When Life Shakes You Up
... An on purpose faith response to crisis
Kenneth D. Ardrey
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Copyright © 2012 Ken Ardrey
eBook ISBN: 9780983664833
Dust Jacket Press
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Scripture quotations marked (NIV) are taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.
Scripture quotations marked (NIV) are taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.
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CONTENTS
DEDICATION
To all those who have allowed me to serve as their pastor through the years. Special appreciation to friends and loved ones in the Fishkill Church of the Nazarene who showed such love, patience, and support when my life was shaken and I needed so much help from God’s people.
To my loving and faithful wife Brenda and my family, Dave, Ryan, Jonathan, and Christina who are my greatest blessing in life, and whose lives have been shaken as well.
INTRODUCTION
Life is not Fair
I was a late bloomer. It all started in 1955 as a five year old beginning first grade. This was back in the dark ages before kindergarten. Five and six year olds were herded into class rooms, sat in rows, and taught the three R’s and other valuable life lessons. Not the least of which was the authority of teachers.
During the first two weeks I should have been in school, I was in the hospital fighting a rather stubborn infection. My friends spent those weeks learning the ropes of Farnsworth Elementary School. I arrived as a timid five year old, not even knowing there were ropes. I sat in the classroom scared and lost. Here I was, not far removed from my first steps, and I now found myself in the first of twenty consecutive years of education.
Mrs. Murphy was a short, stout and stern-looking woman who administered her classroom with an iron fist. The rules and directions were all new to me, and I ended up standing in the wrong line or committing some other serious infraction. I guess she wanted to make sure I knew who was boss because she grabbed my arm and shoved me into my rightful place. Every first grade child in those days was marked with the scab of the required small pox vaccination. Mrs. Murphy was careless enough, or sadistic enough, to grab on to my vaccination arm, opening the wound, which bled all down my arm. Somehow, this was my fault, and I was scolded roundly for it.
This day was not my finest hour. I was too scared of my new teacher to ask permission to use the boys’ room, and the only alternative was to wet my pants. Again I was brought in front of the class, humiliated, and sent to “the office” on my first day of school. The memory fades of what happened in “the office,” but I think water boarding was legal back then.
Early in life I learned that life wasn’t fair ...and that “stuff” happens. I learned experientially that the “stuff” of life can really shake you up. These early experiences impacted me in a way that affected the next ten years of education (which is as good an excuse as any for poor grades). As a child I had no idea how to respond to my time of hurt and pain. Especially in those days, the teacher was always right. If I was in trouble at school, I was also in trouble at home. My response was withdrawal and underachievement. I was just too young and immature to have a strategy figured out.
Too often, even as adults, we have no strategy in our response to the crises of life. We are shocked and indignant that the cosmos would conspire against us in such a way. When hit with the hurt, the pain, and the unfairness of life, we are so unprepared that the response is panic, fear, anger, blame and depression. As we look at the crises of life that shake our foundations and overwhelm us with fear and doubt, we will ask a personal question: How do you respond when life shakes you up? This is an important question. As people of faith we need not rely upon the inadequate resource of self sufficiency. We can respond with faith, “on purpose,” to whatever life brings our way. The events of my life have challenged me to respond with faith in ways I never expected. My hope is that God’s grace at work in the challenges of my situation will be used as a help and encouragement to others.
Personal
I was a late bloomer in sports as well. Being one of the smallest in all my classes was not an advantage in my athletic endeavors. Entering into the sophomore year of high school, I was all of 5' 0" tall. The teacher stopped me in the hallway to begin extradition proceedings back to junior high. God did answer prayer, and by faith and through great personal struggle and strain, I grew ten inches during the next two years. However, I was still always a step behind, not quite good enough for the school teams but much more interested in sports than academics.
I was, however, accomplished enough to make the college JV basketball team as an ardent bench warmer. Warming the bench is an important role on any team ... even the JV team of a small Christian college needed a few spare bodies giving some semblance of a team. This vital function was performed by my good friend Dan and I… sitting on the end of the bench, backslapping, opponent mocking, anything for the team. It was not particularly glamorous but was a legitimate alternative to serious study, and I think free socks were part of the deal. I was still never quite good enough for varsity level.
Upon graduation, I noticed the balance began to shift. As time went on my varsity friends started to plump up and slow down. The differential was narrowing. By the time I was in my early to middle twenties I could more than keep up. My fifteen minutes of fame came in the far north of Saskatchewan, Canada when I was the leading scorer of the Northern Saskatchewan Men’s Basketball League. It was great to discover that without skates, hockey players play very poor defense.
