Passions of the Soul

A week that, in part, shouldn't have been

I tend to define a week as Sunday through Saturday, probably because most calendars are set up that way.  This week got off to a very bad start, in our community.  A 20-something guy with  an assault rifle, or two, lots of ammunition and (I think) additional firearms led local police and deputy sheriffs on a chase that pretty well spanned our city.  He started off the morning shooting at a couple of different houses, and when officers spotted him, the chase was on.  Periodically he fired at them; first, he shot an officer in the shoulder, but the officer kept chasing him.  Fortunately, the injury was not life-threatening.  The third officer (I think both of these were deputies, but I'm using officer as a generic term) was shot at, but the bullet left only a grazing wound.  He was treated and released.

The second officer was not so fortunate.  Tucson Police Officer Erik Hite had retired as a first sergeant in the USAF, two or three years ago (my timing could be off), and promptly applied to the local police academy.  His former commanding office in the Air Force, other friends in the military, and fellow officers in Tucson, have all had nothing but praise for him as a person and an officer.

Officer Hite was, in effect, ambushed, on Sunday morning:  He was chasing the "suspect" on a two-lane road, when the perpetrator made a sudden left turn onto a side street and fired at Officer Hite, striking him in the head.  He actually hit the squad car six or seven times, but the one that counted took Officer Hite's life.  Left behind are his wife, nearly one-year-old daughter, and a son who is also in the military.

I never met Officer Hite, but I grieve, when someone who has taken on the job of serving and protecting us all is killed in the line of doing just that.  I also grieve when I hear that more of our troops have died in a war zone.  Either way, they have died in service to us all; their lives were not wasted.

Nothing else about this week seems quite as important as the way it began--and, for Erik Hite, ended.  The next time you see a police office/deputy sheriff, firefighter or member of the military, say, "Thank you!" and mean it.  You'll make their day.

Better news on Allie!

You can read about her latest venture out for a little fun.  My word, she's cute!  But she, Charity, Bryon and Susan still need our prayers--always. 

Prayer needs and praises, updated

Reading some information about my friends' grandbaby, I realized I hadn't updated the requests and praises, lately.  So...

Ken is about half-way through his radiation treatments and is doing very well on them, with few of the anticipated side effects.  That's a praise!  He still has the remaining treatments to go, of course, and prayers for his continued endurance, lessening side effects, and gaining strength are needed.

Ken and Jeannine's newest grandbaby, Abigail, is making great strides, better than expected, for one born so darned early.  We praise God for bringing her along as well as He has and is, and pray that He'll keep her from getting any more infections, while in the hospital.  Also, issues of optimal weight gain (without use of a feeding tube) and breathing are factors in when she can come home.  If weight were the only factor, it appears that she would go home very soon, as she is at just under 5 lbs., now.

So many things are possible with a preemie as young as Abby, but God knows how to grow babies to be strong.  I keep hearing that children who were preemies have strong personalities; with a body to go with it, Abby could be one formidable little girl for her mommy and daddy to deal with! :o)

Different family:  Miriam, who was supposed to have had back surgery last Friday morning, was surprised to learn on arrival at the hospital that it had been rescheduled.  At this point, she is to report at some unearthly hour like 5 a.m. this Friday morning!  Please keep her in prayer, too.

Little Allie continues with various therapeutic modalities.  She no longer looks like a little baby, either!  She, Bryon and Susan, and Charity all need continued prayer.

One of the Compassion Advocates on our team is Hans, who is getting ready to graduate from college.  Hans has been fighting a recurring gastrointestinal problem for several months, and it has defied every doctor he has seen.  Please pray that God will heal Hans and given him the strength and presence of mind that he needs to finish his coursework and graduate.

