Tuesday 19 March 2019

Still Quarrying 13.

Until now I haven’t had much experience of medication.  Headaches, indigestion, skin rashes have all been largely dealt with by over the counter products.  Now I am on a daily regimen of six different drugs including an anti-coagulant which I have to inject.  This is apart from the chemotherapy.  It takes a bit of organisation and there are inevitably times when the routine slips.  That’s when you appreciate having someone to remind you and if necessary to give you a nudge.  I often look around me in the waiting room at the Beatson and see frail, exhausted people and wonder how they manage to cope with their particular treatment program.  I can only pray that they have the same support as I have.  

Accepting your dependance on others is part of the cancer experience.  Quite simply no one could get through this on their own.  Apart from the skills and wisdom of the medical people there are so many practical needs that have to be met.  It is not advisable for me to drive at present so lifts to the Beatson have to be organised and friends have not been slow to step up.  Part of you feels a bit vulnerable.  Needing to be lifted and laid like this is not the way you like to think of yourself.  But there comes a time when you have to acknowledge and accept dependance.  And Jesus encourages us to embrace this wholeheartedly.  In John 21: 18-19 he sees the vulnerability of old age as being a metaphor for faithful Christian discipleship.  Jesus said to Peter:

 ‘Very truly I tell you, when you were younger you dressed yourself and went where you wanted; but when you are old you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go.”  Jesus said this to indicate the kind of death by which Peter would glorify God. Then he said to him, “Follow me!”’


Jesus making it clear that there will be times when Christian witness will emerge not from strength but from weakness, not from the best laid plans but the twists and turns of circumstance, not from the way we like to think of ourselves but the way we are.  In the end Jesus was taken, made subject to the hatred of  men, but establishing a pattern of service at the heart of Christian witness and it involves vulnerability.  Learning to place your life in the hands of God might not be all sunshine and rainbows, as Peter would discover,  but in the service of Jesus what we lose is our gain.   I think it was Dietrich Boenhoffer who said that when Christ bids a man follow he bids him come and die.  The default position of the disciple is to live according to the will of God, trusting in His good and loving purpose,  no matter the cost.