Yesterday I had lunch with a friend, and afterwards we walked across the street to my favorite coffee shop.  While we waited for the barrista to make his mocha and my chai, I browsed the community bulletin board.

A flyer caught my eye.  It said, “Fundraiser Cut-A-Thon May 2nd.”   It offered haircuts at a local salon for a suggested donation of $7.00  At the bottom it said, “All proceeds will go to a cosmetology student that is batling cancer.” 

I took a flyer and showed it to my friend.  “I should do this,” I said.

“But what about your chemo curls?  They’re great!”  he said.  “Maybe you could just give a donation and skip the haircut.”

I nodded, and stuck the paper in my purse and moved on.  He was probably right.  I shouldn’t go through with it.  I couldn’t go through with it.  Could I?

After losing my hair to chemo two years ago, I am extremely attached to my hair now.  My curls are sometimes unruly and uncooperative, but I love them.  I really do.  They are my equivalent of a red badge of courage.  They are at once a symbol of my loss as well as my reward for surviving arduous months of cancer treatment.

My friend Lauren had chemo for lung cancer, and when her hair started to grow back, she let it grow.  And grow.  And grow.  Her curls were unruly, too, but she wouldn’t let anyone with scissors near her head.  “I worked too hard for these,” she used to say.  “I’m not cutting a single inch.”

That’s the stand I took, too.  Until this morning, when I studied the flyer while I was drinking my coffee. 

Could I do it?  Could I part with these curls that have taken blood, toil, sweat and tears – and 24 months of my life – to grow? 

I thought about what my friend said, that I could just give money and not get my hair cut.  But I realized that giving money wouldn’t be any sacrifice.  It wouldn’t cost me nearly as much as a hair cut would. 

David’s words when he was offering an expensive sacrifice to God echoed in my mind, “I will not give that which costs me nothing.”  (my paraphrase)

So I drove to the salon in downtown Gresham, handed over my contribution to the fundraiser, sat down in a barber’s chair, and I let the stylist cut my precious curls.

While she was cutting, I thought about the last time I was in a hair salon, getting my hair cut.  It was two years ago, April 2007.  When I fould out I was going to be having chemo, I decided to get my long blonde hair cut preemptively so I could donate it to Locks of Love.  If I couldn’t have long hair, at least some child going through chemo could have a wig of beautiful blonde hair.

Three of my friends showed up at the salon to lend moral support.  I teared up as they were taking pictures of me pre-haircut, with my long blonde hair still attached. 

One of my friends slipped out, went to a wine shop next door, and bought a bottle of champagne.  She returned with the bottle and four plastic glasses.  We popped the cork and had a toast.  To my hair, I said.  What I really meant was, Here’s goodbye to the life I used to love.  Remember this moment, in case I don’t ever get it back.

To your hair, they said as we charged our glasses.  Cheers.

Three glasses of champagne later, my long hair was gone.  Staring back at me in the mirror was an androgenous face with hair cropped short like a 12-year-old boy, I thought.  I laughed and cried at the same time.  It was too profound a loss to be controlled by any single emotion.

While I was getting my hair cut today, the cosmetology student with cancer came in.  Her tall, thin, beautiful, 19-year-old frame was folded into a wheelchair.  She was wearing latex gloves and a surgical mask.  She’s going through chemo for liver cancer, but she hasn’t lost her hair yet.  It’s long and straight and blonde.  Like mine used to be. 

I smiled at her when her mom wheeled her into the salon.  “I’m Sarah,” I said.  “I had cancer two years ago, and I survived.” 

I recognized the vacant, exhausted, going-through-cancer-treatment look in her eyes. 

And then, for a few fleeting seconds, I saw them brighten with an expression that was more precious than any amount of money, more valuable than all my hard-earned chemo curls. 

It was a glimmer that looked for all the world like hope.

I was reading an article on singleness that was reprinted from Glamour magazine when I came across this priceless quote.

“But hey, there are far worse things than not knowing your romantic future. Imagine being diagnosed with breast cancer, treating it, and beating it … but still wondering at every next mammogram if the cancer will have come back. That’s living with uncertainty.”

You’ve GOT to be kidding me.

The book of Ecclesiastes, which was written thousands of years ago, says, “There is nothing new under the sun.”

You’d think after that wise insight had been taught to hundreds and hundreds of generations, it would eventually sink in.  But it hasn’t.  Not with me, at least.  I thought the recent lessons I’ve been learning about being rather than doing for God was an epiphany unique to me. 