And then there is Kenya.  Compassion's children are scattered all over, so many of them displaced by the violence that has robbed them of homes and belongings.  Compassion Kenya continues as best they can to care for all of the children who can be located, but conditions are even more heartbreaking than usual...which is saying a lot.  If you want to help, you might consider making a donation to Compassion's Disaster Relief Fund; in a comment section, you can specify that you want your funds to be used to help in Kenya, although there are other areas in need of assistance, as well.  And, of course, if you want to change the world for a child in poverty, in Jesus' name, you can do that here.  While you're praying for Kenya, please remember Rebecca, who is in the Leadership Development Program, there, and whom we sponsor.

MORE UPDATE:    I previous wrote about Tom and Karen, and her journey through diagnosis, surgery and treatment for endometrial cancer.  She finished her chemo' treatments sometime in January, I think, or early February.  Tom and Karen like to come to Arizona, now and then to do some hiking on snow-free ground, and this is their weekend to be in Tucson.  They came to church, this morning, so we got to visit a little bit afterward.  Karen looks great, and as far as they know, she is free of cancer.  They will appreciate prayers, however, as she will have a three-month checkup in April.  Praise God for having brought her through treatment as well as He did!

Kenya 2

This is an update on the violence in Kenya, as reported by a family member of one of our church members.  The first note is from Shauna, wife of Samson Okongo and administrator of Unite 4 Africa.  They are missionaries who have been mostly Stateside for about 3 years.  Samson, whose life reads like the Book of the Acts, is currently in Africa, but I haven't heard in which country, in a couple of weeks.  At least 3, maybe 4, of his family members have already been killed in the violence that rages there, and as of a few weeks ago, one of his sisters was missing.

Dearest Ones,

This is an update from Samson's second eldest brother.  For those who were under the impression that the violence was calming down, please be aware that it is getting worse in many places.  Please continue to pray, friends.  I will send out news as I have it.  That you so much for your attention to this.

Till all have heard,

Shauna Okongo

------------------

Dear.

I have not slept last night.  Naivasha has been very brutal with killings of Luos and Kalenjins.  About 30 or more have been killed and many burned in their houses.  The madness is coming our way.  They have threatened to kill us and finish the work.  Are roads have been barricaded and we cannot move.  We are looking for any rescue means.  Many people who show the TV news yesterday have called to pray for us.

We still call for prayers.

David

If you are a praying person, please pray earnestly for Kenya, and for the Okongo's family.  And that is only one family.  I also noticed that the violence is not limited to the two tribes I first read mentioned in earlier reports.  Many Compassion projects have been affected since the violence began, and we still have no word--that I have heard--about specific children, including our Leadership Development student, Rebecca.

You may not like the word, but Evil is at work and having a hey-day in Kenya; it is a spiritual battle with earthly violence, bloodshed and death to show for it.  But Evil is not defeated by human intervention, as needed as that may be.  Rather, it is defeated only by the working of the Holy Spirit of God.  Please, please pray for Kenya.  And if you are so inclined and able, please feel confident in donating any amount to Unite 4 Africa.  It is a 501(c)(3) organization, which means your donation is tax deductible.  I know Shauna and Samson Okongo, and you will find no greater hearts or integrity.  The need is urgent.

Updates on two babies

Abigail, the newborn/preemie I told about before Christmas, is coming along, breathing with apparatus in her nostrils, now, rather than with a tube down her throat.  Other areas of development are coming along, some more slowly than others.  She is, of course, still in the hospital and still in need of God's care--and her parents are very aware of His presence.  I'll re-read Grandma Jeannine's letter and come back with more specifics, if I see that I blew past something notable.

Ali/Allie's grandfather posted the recent progress report.  It, too, is mixed, but overall it's good news.  This is the first time, I think, that I have seen her diagnosed with quadriplegia, but physical therapy is helping.  She is still visually impaired.  Bryon and Susan credit all progress to God, in answer to all of the prayers being offered for Allie.

Class of '67

I'm a solid week and a half behind in writing this post, but it's high time I did.  I wish I'd been able to write it as soon as we returned from my 40-year college class reunion; why I wasn't able at that time is another story.

