Okay—it’s been a while since my last update, and while I wish I could regale you with stories of incredible progress and change, the truth is, everything is pretty much where we left it a couple of weeks ago. I still have cancer. I still have fluid build up. I still am praying for a miracle.
I am still here, in other words, and that’s good news.
At least, it is to me and my family. For other people, there seems to be a resentment that’s built up for the repetition of life. They are weary of being under Covid rules. Weary of the political bullcrap. Weary of the culture wars, the incessant barrage of bad news, the unfiltered access to negativity, and the increasing sense that they’re somehow supposed to keep up with it all.1
I may be biased, but it’s incredible to me how people grow to resent the fact that life goes on, that day after day the sun rises in the East and sets in the West. I won’t pretend like I’ve always been a big fan of life’s redundancies—cancer does wonders for your perspective—but now, I’m not averse to the fact that there’s a wonderful sameness to life.
I think it may just be one of life’s greatest blessings.
My mind can’t help but drift to the Bible story of Israel and the quail and manna when I think along these lines. If you’re not familiar, God delivered the Israelites out of Egypt via the 10 plagues and Moses, and once they’d crossed the Red Sea into the country they were destined to roam for a number of years, they quickly realized food was going to be an issue. So like any appreciative group, they began whining to Moses about the way God had drug them to the desert to die.
Moses, being human, got sick of their lip and asked God to intervene—which God did, by way of sending manna every morning for the Israelites to harvest and eat. The little bit white specks would appear on the ground every morning, and all the people had to do was gather enough for their entire household for the day, and presto! Instant meal. The manna tasted like “wafers made from honey,” so imagine a saltine cracker with a slightly sweet flavor and you have some concept of what they were eating.
Naturally, a daily supply of a magic bread-like food source calms everyone down and things hum a long like a Disney musical.2 People are grateful for the provision from God, grateful that each day’s meals are handled with minimal effort, and their shouts and songs of worship rise to God and please His ears.
Whatever.
In true Biblical fashion, the people not only gripe about the food, they gripe about the fact that they have to go out every morning to collect it. They’re not allowed to load up a bunch of it and save it for later because God wants to ensure that they have to put in some effort in order to prevent them from taking His kindness for granted. But they do anyway because the people of Israel are nothing if ungrateful. And completely unashamed of whining about it.3
So God, in his infinite patience, decides to listen to their complaints and provide them with their next request: meat. The next day the Israelites wake up and not only find manna scattered around the ground, but quail as far as the eye can see. And they’re as easy to catch as the manna is to gather: imagine a flock of little birds just standing around as if dazed or confused, just waiting for someone to pick them up. That’s what the Israelites had to deal with—slightly stoned birds just waiting to be eaten with a side of honey-wheat bread.
Humanity has been ungrateful for centuries—millennia, really—so it’s no surprise that lack of gratitude pops up whenever the world doesn’t go our way.
It just shouldn’t be that way.
Sure, I’m moralizing, and it’s not exactly fair for a guy with cancer to preach about gratitude and being thankful for the day-after-day sameness that most of us are desperate to escape. So many of us dream about a life of greater purpose and meaning, and we expect that kind of life will include change and growth and exciting developments that make each day feel like an adventure.
And sometimes, that’s true. But most of the time?
Nope.
Each day feels more like a repeat of the one before it, no matter how hard we try to make things different. But that’s okay, because there’s growth in consistency.
In fact, consistency is required for growth because if we don’t repeat the healthy habits and actions and skills that we want to harness on a daily basis, they’ll never set. We’ll end up doing what so many of us experience whenever we start a diet or make a New Year’s resolution—we’ll stick with it for a little while, then let it fall by the wayside.
That’s not how you build any kind of habit, much less how you establish a pattern of growth. As my mentor and boss John Maxwell says, “Consistency compounds,” in any kind of endeavor, be it habit-building, personal growth, personal finance, or business. What you do daily determines your growth, and your growth determines your success.
I’ve written about the areas where I’m pursuing growth in my life during this season of cancer, and it wouldn’t be possible if I weren’t able to wake up to “just another day.” In fact, there are days when I wake up and things aren’t like “just another day”—like Friday, for instance.
I went in for a scheduled echocardiogram to make sure there’s nothing wrong with my heart,4 and after the procedure was done, I was wheeled over to the ER of Piedmont Walton hospital and admitted for observation.
There was no explanation given, other than the cardiologist saw “an abnormality on the scan,” so the ER staff treated me as if I were any other cardiac patient coming in. That meant a barrage of sensors, a near-constant blood pressure reading, and a host of blood draws.5
Turns out, none of it was necessary.
When the cardiologist finally showed up, all he wanted was for someone to put eyes on me and make sure I wasn’t in distress.6 So I was released and sent home with a good report and told to follow up with my medical team on Monday. I spent the rest of the afternoon on the couch trying to relax and not allow fears to creep into my mind—which I was able to do thanks to my family.
I woke up today feeling better. After all, it was one more day that I could see the sunshine.
