mother, but I had never before put a name to it – she was a street-fighter. When she set a goal, she suppressed or transformed any emotion that might hold her back from it. Depression wasn’t allowed. Anger was focused into activity that would get work done. Doubt about her ability to “beat this thing” was tossed out as unacceptable. Nothing was going to stop her!
By this point in her life, she had committed herself to Jesus and was going to church. She trusted that God would make some way for her to get better, but it was hard to tell whether this was faith or denial. I suspected that her belief that she would receive a miracle was largely based on her feeling that no other option was acceptable. One thing was clear, however: If cancer was going to drag her to her grave, she was going to leave claw marks in the ground the whole way there.
My mother’s desire for independence surged, and she decided she didn’t need my sister and me to take care of her. We told her she needed help, but she kept disagreeing with us …and proving us wrong. When we advised her to lower the price of her house so she could sell it more quickly, she held it high and sold it quickly anyway. When we told her she wouldn’t be able to buy her new condominium on the date she had picked, she signed the papers exactly when she said she would. When we wanted to hire someone to take care of her, she chose to stay by herself and did quite well for over a year. My sister and I began to wonder if for the rest of her life we would ever win a disagreement with her.
My mother’s friends told us she needed to rest and let people take care of her. After all, she was going through an incredibly difficult treatment of a terminal disease. My sister and I agreed, but we couldn’t figure out how to get her to cooperate.
In the final analysis, my mother’s approach worked for her, at least in the beginning. Not only did she live on her own, but she doubled every estimate the doctor gave her. After he had told her she might live a year, she lived for two. Even at the end, when he told us she had at most eight weeks left, she hung on for twenty.
The cancer finally caught up with her, however. A year and a half after her diagnosis, her friends found her lying on the floor speaking incoherently. The brain tumors had once again caused her brain to swell, which had combined with dehydration to take away her ability to function.
Her friends dialed 911 and called for me to come over and help. When the paramedics showed up, she wasn’t aware of what was happening and asked them why they had come. She looked especially unhealthy, as a blood vessel had broken in her eye, making the white part bright red. They told her that I had said she didn’t look good, and they were there to help.
It was the wrong thing to say to my mother; she wasn’t about to admit that she was losing her battle with cancer. As they wheeled her out – bald, gaunt, and misshapen from over a year of disease and treatment, too weak to stand – she looked at me with disbelief and accusation through that bright red eye and said, “You told them I didn’t look good!?”
The image stuck with me. Though my mother wasn’t herself that morning, it was a picture of her defiant unwillingness to give in to what was happening. The disease hadn’t changed her spirit. No matter what was going on, she insisted she looked good!
I saw in my mother’s defiance the little girl whose father had abandoned her, who had been shipped off to a boarding school, who had been molested, and yet who had refused to let any of it stop her from living a successful life. Her years had been filled with enough difficulties to cause anyone to break down, but she wouldn’t give in. Why should she treat cancer any differently? She died as she had lived – refusing to believe that adversity could stop her.
This kind of a stance is difficult, however. It’s hard to ignore injured emotions, and my mother used nicotine and alcohol to ease her pain, eventually leading to her premature death. During her last two years I, for the first time, was able to see her without these drugs in her system, and I realized how much she reminded me of an exaggerated picture of myself. Though she fought different enemies, the stance was the same. We both ran roughshod over our emotions and pursued what we believed needed to be done.
I had been doing it full throttle for the past few years (and partially for most of my life), but I had chosen not to use the drugs that could have soothed my heart in the struggle. It’s no wonder I was feeling so much distress.
I, at last, understood why smoking and privately acting out had helped me with my schoolwork while in college.[67] It was the only time in my life when I had fully lived in the style I had learned from my mother. My addictions had eased the pain of my harassed emotions and allowed me to concentrate on my studies. I also understood why my job continued to be such a source of temptation for me. It was the main place in which I continued to override my inner life while refusing the medications that would make my approach feel workable.
Though the street-fighting lifestyle I had picked up from my mother was better than giving up, I knew that God was allowing me to watch her for a reason. The prophecy I mentioned in Chapter Ten said that I didn’t know where I had come from. More and more, I was learning. I was born into a family shaped by destructive forces I didn’t know how to handle, so I had imitated my mother in order to find some way to survive. Unfortunately, she was in many ways emotionally damaged, and I had adopted her disabilities.
I still wasn’t sure exactly how to fix that, but I knew the Holy Spirit was leading me. He had changed me a great deal already, and I knew He would continue to work. His wisdom was stirring my heart to no longer run roughshod over my emotions. Instead, I treated them as friends whose opinions I valued. I listened to them and counseled them, avoiding their advice when it was bad, yet trying to respect them as valuable parts of me. The street-fight was coming to an end.
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