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?

On Saturday, Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama announced that he’s picked Delaware senator Joe Biden as his V.P. running mate.  With this announcement came a flood of biographical information about the senior senator from Delaware as media outlets began to delve into the man that is Joe Biden.

I knew a little bit about the senator from seeing him give interviews on cable news programs and Meet the Press.  But until recent media reports published the details of his past, I had no idea that he had experienced so much personal tragedy in his life.  In 1972, his wife and daughter were killed in a car accident, leaving him alone to care for their two boys while he was commuting more than an hour each way from Delaware to Washington, D.C., to fulfill his Senate responsibilities.

After being forced to drop out of the presidential campaign in 1988 amidst accusations of plagiarism, he almost died from a ruptured brain aneurysm.  Soon after the emergency surgery that saved his life, he returned to the Senate floor as if nothing had happened  (at least that’s my take on things).

When I heard that Obama picked him for V.P., I thought, Why didn’t Biden use his personal tragedies as leverage to get him into office?  Why didn’t he tell these stories of personal woe to win people’s sympathy and support? 

Who knows what was going on behind the scenes.  But from this side of things, it didn’t seem that Biden tried to cash in on his personal tragedies and triumphs to gain the V.P. spot.  He was picked on the merits of his professional accomplishments rather than his personal misfortunes.  And, politics aside, I really respect him for that.

I know from personal experience how hard it is not use obstacles you’ve overcome as a shortcut to get to the front of the line.  Last year while in treatment for breast cancer, I applied for a new job with the understanding that I would start as soon as I finished chemotherapy.  However, the day after I finished chemo, I contracted pneumonia and spent several weeks in the hospital on I.V. antibiotics waiting for my immune system to regenerate.

After a month-long delay, I started my new job at a hospital in Portland, OR.  I still didn’t feel well, but I decided to be tough and start working anyway.

Recently I reached the six-month mark at my new job, and I had to complete a performance review, which required me to state why I’m a good employee.

The first thoughts that jumped into my head were, I started working full time only a few weeks after getting out of the hospital.  I’ve worked with pneumonia every day for the past six months without using a second of sick time.  I’ve come to work with platelet counts so low, my toenails bled just from the weight of my shoes.  I’ve managed to get infusions every three weeks without missing any work.  I’ve come to work with a white count so low I was neutropenic,  and I would’ve had to be hospitalized if I’d gotten sick from one of my patients. 

Who could argue that I’ve not had an absolutely stellar performance, considering the challenges I’ve had to overcome just to be working full time and functioning as a normal member of society?

After savoring these personal accomplishments, I finally sacrificed my pride and came to the conclusion that if I expected my employer not to hold my illness against me (which they didn’t, by the way - they have been great about that), then I couldn’t use it in my favor.  It has to stay neutral ground. 

So instead of containing glowing reports of my inner strength and determination, my performance review consisted of boring points – like, I have good hygiene, I come to work on time, and I haven’t killed any patients. (I did not get a merit raise for any of this, by the way).

But I think this is why I can appreciate Senator Biden’s restraint.  Because when you overcome obstacles and endure hardships, when you work twice as hard and seem to get half as far as everyone else, when it takes all the energy you can muster just to get out of bed in the morning, it’s hard not to ask society for a free ride — or at least a little extra credit.

So props, Senator Biden, for standing on your professional achievements rather than your personal tragedy.  Kudos for getting out of bed, picking up the pieces, and trying again.

Just for that, you deserve a merit raise.

One of my friends, who is a sports writer for a Portland newspaper, recently told me he’d been assigned to profile a high school athlete who’d overcome leukemia in grade school to become his high school baseball team’s MVP.

When I heard his assignment, I issued him a challenge: write the entire article without using a single military analogy.

He didn’t understand, so I elaborated: It seems that everyone who talks about cancer, chemo, etc., feels obligated to compare cancer to combat. 

You receive the devastating diagnosis of cancer, the elusive, silent invader.  Then you “battle it.”  You “fight” for your life.  You “wage war” against the malignant cells.  You and your oncologist draw up a “strategy” to “beat” the disease.  And if you’re unlucky and you “lose the battle to cancer,” at least you will have “battled” cancer “bravely.” 

It is rumored that Spartan mothers used to tell their sons before a battle that they’d better, “Return with your shield or on it.”  (implying that they’d better return as heroes or fallen heroes.  if they returned as captives or without their shields, they’d be seen as cowards).

Back in modern America, only in the sarcastic pseudo-newspaper The Onion has anyone ever been described as “losing a cowardly battle to cancer.”  Cancer patients are always brave.  They always fight.  Having cancer is always a battle.

I don’t yet understand why cancer is the only disease that’s described in such militant terms.  But I’ve yet to read about someone who “fought” against COPD.  No one I know has “battled” diabetes.  I’ve never read an obituary in which the deceased “bravely” defied heart disease or “lost a five year battle with old age.” 

Recently, Tony Snow died of colon cancer. (Or, “lost a brave three year battle with colon cancer,” as the current vernacular would have it.)  When I heard the news, my heart sank.  I always felt somehow connected to him, because Mr. Snow was diagnosed with a recurrence of his colon cancer at the same time I was diagnosed with a recurrence of breast cancer, and we went through chemo simultaneously last summer. 

Call it survivor’s guilt or whatever you will, but when I heard that he died, and I still have a clean bill of health, I was deeply saddened.