Over the years, I considered myself at least a semi-athlete, which means I could normally keep up with the overweight slow guys in the gym. Playing sports well into my forties, I planned to be running with the kids when I was sixty. Suddenly, however, the large, slow people were getting older and quicker, and I was getting older and slower. Seeing fifty pounds of overweight former athlete roll on by was more than a bit disconcerting.
There were other changes. As the pastor of a busy church, I found my stamina severely affected. My planning and organization seemed to be less and less effective. Routine tasks took twice as long. My handwriting was getting worse and worse. Knowing that a sloppy signature indicated an advanced level of education, I was pleased that I could pass as well educated by signature alone. Friends and family started to nag... why are you limping... why don't you swing your arm when you walk... is your arm hurt… why are you shuffling your feet?
One day I went to pick up a dish and was unable to do so. The previous Sunday I had fallen at church bruising myself badly. It looked like something needed attention. I went to the doctor who ordered an MRI. They took all kinds of pictures of my brain... perfectly normal they said. It was good to have confirmation... my kids have never been too sure. The next step was a visit to the neurologist who went through the basic neurological movement type diagnostics and informed me matter-of-factly that I had early Parkinson's disease.
Quickly analyzing the situation, it struck me that early Parkinson's disease is a lot like... just like... real Parkinson's disease. All kinds of words came to my mind... debilitating... devastating... discouraging... and probably some more d words which would remain verbally unexpressed. He gave me a prescription and said to come back in a few months.
What does a neurologist in Poughkeepsie, New York know after all? I am one hour away from one of the top movement disorder centers in the country, Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan. We set an appointment, and believe it or not, they did the same diagnostics and came to the same conclusion except they didn’t call it early Parkinson's disease. They called it Parkinson's disease (PD).
Parkinson's is a disease of the brain. A definitive cause has not been identified, although evidence points toward a combination of genetic pre-disposition and exposure to some environmental toxin. Whatever the cause, the brain cells which produce dopamine begin to die off. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter which enables the messages to travel from the brain to the various parts of the body. By the time a Parkinson's patient shows any symptoms, 80% of these dopamine producing cells have died off. From that point on, the disease only gets worse. There is no cure. The most common symptom is tremor... usually starting on one side... often in the hand and then progressing to the rest of the body. 15 to 20% of Parkinson's patients never get tremor. Other symptoms of Parkinson's disease are stiffness, slowness of movement, confusion, memory loss, instability leading to falls, aches and pains, and difficulty writing. Any function of the body can be affected. Breathing, swallowing, digestion, bladder control ... all can be affected or slowed down by Parkinson’s disease.
Driving home from the neurologist, I was shaking my head. These are the kinds of things that happen to other people. Over the years I've preached that instead of asking why me when the trials come, the question is why not me? Would I be able to practice what I preached? I wasn’t too sure.
I had a plan for my retirement years. I was going to work really hard, so I could retire at sixty-five, settle into a church with a small salary/stipend, and spend my time doing all the things I loved to do as a pastor. The tough assignments would fall to the young senior pastor. Some days, I couldn’t wait for those golden years. That was my plan. Suddenly the horizon had changed. With kids in college, no house to live in, no job, growing uncertainty, the plan had changed.
If you watch (not stare at) people with Parkinson's disease the tremor is very often obvious. Especially in times of stress, the hands can shake uncontrollably in a "marble-rolling" kind of motion. We PD people hold our hands down or keep them in our pockets so others will not notice. As the disease progresses the entire body can be affected by the spasms. At this point in time, ten years following my diagnosis, friends at church have learned to keep their distance during coffee hour. Random movement has smacked more than one cup of coffee from the hands of an innocent bystander. The tremor of PD is very obvious, but there are those crises, less obvious visually, that shake our lives just as profoundly.
What do you do when life shakes you up? How do you live when the plan changes? There are all kinds of coping mechanisms both negative and positive. But denial, false hope, busyness, blame, anger, and bitterness tend to be the responses of least resistance. How do you respond to facing an incurable diagnosis?
Battle Plan from the General
The Bible is full of examples of people who face the unexpected realities of life with faith and courage. Joshua was one of these people. Joshua was a great military leader who led the people of Israel into the promised land of Canaan. His example can be a help and inspiration to us. In his response to the unexpected, we can find a “battle plan from the general” if you will.
