Dream Have You Caught God's Vision?

when God gives glasses It is imperative that we know what it means to see, to hear, and to discern the things of the world to which we truly belong. MARK CHIRONNA They are all staring at me. Lori's wig is crooked. She's got a nine-year-old and is losing her battle with cervical cancer. To her left is Paul. He has pancreatic cancer and his wife, Evelyn, will lose her partner of forty-seven years in only four weeks. To his left is Beth. She just had a lumpectomy, lost her left breast, and is beginning a chemo regimen. Her engagement to sing her first solo concert at the Kennedy Center has been canceled. The other side of the room is not looking much better. Bill's abdomen is distended and he looks as physically uncomfortable as his wife does. They don't even have the comfort of a diagnosis. To their left are Maya and William. They just got run over with positive biopsy results and resemble emotional road kill: blank eyes staring at speckled tile and no signs of life. Sitting next to them is Mike. The wrapping on Mike's head can't mask the huge divot of missing skull from a surgery that removed a glioblastoma from his brain. As I look at him, I can't fend off the thought that he's a goner. His kind of cancer is not the kind you survive. His chin is in his chest and I can't see his face. His new wheelchair makes him slump. I can't tell whether he is doing well today or not. By contrast, Michelle is supremely visible. Outwardly perfect, she is flanked by her two perfect girlfriends. Their perfect world, perfect nails, and perfect makeup suggest all is very well. But Michelle's insides betray her outsides. Blond and beautiful outside, but bellicose and bitter on the inside. She is losing her fight with an aggressive breast cancer. The trip to Japan to explore experimental therapies was a failure and she's back with us in Orange County. On this night, in this room, the big C is defeating the OC. Oh, and did I mention? They are all staring at me. The year was 1993, and I was twenty-nine years young. I was attending seminary, working full time, and had been assigned a clinical pastoral rotation on an oncology unit. One evening a week we met in the basement of the Western Medical Center in Anaheim with about thirty cancer patients and their families or friends. To describe this time as a defining moment seems to cheapen this chapter of my life, but it captures the ethos of the year in which my world was beautifully ruined by God. It was a year of first-time encounters with reality: first time I was afraid to show up for work first job in which mortality was a daily reality first sustained connection to cancer and its victims first encounters with true despair and imminent death first exposure to "unfixable" emotions first big crisis of faith first funeral first time I caught a clear vision of life and heaven What did Iseefor the first time? I control nothing. Trauma dissolves the trivial. Relationships define riches. Personal discomfort leads to discovery. Reality, however painful, is where we find eternity. God's vision for me is different from my vision. Physical poverty produces spiritual clarity. A cancer support group was God's agent of new meaning and purpose in my life. I didn't like His choice, but He didn't care. He let me borrow His glasses. He decided that's the kind of reality I needed to get clear in order to see Him and, in the process, see myself. I saw that Kenny likes sanitized, sanctified, and tidy. He prefers comfortable and predictable, like any gooLuck, Kenny is the author of 'Dream Have You Caught God's Vision?', published 2007 under ISBN 9781578569878 and ISBN 1578569877.