This was the first class reunion I had attended, and I'm so glad Bruce went with me.  It really was more than a class reunion, for me, though; I also reunited, reconnected with Jerry and Nadine, and Warren and Jan, who were my peers in our youth group before they ever paired off; and with Norm and Judy, who were the adult leaders of our group, in the church in which I grew up.  I should say they were very young adult leaders, being college students, still, when they began working with us.  Anyway, it had been roughly 35 years since I'd seen any of them.

I left college without graduating for the same reason many young women quit school:  to get married.  My then-husband and I moved away, but we were still in the loop, to some extent, for maybe 10 years.  Several years after that, tho', we divorced; that was the one of the first of the twists and turns in my life, to the point that I was out of touch with almost everyone.

During the reunion weekend, the reconnecting with old friends seemed to be filling up a hole in my soul.  Even several people that I had known, but not known well, in college, contributed to that sense of being filled.  I had kind of known the hole was there, but I had no idea how deep it went or how important it was--how important those people were to me.  The opportunity to sit and visit, to play catch-up with each other's lives, and just to have great fun during the reunion luncheon, could qualify for a part in one of those commercials--you know, "Travel to and from the class reunion:  $150.  Hotel room for two:  $100+/night.  Seeing old friends:  priceless."  And the cherry on top was that my husband enjoyed it as much as I did.  I've started a photo album (look in the right Side Bar), but I have more pictures to add and editing to do.*

It wasn't quite all fun, however.  As I mentioned in a post below, one of my friends is now in a wheelchair.  I learned from her that 25% of patients with spinal-cord injuries live with a constant, intense, burning pain that nothing even helps.  She is in the 25% group.  The grief I felt for her and her husband after their accident, years back, all came up again.  I just wanted to be able to put my arms around both of them and make it all better, and I don't have the power to do that.  Oh, how I wish I did.

But the luncheon was fun.  We discovered a couple of stand-up comedians in the group; I'm not sure what they do for a living, but Eddie and Clyde ought to hire an agent and take it on the road.  Everyone was congenial and ready to reminisce.  It did come as a bit of a shock, tho', that both the school song and mascot have been changed!  I shouldn't have been surprised; the college moved from Pasadena to San Diego in 1973, and that really did call for a change in the song.  Face it--locating in San Diego, on Point Loma, is a bit of a change from being "Nestled in the High Sierras!"  (I'm not sure Pasadena's exactly nestled in the High Sierras, but we did have some nice mountains to look at, when it wasn't too smoggy.)  Somewhere along the way, someone must have said, "You know, we're at the ocean.  We really ought to have a different mascot."  So the college is now represented by sea lions, rather than Charlie Crusader.  I wonder how that works on the basketball court....

I let 40 years go by before attending a class reunion; now, I can't wait for the next one.  Five years! Listen, at our age, a lot can change in that time.  Sigh.

UPDATE:  I have completed the Photo Album for PLNU Class of '67 Reunion.

Reunion

Forty years. 40. Years.  Surely that's a mistake!  It cannot possibly have been 40 years since my class graduated from Pasadena College (now Point Loma Nazarene University)!  My mind keeps wandering between denial and excitement, as we approach the time to leave home and travel to see some of my old friends...and most likely, some who were never friends of mine.  Ever since I made a firm decision to go, people I knew back then, old friends, have found their way into my dreams, night time or nap time.  People I haven't seen in 35 or 40 years.  I know they will all have aged, but I'll just have to be gracious about it; I, of course, haven't changed a bit!  I've considered trying my hand at a Confunding charm and telling them that I entered college when I was ten years old, but someone borrowed my wand, so I'm stuck.

I am old enough to have graduated a little over 40 years ago (repeat three times:  I am old enough, take a deep breath, and repeat the set).  I did not, in fact, graduate then, not until 1991; and I graduated from our local university, so my real graduating class was 1991, from our local university.  But I will never attend a reunion for that.