I was humbled to read the following passage written by C.S. Lewis more than 50 years ago. 

     “What is more (and I can hardly find words to tell you how important I think this), it is just the people who are ready to submit to the loss of the thrill and settle down to the sober interest, who are then most likely to meet new thrills in some quite different direction…This is, I think, one little part of what Christ meant by saying that a thing will not really live unless it first dies.  It is simply no good trying to keep any thrill: that is the very worst thing you can do.  Let the thrill go – let it die away – go on through that period of death into the quieter interest and happiness that follow – and you will find you are living in a world of new thrills all the time. 

     But if you decide to make thrills your regular diet and try to prolong them artificially, they will all get weaker and weaker, and fewer and fewer, and you will be a bored, disillusioned old man for the rest of your life.”

                                                                                                                          - C.S. Lewis, Christian Behavior

The other day I was driving on the freeway at 60 mph when I heard a loud bang, and my car began to shudder and decelerate.  I tried to drive to the next exit, but my car was shaking too hard to drive it.  So I pulled over to the side of the road and called a tow truck. 

While I waited, I tried to figure out what could be wrong with my car.  I had plenty of gas, and I’d recently had the oil changed, so those didn’t seem likely culprits.  My Saturn is 11 years old, so it’s not inconceivable that something major, like the transmission, had gone out. 

I thought about popping the hood and taking a look at the engine, but that didn’t seem like a good idea – partly because I was on the shoulder of a major highway with less than 6 inches between me and speeding traffic, and partly because I know absolutely nothing about engines. If I did look under the hood, it would just be for form’s sake, not because I could actually recognize or fix any problems.

When the tow truck arrived, the mechanic helped me out the passenger’s side and over the concrete divider where I could watch him work from a safe distance.  As soon as I looked back at the car, I immediately saw the problem: my rear tire had blown out.  It was flatter than flat, with shards of rubber hanging from the rim. 

The mechanic hooked my car up to his truck, and towed it off the closest exit.  He drove into an abandoned lot, changed my tire, and handed me back my key.  “You’re really lucky it was your back tire that blew out, not your front tire,” he told me.  “When the front tire blows out, most people lose control of their car.” 

I thought about losing control of my little 2 door coupe in rush hour traffic, and shuddered.  I thanked him profusely and, without thinking about it, threw my arms around him and hugged him before I climbed into my car.  (I’m pretty sure he didn’t see that coming).

He waved at me as I drove away.  I made it to my dinner date, only 10 minutes late in spite of the misadventure. 

And I didn’t think much of it after that. 

I didn’t raise my fist to heaven and ask, “Why, God, Why?  Why would my back tire blow out instead of my front tire?  Why didn’t I wreck my car?  Why wasn’t I seriously injured?  Just tell me why!”

That would have been ridiculous, right?  But it is a fair question.  With a 50/50 chance of back vs. front tire blow out, why did the odds fall to the safer of the two options, the one that didn’t get me killed in a fiery wreck?

Because, while I intellectually recognize the equal potential for good and bad in most situations, I instinctively want and expect the good things to happen to me.  Bad things are what happen to other people.

A surgeon who lectured to my class in grad school gave an insightful answer to the question of the difference between major and minor surgery.  “Minor surgery is the one you’re not having,” he said.

I think that egocentric perspective is part of being human.  I certainly recognize it in myself.  I am not nearly as surprised that young women get breast cancer as I was that I got it.

I work in an ER and it does not shock me to see sick people, but it sure throws me for a loop when I get sick.

I am quick to complain when I get the short end of the stick, but think nothing of it when things unexpectedly go my way. 

My parents are happily married and I didn’t have to grow up in a broken home. 

I got to go to college and even grad school. 

I have an interesting job and great friends. 

I love the church I go to. 

I’ve been snorkeling in Mexico, Bermuda and Hawaii. 

We often ask why bad things happen, but maybe that’s the wrong question.  When we live in a world where entropy and the second law of thermodynamics are in effect, and everything seems to be in a process of disorganization and decay, maybe the real question is…why do good things happen to bad people?  Why do good things happen to me?

The piano piece 4′33″ (Pronounced “Four minutes, thirty-three seconds”) was first performed at a piano recital in Woodstock, NY, in 1952. 

Pianist David Tudor took the stage and performed the piece composed by John Cage.  Tudor sat down at the piano…in complete silence.  For four minutes and thirty-three seconds.