I googled his name on the Internet, and came upon an interview done with David Gregory this spring.  Mr. Snow allowed Mr. Gregory to not only interview him, but also to follow him to a chemo session.  While he was sitting in a room getting ready to receive another chemo infusion, Mr. Snow told Mr. Gregory that he was going to beat this cancer.  He said that when you have cancer, if you buy yourself two or three years, you’ve bought yourself a decade because medicine is always making advances.  He said when he was diagnosed he told his children not to worry.  He promised them he’d be bouncing their children on his knee.

When he died, his three children were 10-15 years old.  They didn’t have their own children, and Mr. Snow did not bounce them on his knee.

And it made me wonder why he gave that quote to Mr. Gregory, after he already knew that his cancer had metastisized and that his chances of even surviving one year were slim to none.

It’s the same thought I have when I hear of cancer patients who undergo an experimental cancer treatment that may extend their life for 4-6 weeks, at best.  Do these patients really want to prolong their debilitating pain?  Are they so afraid of death they’d rather go through another month of hell than die sooner and put the agony behind them? 

I don’t know the answer, but my suspicion is that as a culture we’ve created a language and a mentality about cancer that propels cancer patients to keep up the apperance of “fighting” long after they’ve acknowledged the inevitable end of the disease.  Society tells cancer patients to return from their arduous journey “with your shield or on it.”  Either you beat the disease, or you lose a brave battle to it.  There is no white flag. There is no surrender.  There is no “making your peace” with cancer and submitting to it.  You either go down fighting, or, as in the celebrated case of Lance Armstrong, you don’t go down at all.

All of this explains why I didn’t even know that there was an antonym for the word “invincible” until I started writing this piece. 

As it turns out, “vincible,” the opposite of invincible, is actually a word.  This forbidden 8-letter word is in the dictionary. 

But terminal cancer patients will be forced to continue their “brave battles” until “vincible” enters our vocabularies.  And maybe, our consciences.

Yale Cancer Center has a complementary medicine program for patients who are undergoing cancer treatment.  They offer massages, art classes, yoga classes and Reiki, all for free. 

One day when I was getting chemo, the social worker came over to my chair and asked if I’d like to participate in any of the programs.  I told her I was too sore to do yoga, and too sad to do art  – unless dumping  gallons of black paint on everyone and everything around me to make the world as dark as I felt counted as artistic expression.

 But I did agree to get a massage.

Up until then, I’d been the recipient of a lot of unhelpful, and even hurtful, comments from well-meaning friends.  “You’re lucky you have breast cancer — you get a free boob job,” one of my co-workers said.  “I wish I was on chemo so I could lose weight like that,” a friend said after I told her I’d lost 8 pounds in a week from vomiting incessantly after my first round of chemo.

At the beginning of my massage, the therapist dimmed the lights and turned on soft piano music.  “I know you’re sick right now,” she said.  “But think about the 98% of your body that’s healthy and pain free and working just like it’s supposed to.”  Her warm hands worked on the knotted muscles in my back as she continued, “I know there’s a lot that’s gone wrong for you, but for right now just try to focus on what’s right with you.” 

That thought rocked my world.  It stuck with me through the next six months of treatment, and it is still with me now.  To have someone recognize the good in me when everything seemed so wrong was an extraordinary experience. 

I could — and probably will — write about the amazingly damaging things people said and did while I was going through this experience.  But there were also some great people, many of them strangers, who encouraged me when I least expected it.

When I flew out to Portland last fall to interview for jobs here, my hair was just starting to grow again after chemo.  I wore my wig to my job interview, but I didn’t bother to wear it otherwise because it was itchy and uncomfortable.  I stopped at a Walgreen’s one evening to get some gum.  When I was checking out, the cashier, a woman in her 50’s who was sporting a pixie cut herself, asked me where I’d gotten my hair cut.  I instinctively bristled — I was really sensitive to comments about my physical apperance. 

“I didn’t get it cut like this,” I said defensively.  “I had chemo, and it’s just now growing back.”

She reached across the counter and grabbed my hand.  “Me too!”  she exclaimed.  “I’m doing a breast cancer walk this weekend,” she said.  “Are you going to be around?”

I shook my head and told her I had to fly back to Connecticut the next day.

“Well, sweetie, you come back next year and we’ll walk together, okay?”

I went back to Connecticut and had four more rounds of chemo.  When I did finally move to Portland a few months later, my hair was just starting to grow back out for the second time.  I wore my wig to work, but I didn’t bother to wear it otherwise.  My first week here, I got pulled over for turning left on a yellow light while I was running errands on my day off.

The police officer approached my car, and I rolled down the passenger side window.

“Do you know what color that light was back there?” he asked sternly.

“Well, it was green when I started to go through the intersection, but it turned yellow,” I said.

“That’s right,” he said.  “In Oregon, we don’t turn on yellow lights.”  He asked for my driver’s license, and said he was going to have to give me a ticket.

He looked at my picture on the license, the one taken three years previously when my hair was long and blonde, then looked back at the crew-cut I was sporting now. 

“Is everything okay with you?” he asked.

My eyes welled up with tears and I shook my head.  “I had breast cancer,” I explained.

“Oh.”  He handed me my I.D.  “I’m sorry to hear that.  Well, listen, you don’t need this now.” He tore up the ticket.  “I hear they have really good treatment for breast cancer these days.  I hope you beat it.”

And he let me go.

Sometimes hope comes when you least expect it.

Sometimes the kindess of strangers provides an unexpected refuge.

Sometimes you need someone to come alongside you, overlook your faults and problems, and recognize what’s special about you. What’s good in you.  What’s right with you.