I will reference the Old Testament passage of Joshua 1:1-9 throughout the book. Let me summarize the story. Moses obviously was a great hero of Israeli history. He had delivered his people from the bondage of Egypt and had brought them to the brink of entering the promised land. Along the way, Joshua had been his loyal military leader. But now God had a new plan for Joshua: “After the death of Moses the servant of the Lord, the Lord said to Joshua son of Nun, Moses' aide: ‘Moses my servant is dead. Now then, you and all these people, get ready to cross the Jordan River into the land I am about to give to them, to the Israelites.’” (Joshua 1:1)
Joshua suddenly found himself as the divinely appointed designated heroic leader of the chosen people of God. Being the Prime Minister of Israel was not Joshua’s plan. He was a soldier, not a politician. He was a fighter, not a talker. How would he respond?
There are lessons we can learn from Joshua that are helpful as we face those things that shake us up in life. How do you respond when life shakes you up?
FACE THE FACTS
ACCEPT THE FEELINGS
COUNT THE BLESSINGS
LIVE THE FAITH
TRUST THE FUTURE TO GOD
These five points are not presented as a linear step-by-step procedure. They are not steps as much as aspects of dealing with the hurt of life. I needed to come back again and again to face the facts that I had Parkinson’s disease, and I needed to decide to face the reality of the whole thing. I still get afraid for the future and need to decide to trust my future to a loving, personal God. These five aspects are “faith options;” decisions to be made in times that are overwhelming and stressful. My goal is to present, not a process, but perhaps a play book, giving options with which we can respond by faith.
1
FACE THE FACTS
“Moses my servant is dead…”
Get Your Flu Shot
It saddens me to admit that I received my first flu shot this year. There are certain groups of people who need flu shots more than others and are strongly encouraged to do so. I have never been a part of this group, but having just turned sixty, dealing with a chronic disease, with a wife in public nursing, I qualify on all counts. There are several factors conspiring together that influenced me toward this decision. One of these factors was living with a loving/nagging medical practitioner. The fearful warning, prevalent at the time, of the coming global epidemic of swine flu was another. The clincher was my reading of the book by John M. Barry, The Great Influenza Epidemic of 1918, which is a fascinating and harrowing account the incredible death toll of that terrible epidemic.
In the winter of 1918, the coldest the American Midwest had ever endured, history’s most lethal strain of the influenza virus was born. Over the next year, the global fatality count was between 50 and 100 million. During the two years that this scourge ravaged the earth, a fifth of the world's population was infected. The flu was most deadly for people ages twenty to forty and infected 28% of all Americans.
An estimated 675,000 Americans died of influenza during the pandemic, ten times as many as in the recent world war. Of all the U.S. soldiers who died in Europe, half of them fell to the influenza virus, not the enemy. Over 43,000 of the servicemen mobilized for WWI died of influenza.
On September 7, 1917, Fort Devens, a military camp thirty-five miles northwest of Boston, saw the first case of flu. Within two weeks 20% of the recruits were infected. A hospital equipped for 1,200 was bursting with 6,000 patients. The doctors and nurses were dying as quickly as the patients. Dr. Roy Gist wrote that men would report to the hospital and:
Two hours after admission they have mahogany spots over the cheek bones, and a few hours later you can begin to see the Cyanosis extending from their ears and spreading all over the face, until it is hard to distinguish the colored men from the white. Within hours death is final after excruciating pain, with bleeding from the nose, ears and even eyes. (The Great Influenza Epidemic of 1918)
The first case in Philadelphia, a city of 1.75 million, was reported on October 1, 1918. Within ten days hundreds of thousands were infected with hundreds dying each day. Bodies were stacked like cord wood waiting for the death wagons to pick them up. In New York City alone 21,000 became orphans and twice that many lost one parent.
In the midst of this real to life horror movie, the government forbade the newspapers from publishing anything but positive, encouraging news about the pandemic. In order to dispel the national alarm caused by “exaggerated reports,” the Associated Press reported, “…while there are about 4,500 cases (at Great Lakes Training Station) the situation in general is much improved.” Hundreds of newspapers continued the national message propagated by the Surgeon General: “there is no cause for alarm if precautions are followed” and “the epidemic is on the wane.” Colonel Philip Jones told the Associated Press, “The so called Spanish influenza is nothing more or less than old fashioned grippe.” “Don’t Get Scared” was the advice printed in virtually every newspaper. Almost daily it repeated, “Don’t Let Flu Frighten you to Death” and “Don’t Panic.” As a result, thousands more died as bodies piled on the streets and front porches of our great cities.