The piece is actually composed of three movements.  Tudor opened and closed the keyboard lid to signify the end of a movement and the beginning of the next.  By the time he closed the lid for the final time, many people in the audience had left – some were confused by the silence; others were enraged.

Cage’s point was that even what we consider silence, the absence of intentional sound, is composed of lots of incidental sounds that we notice only when we stop to be quiet and listen. 

I haven’t posted anything on my blog in a few months, because I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, and I’ve been trying to do a lot of listening.  It’s not easy for me.  I’d rather be busy and verbose than still and silent. Silence takes discipline.  Silence is awkward.  Silence requires more being than doing.  And, as Shakespeare would say, there’s the rub.

I am the A-est of Type A personalities.  When I was twelve, I started going to informational meetings offered by medical schools so I could carefully research my educational options.   When I was fourteen, my dad found me sitting on the porch steps one evening, watching the sun go down.  He asked what I was thinking about, and  I told him I was thinking about running for president – and I wasn’t kidding.

When I interviewed at Yale, the admissions committee asked why they should accept me into the program.  I told them, because I was going to change the world, and they would have the chance to say they knew me when.

Then I finished Yale and got accepted into Columbia, and I thought, I knew it!  I knew I was supposed to do something big!

My favorite motto was, “Attempt great things for God.”  Not only was I attempting great things; I was succeeding at them. 

I suppose I should have known that it wouldn’t last forever, but I didn’t.  My mom told me, God made us human beings, not human do-ers. But it didn’t sink in.

Until I got sick and I lost everything I cared about, every opportunity I’d been working so hard to create.  I left my job at Yale, left the journalism program at Columbia, and moved 3,000 miles away.  I wasn’t trying to do anything noble; I was just trying not to let my sadness drive me insane.

I used to have an impressive list of degrees and accomplishments.  For the past year, my big accomplishments have included getting out of bed in the mornings, making myself nutritious food, not getting chemo, managing my crazy curly hair, and staring at the ceiling, trying to figure out what’s next.

I’ve been plotting all the cool things I could do for God in Portland, telling Him what I think the new plan should be. As if I’ve been red shirted, and I’m waiting for the coach to look down the bench, point his finger at me, and sub me back into the game to score the game-winning shot.

But instead of cosmic enthusiasm, I have been met with silence.  And reminders that I am a human being, not a human do-er. 

I was thinking about this the other day when I was reading Luke 18.  The rich young ruler asks Jesus what he’s supposed to do to become a follower of Christ.  He tells Jesus he’s already kept the 10 Commandments, and asks what’s next.  Jesus tells him to go sell everything he had, give the proceeds to the poor, and follow Him.

The rich young man went away sad, because he was wealthy and didn’t want to sacrifice that much to follow Jesus.  And that’s how the Sunday School version of the story usually ends.

But if you read a little further, you see Peter telling Jesus, “We have left everything to follow you!”  I think he and the other disciples saw Jesus’ interaction with the rich young man.  And they realized that while the young man didn’t have the chutzpah to make the sacrifice, Peter and John and the rest of the disciples had done just that!  When Jesus called them, they had dropped their nets, abandoned their boats, resigned their places on the fishing committees, and followed Jesus.

When I see Peter’s statement, I imagine he meant, “Jesus, you know how you said to that guy that to please you he just had to sell everything and follow you?  Well, that’s exactly what we did.  Remember that?  Remember how we gave up everything you asked us to?  We sacrificed everything we had to become your disciples, and we still don’t get you.  We still don’t understand what you’re talking about.  We still don’t understand you.”

The disciples, and many saints who have come after them, learned that what seemed to be the finish line was really the starting gate.  Abandoning everything to follow Jesus wasn’t the goal; it was just the qualification for the next round. You don’t get the prize; you get the chance to contend for the prize.

What exactly are we contending for?  I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.  What’s the goal? What’s the point? 

The best answer I can find is simply that we get the chance to know God, and to be known by Him.  Which is weird and strangely unsatisfying, because personally I’d rather get the chance to do something hard for God.  Like be a martyr.  Or live on the streets with homeless people.  Or run a non-profit organization.  Or adopt orphans from Darfur.  Or buy children out of the sex trade.  Because at least when you do something hard, you have something to show for your troubles.

What does it matter if you know someone?  That’s not a normal goal for an A-est of Type A personalities kind of person. But I think it’s true nonetheless. 

Jeremiah wrote, “Let not the wise man boast of his wisdom or the strong man boast of his strength or the rich man boast of his riches, but let him who boasts boast about this: that he understands and knows me…” (Jeremiah 9:23,24, emphasis added.)