When I was wavering over whether to go to San Diego, I kept visualizing people I didn't really want to see--people around whom I had always been uncomfortable, because I never knew whether they were going to be friendly or stuck up.  Finally, I realized two things:  First, the people who persisted in passing and pausing before my eyes were not in my class; they were a couple of years ahead of me.  When I began digging in my memory banks for people who were in my class, I began to get excited about going.

Second, I am not only older, I'm not the same person I was then.  I don't usually approach people the same way as I did then--What do they think of me?--but more open to seeing and hearing who they are.  Besides, they have all no doubt changed, as well, for better or for worse.  One of my good friends from our youth group is now in a wheel chair, a result of a nasty accident while on vacation, more than 10 years ago.  Others have lost close family members.  I'm sure, if I were privy to the information, I would know many others who had experienced severe hardship or catastrophic illnesses.  There may be some deaths that I haven't heard about.  These things have a way of pruning us, reshaping, smoothing out rough edges (sorry about the metaphoric shift).

One person I would like to see who will not be there is Jeannine, but in addition to the health issues in her household, she will be retiring at the end of this week.  I dunno, I guess she didn't want to miss the party, or something. <gr>  You see, there's another reality check on my age:  My close friend, the one friend I've known the longest, is retiring!  Oh, wait--she's taking early retirement.  Whew!

So...we will leave the campus on Saturday afternoon and go north, a couple of hours, to spend a couple of days with my family, again, and then come home on Tuesday.  I probably won't get around to blogging until Thanksgiving, maybe even Friday.  We'll see.  If I don't, I hope you all have a good Thanksgiving time with family and friends that you love.  And please--not to lay on guilt--try to remember that we all, no matter what difficulties we face, still are far, far better off than most of the world.  So let's give thanks, even for those things that we all take so for granted, even for the things that annoy, irritate or drive us a little nutty.  Someone told me, long ago, that anything for which you can really give thanks has lost its power to defeat you.  So thank God for it and ask for the insight, the wisdom, the clarity to see him, her, them, it, even yourself, through His eyes.

Happy Thanksgiving, and God bless.

Updating

If you're following Ali's progress, check this out.  You'll notice a change in the spelling of her name; with the adoption in progress, this is the time to do that.

My known-her-since-kindergarten friend, Jeannine, has brought me up to date on her husband's choice of treatment for prostate.  Surgery did not get all of it.  He had decided to enter a clinical study, but then they learned that he had been turned down.  The only other option they know of is radiology and hormone therapy, but two doctors are supposed to talk to each other, and neither has called Ken, yet.  Meanwhile, he's feeling very well, and his last tests showed no new signs of cancer cells.  They're happy about that, of course!  Still...since he's not really out of the woods, they'll appreciate our prayer support.

Miriam told me something about a recent visit to the specialist for her back, but I'll have to find that, again and put it in here later.

  A new request, though, from me:  My sponsored child, Denisse, in the Dominican Republic, is in one of the 19 Compassion-assisted projects that have been affected by the flooding that has resulted from Tropical Storm Noel.  That's all I know! I kind of assume that she and her family probably lost everything they had, as many have done.  It could be months before I know how she is, and that's really hard.  My friend and supervisor and his wife sponsor a boy in Peru, whose project and community were impacted by the earthquake down there in August; they still don't know how he is, and now I know how they feel.  Please pray for these children and their families, the churches that serve them and run the projects, and the project staff.

Recent reports on Baby Ali

Go to Bryon's blog, scroll down to the October 18 "Ali Report," read that and then go up to the two posts on October 23.  Such good news! 

More prayer requests

Before I mention specifics, I need to say something about prayers for healing.  First, I believe God heals in a variety of ways--fully and immediately, or over time and with medical treatment.  I was once healed, fully and as a result of one friend's specific prayer for healing of a recurring and stubborn infection.  I also know that God does not always choose to answer our prayers for healing--our own, or someone else's--in the way that we want.