Another day for which I am grateful.7
Prayer requests for the family:
Jason—my next round of chemo on Tuesday; a solution to the swelling and fluid retention; healing in my body; continued growth in my emotional health; for less fatigue and more awareness; for the ability to get up and get moving, physically; for spiritual and mental stamina to continue appreciating the repetitiveness of my days; several requests I’ll leave unspecified.
Rachel—for rest and recharging as we head into the final weeks of summer; for continued peace and patience with providing care to me and the kids; for increasing strength and wisdom as a parent and community member; for patience in raising a teenager; for God’s unfettered blessings to pour out on her and her needs.
Ella—for rest and recharging as we head into the final weeks of summer; for wisdom and insight into relationships and friendships with her peers; for wise judgment on which peers to trust and confide in, as well as the people and topics she can share with others and who and what she allows to share with her; for a blessed and successful school and ballet year in 2021-22.
Jon—for continued development of self-discipline; for a willingness to engage with classmates and make friends this year; for discovery of a passion that will draw him into a daily habit or practice; for continued openness about his spiritual questions; for him to develop a personal relationship with God; for a blessed and successful school year in 2021-22.
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I’ll close with this: I hope, if you’ve been feeling stuck or as if you’re treading water, that this post has been an encouragement to help you reframe the way you look at this moment in your life. I recently had to write a teaching piece at work on how patience pays off, but we don’t develop patience if we’re never subjected to times in our lives when we have to practice patience. So we all have stuck seasons; we all have times when we resent the sameness of our days and long to break free into a season of progress and discovery.
Just remember when you’re in such a season, that it’s not punishment. It’s training.
The Bible speaks of this process in Paul’s Letter to the Romans. The well-traveled and well-tested apostle wrote, “we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.”
The word suffering doesn’t exactly ring a lot of happy bells for most people, but what it means in the Greek context is “pressing” or “pressure.” It’s not a picture of torment or pain, but a picture of consistent discomfort, the kind you can endure for a while, but eventually find boring and frustrating.
Which is the point: the pressure pushes you to learn how to persevere, to withstand the psychological frustration of life not moving at your preferred pace. When we learn to persevere those days of repetition, we build our character,8 and over time that translates to the greatest power we can have as people—hope. In the Greek, and in real life, genuine hope isn’t a dream or a wish; it’s a firm anticipation of pleasurable future.
In other words, this season of seemingly unbearable boredom will eventually produce a belief in a positive future.
That’s that I’m holding on to these days, that hope for a positive future. It’s what keeps me going each day as I wait for my future to move beyond my current stasis. I’ve written about it enough to not require further exploration, but I will leave you with this, a song from my dear friend Jake Decker, who produces music on line at jakedeckermusic.com.
It’s called, “Not In a Way That We Can See” and it explores the pressure of living through the day to day sameness without a clear view of what’s ahead. There’s a line in the song that Jake said came to him as he thought about my situation, and what my family was going through during this season. I love the lyric, so I thought I’d share it as my closer, but you should click the link and go listen to the full song.9
Here’s the lyric Jake penned, and that resonated with me (for obvious reasons):
Oh, yes, the future is uncertain.
So many things that could go wrong.
But I believe goodness lies before us,
just not in a way that we can see.
I do believe goodness lies before us, and I believe those who understand the power of the “same old, same old,” believe the same thing. It’s the beauty of hope, and the force that pulls us forward, up and out of our current doldrums and into the character and perspective that make us world changers.
I pray you’re one of us.
As always, thanks for reading, and please know I appreciate every prayer, thought, encouragement, well wish and kind word you send my way through whatever medium you choose to send it. They are part of my healing process, and I am grateful for them all.
Have a great week.
Best,
Jason
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Spoiler alert: You don’t.
If you’ve ever read the Bible, you should be smell the sarcasm on this take.
They not only whine about the effort required to gather manna, they get irritated at the fact that God didn’t provide some kind of meat. So, if you’re keeping score, they not only don’t appreciate what God does provide, they have the chutzpah to ask Him to add in a side of meat. Which God does, in the form of quail.
My oncologist was kind of wondering if there was some heart condition that might be causing all of my fluid retention. According to the cardiologist, that would be a big, fat no.
Getting blood from my veins is usually pretty easy (I’ve been told I’m a good bleeder), but yesterday was a new experience: after four different needle sticks that got ZERO blood return (despite being fully capable of receiving fluids), they finally got blood on the fifth stick, after wiggling and moving the needle around countless times to get the flow correct. My arms look like someone used them for a knife throwing contest, and I have more bruises than an over-confident bar fighter.
I wasn’t.
Even if Jon is watching a marathon of the Star Wars prequels.
Shout out to all those parents out there who regularly tell their kids that sticking with something like eating broccoli “builds character.” You can now tell your kid that it’s “in the Bible” and maybe end that argument sooner.
This is from Jake’s Patreon account, so it will cost you money: a whole dollar. You can support Jake for a single buck that gets charged to your account only when Jake releases new music (be it just lyrics, a rough cut, an in-process version, or a finished single). It’s worth the buck, believe me, if only for the privilege of cruising around the website and sampling Jake’s work. I highly recommend his songs, “Ghosts in the Hall” as well as “The Man That I Am.”
Thank you for your words of encouragement and knowing that when we wake up each day it may be the same but we did wake up. Appreciate everyday.