So I sit at the keyboard, long after the spotlight has dimmed and the audience has gone home, with my empty hands poised above the keys, trying to interpret God’s silence, and praying that He’ll interpret mine.

When I was in elementary school, one of my teachers told my class a story about a violin. 

She said that in a town in Austria, there was a violin maker who prided himself in making the finest-quality instruments. 

A first chair violinist came in one day and bought one of the violins.  However, it did not play up to the musician’s standards, and a few days later, the musician angrily returned to the instrument shop.  In a fit of rage, he smashed the violin against the floor and stormed out.

A few days later, the musician thought better of his actions and returned to the shop to apologize to its owner.  As the musician approached the shop, he heard the sweetest strains of music he’d ever heard coming from the shop’s open windows.  He walked in quietly to see the instrument maker standing in the middle of the store, passionately playing a violin.

“How much?” the musician asked the instrument maker.

“How much for what?”  the instrument maker asked, interrupting his playing.

“For that glorious violin!”  the musican exclaimed.  “I have never heard such an extraordinary instrument before!  I must have it!” 

“This, sir, is the instrument you returned to me three days ago, and it is not for sale,” the instrument maker informed him.

As the musician looked closely, he could see the cracks in the wood where the instrument maker had painstakingly glued the violin back together.  The broken instrument had been restored, and in spite of – or perhaps because of – its brokenness, it played a more extraordinary song than ever before.

I thought about brokenness a lot last year when I was going through treatment.  I was as sick and as sad and as scared as I’d ever been, and my only consolation was that many saints before me had had similar experiences, and God had seen them through. 

The Weeping Prophet wrote in Lamentations 3, “I have been deprived of peace; I have forgotten what prosperity is.  So I say, ‘My splendor is gone, and all that I had hoped from the Lord.’” 

Paul wrote in II Corinthians 4, “We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed.” 

Surely it was great trials that had prompted these words, and yet the very fact that these verses are recorded in Scripture means that their authors survived to write them.

My other hope in those dark days was that the state I was in was not permanent.  My body would heal, my tears would dry, my immune system would rebuild, my hair would grow back, my chest would be reconstructed.  I just had to “keep the faith,” as my mom often reminded me, until it happened.

More than a year later, I can tell you that thanks be to God, my body has healed, my immune system is back to normal, I’ve undergone the final step of reconstruction, and my hair is curly and getting longer every day.

But I can’t say that my tears have dried.  I am a lot more weepy than I used to be.  In fact, last fall I purposefully stayed away from church because I realized that every time I went to church, I broke down in sobs when they sang the hymns.  Refrains like, “All to Jesus I surrender, All to Him I freely give,” and “The Love of God is greater far than tongue or tribe could ever tell; It goes beyond the farthest star and reaches to the deepest hell” reduced me to tears. 

Because for me, they weren’t just rhyming lines in a song; they were words wrenched from my soul, words that I knew were true only because I had gone to what felt like the deepest hell…and been carried out to safety in my loving Father’s arms.

So I stayed away for a few months.  When I moved to Portland, I thought I was over it.  I thought I could go to church again without dissolving into a puddle every time we sang a song.  My first Sunday at the new church, the children’s choir filed up onto the stage and began to sing, “Jesus loves me this I know…Little ones to Him belong; They are weak, but He is strong.”  I lost it.  To my dismay, my weepiness had followed me to Oregon.

Now, instead of letting the tears keep me away from church, I just put extra tissues in my pocket on Sunday mornings because I know I’ll need them. 

I was thinking about this a few weeks ago while I was driving to church, and this verse came to me.  It’s the verse before Paul talks about being hard pressed, crushed, persecuted, etc. 

It says, “But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us.” (II Cor. 4:7)

I thought all the way back to June of 2007 when I started this blog.  I had finished my first round of chemo, and I became so emotionally unstable that I decided to take an anti-depressant for a while because, as I said then, I didn’t want to end up a “cancer-free crack pot.”

The other thing that came to mind was something my best friend said to me last month when we got together for coffee.  She said, “What I love about you, Sarah, is your honesty and your brokenness.”  Her words jolted me.  I always thought of my brokenness as a temporary condition –something I had been but was recovered from because I was healthy — not a permanent state.  But she had said, What I love about you IS, not WAS.  Is.  As in, present tense.  Ongoing.  Still broken. 