This is a common dilemma for Christians.  God can heal anything, but He doesn't, always.  Why?  I can't answer that for the simple reason that God never sees fit to answer my Why? questions.  So how are we to pray?  I recently struggled with that question concerning someone very dear to me.  Then, while singing praises to God in church (specifically, How Great Is Our God!), I prayed for this person and was reminded as I prayed of a pastor in the Dominican Republic who is a living, walking, talking miracle; it seemed as though God used that memory to say to me, "I did that, and I can handle this problem you are praying about.  Pray for a miracle." So I think I now understand that we are to pray for what we want--the full healing of those we love and care about--but always with an openness to whatever He chooses to do, or not to do.  That requires faith--the faith to trust Him to know and to do what is best.

So with that, I offer these needs.  I don't have many updates to offer regarding people previously named in similar posts, but I'll do what I can, as I have at least one new request.

Ken, the husband of my virtually life-long friend Jeannine, was diagnosed a few months ago with cancer of the prostate.  He has been through two surgeries, as he had some internal bleeding following the first surgery.  He was off work for six or seven weeks, and is not yet up to full strength.  However, he also has to decide what course of treatment he will undergo, as the cancer was not fully contained in the prostate.  Please pray for Ken and Jeannine, for healing, for strength to endure, and for God's peace.

Over at Beverly's blog, you can see pictures of her granddaughter, Ella.  Ella looks like one healthy little girl, but Ella has cystic fibrosis.  She has done very well, but she's now on medication for a "bad bug" in her throat, and will have to be on medication for a full month.  I'm pretty ignorant about CF, but I know a bad bug is bad enough in an otherwise healthy child.  Please remember Ella, her mommy and daddy and her grandma in your prayers.

Last I heard, Martha's godmother, Ann, was still showing good results from her chemotherapy and was finally free of the colostomy.

My friend Miriam escaped surgery on her shoulder, thanks to the workings of her physical therapist.  Now she has pain due to a bulging L5 disc that is compressing the S1 (S for sacrum, or maybe sacral?) nerve root.  Yeah, that's gotta hurt.  I remember too well the excruciating pain my precious husband endured for too long caused by a bone fragment digging into the sciatic nerve.  Those things don't get better by themselves, and I'm thankful for Miriam that her doctors didn't tell her to live with it for a month to six weeks, before they would do an MRI.  She has an appointment with appropriate doctors on Oct. 16, unless they can get her in sooner.  She would appreciate prayers, probably for strength to endure, until then, and for wisdom and skill in the doctors who will treat her.

I don't have any updated information about Karen, who had a hysterectomy during the summer due to endometrial cancer.  Contrary to what the surgeon thought immediately following surgery in June, the lab reports showed that the cancer had spread into other organs, so chemo' began on August 1.  During this same period of time, Tom's mother was ill and cancer was likely.  Again, I don't have a recent update, but certainly, Tom and Karen and their family can use our prayers!

And my dear friend Linda, for whose husband we prayed a few months ago (Rob is doing well, thanks!), and her extended family, are dealing with the aftermath of her dad's death and her mom's advancing age and decreasing abilities.  It's one of those kaleidoscopic situations that defies any simple or clear request for prayer, but Linda, brother J.D. and sister Janet could all use a prayer net beneath them.

And, finally, little Ali, for whom we have prayed, continues to show little but important signs of progress, even while she continues to face so many major challenges.  Bryon and Susan (Grandma and Grandpa who are now caring for Ali) continue to deal with the loneliness of having been abruptly uprooted and transplanted on the other side of the continent.  Please remember them all, as their lives really have been forever changed.   One specific prayer request, too, is that the adoption proceedings will go smoothly, that the Court will decide in their favor and that Ali will be released to them by the State of California.