As I drove to church with my pocket full of tissues, all of these pieces fit together, and I realized that I am the jar of clay that Paul wrote about.  I am a broken, cracked clay pot that God has chosen for some inexplicable reason to fill with His strength and His love and His joy. 

I am the violin that was shattered and repaired, that sings a more poignant song than ever before because it was restored by its Maker.

And the tears I cry so often during worship, they’re just drops of overwhelming gratitude and joy that spill through the myriad cracks. 

###

 I’ve been doing a lot of reading during the past few weeks while recovering from surgery.  I’ve read a few thousand pages so far, everything from theology to poetry to fiction.  Just for fun, I thought I’d share some of my favorite quotes and poems.  Enjoy!

     “I make the most of all that comes and the least of all that goes.”  – Sara Teasdale

-from “The Eternal Goodness” by John Greenleaf Whittier

     “To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.”   -G.K. Chesterton

     “Be careful about reading health books.  You may die of a misprint.”  -Mark Twain

     Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o’clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow

Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

                                     – from “The Hollow Men” by T.S. Elliot

     “Women are like elephants.  I like to look at ‘em, but I wouldn’t want to own one.” – W.C. Fields

     “Reputation is what men and women think of us.  Character is what God and the angels know of us.”- Thomas Paine

When I was in college, my parents moved to the midwest so my dad could pastor a church in Normal, Illinois.  Yup, that’s right, Normal.   Needless to say, my siblings and I were at no loss for stupid puns that all revolved around the punchline “getting back to Normal.” 

In 2006, when I was recovering from my mastectomy and still reeling from a cancer diagnosis, the word “normal” came up a lot.  Friends and family tried to compliment and encourage me by saying that I looked good, my reconstructed chest looked normal, they hoped I would recover soon so I could get back to normal, et cetera.

One morning shortly after I got out of the hospital, I opened another Get Well Soon card that used the word “normal,” and I fell to pieces.  My mom stopped scrambling eggs in the kitchen and came into the living room where I had dissolved into tears on the couch. 

“Normal!  Normal!”  I shouted.  “Why would I ever want to get back to normal?  Why would I want to go through the hell of biopsies and surgeries and bone scans and intractable pain just to end up where I was before all this started?”

My mom listened patiently while I continued to angrily ask rhetorical questions.   If you end up where you started, what’s the point of the journey?  If you fight an uphill battle, if you overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles, if you run a life-threatening gauntlet and survive it, shouldn’t you end up at a new desntination?  Shouldn’t you be better?  Stronger?  Wiser?  At the very least, shouldn’t you and your new destination be different? 

Besides, how could you go through something so abnormal as being diagnosed with breast cancer out of the blue at the age of 27 and having permanently disfiguring surgery, and end up normal?  The idea of getting back to normal seemed to waste all the physical and emotional effort I spent to get through the horrific ordeal. 

So I set out to do everything not normal on purpose.  I wanted my post-cancer life to be as different as possible to reflect the irreversible physical, emotional and spiritual changes I had gone through. 

While I was still in the hospital, I had my friends bring me fashion magazines so I could pick a new hair style.  I bought new clothes at a consignment shop.  My former roommate got married, so I even moved to a new apartment and bought new furniture.  I went shopping at a different grocery store.  I bought coffee at a new coffee shop.  I walked a different way to work.

I even got angry at my boyfriend for suggesting we have dinner at what used to be one of my favorite restaurants.  “Why would I want to go there?”  I asked incredulously.  “I’ve been there before!”   After that episode, I bought a Zagat’s guide and left it in his glove compartment, and every time we went out to dinner I picked a new restaurant from the guide that neither of us had been to before. 

Instead of trying to get back to normal, I spent a year trying to move forward to a new and different place.

And then, almost exactly a year after my mastectomy, I was diagnosed with a recurrence of my cancer, and my world -and my body - fell apart. 

My right saline implant had to be removed so I could have radiation, which left me with a lopsided chest and an unweildly mastectomy bra stuffed with a heavy, rubbery breast prosthesis.  I couldn’t wear most of my dresses and tops because the straps and cups of the bra were too wide, and they showed through everything. 

I spent the year after chemo getting Herceptin infusions and taking antibiotics for a refractory case of pneumonia, working, and going out of my way to avoid the mall and all clothing stores.  Every time I walked through racks of clothes, I was reminded of how abnormal my chest was, and all the things I couldn’t wear.

This fall I finally finished my course of Herceptin. I finished my year of antibiotics.  And I had surgery to reconstruct the right side of my chest.  A week after my surgery, I was fitted for a normal bra.  The next day, I went clothes shopping with my mom, the first time I’d been clothes shopping in over a year. 

As I looked through racks and racks of adorable dresses and tops and realized that I could wear them now that I was in a normal bra, I was overwhelmed with relief and joy, and in the middle of the sweater section at the department store, I burst into tears.

Much to my surprise, I was overjoyed to be back to normal. 

Normal doesn’t seem like such a bad thing any more.  Normal means I no longer have to go to the treatment room every three weeks for  Herceptin infusion.  Normal means I don’t have to take three antibiotics a day.  Normal means I don’t have to stuff my bra before I leave the house.  Normal means I get to wear a V-neck top without thinking about it.  Normal means that I can finally wear a swimsuit.  Normal feels like me again. 

Normal feels good.

I

For the past year I’ve been following the blog of a guy named Colin Beavan, who lives in New York City with his wife, their 2 year old child, and a dog.  Colin dubbed himself the “No Impact Man,” and decided to spend a year trying to make the smallest ecological impact he could. 

He and his wife decided that they would walk or bike everywhere they went, buy nothing but locally-produced fruits, vegetables and meat, and buy nothing sold in packaging.  They decided to do their laundry by hand, not to buy any paper products, not to use air conditioning, and not to produce any waste except what they could put in their compost pile. 

He began his experiment around the time I was diagnosed with a recurrence of my breast cancer, a time when I was seriously evaluating my life, the impact I had made on the world so far, and possibly the limited time I may have left to effect any kind of change in the future.

 During the week after my diagnosis, I had CAT scans and a bone scan to make sure the cancer hadn’t spread.  The day after my bone scan, I got a call from my oncologist: there was a spot on my left arm that lit up.  I had to have an MRI to see what the lesion was.

I was in shock.  How could I go from non-invasice to metastatic cancer in less than a year?  I called one of my friends, who came over after work and sat on the couch listening while I cried and asked unthinkable questions with no easy answers.  How could this happen?  Is it possible for cancer to spread that fast?  How could I feel so well but be so sick?  And finally, What do I do if the MRI comes back positive?

My friend’s answer was very practical: you do everything you always wanted to do, you just do it faster.

Country singer Tim McGraw wrote about a similar scenario in his song Live Like You Were Dying:

He said I was in my early forties with a lot of life before me

When a moment came that stopped me on a dime

and I spent most of the next days looking at the x-rays

Talking ’bout the options, talking ’bout sweet time

I asked him when it sank in that this might really be the real end

How’s it hit you when you get that kind of news?  Man, what’d you do?

and he said, I went sky diving.  I went Rocky Mountain climbing

I went 2.7 seconds on a bull named Fumanchu

And I loved deeper and I spoke sweeter

and I gave forgiveness I’d been denying

And he said, someday I hope you get the chance

To live like you were dying

It turns out, the lesion that lit up on my arm was benign and, thanks be to God, I do not have metastatic cancer.  But it really made me think.

Conventional wisdom tells cancer patients that if you get a terminal diagnosis, you get a carte blanche to do whatever you want to do, whatever makes you happy. 

Live it up. Go nuts. Blow the wad. Throw caution to the wind. And a lot of other carefree cliches.  But what if there’s another option?

I was thinking about this the other day when I was paying my bills and figuring out my monthly budget.  While I was crunching the numbers, I started to wonder where all my money is going. 

I always thought I was disciplined with my money: I put a certain amount in my checking account every month, and I use it to pay rent, utilities, and other fixed expenses.  But there’s extra money that I spend every month on…well…stuff, I guess.  It’s not super expensive stuff, but it adds up. 

Starbucks lattes. Eating out. Clothes. Newspapers.  More Starbucks. Maybe an occasional manicure.  Plane tickets.  Train tickets.  Books.  Magazines.  More Starbucks.  And a lot of other non-necessities.

I started wondering what would happen if I attempted a year of high-impact living.  What if I only afforded rent, utilities, gas and groceries (i.e., the necessities) and gave up buying everything that was unnecessary, and gave that money away to a cause greater than me?

What if I contributed that monthly amount to missions?  Or to the trust fund I’ve talked about starting that would fund college educations for low income women?

What if, instead of using my brush with cancer as an excuse for self-indulgence, I used it as a motivation, echoing the advice of my friend, to do everthing good I always wanted to do in the world…

                                                                                                                                        … only faster?