Today is February ….8th, and 5 years ago I came home from my stem cell transplant. I came home not really knowing all of who I was as I ventured back into life. Apparently I was a cancer survivor…I sure was hoping I was a cancer survivor, but I really didn’t know yet. After living at a medical facility for about a month. I came home.
Maybe you have come home. Home from the battle field, home from the hospital, home from college, home from the grocery store, home from church. All you wanted was to get home, a home, a place, a safe familiar place; a safe familiar feeling. Maybe you are at work right now and you want to go home..;)
Such was my journey at that point, for several weeks I looked out the window at unobstructed million dollar views of Mt. Hood from the 14th floor of a hospital in Portland, Oregon. It was a last effort for something that I never thought would go this far. For days I wondered where the tiny cars on I-5 were going as I watched them in my decreasingly lucid moments till I ceased to care about cars on the freeway, the spectacular beauty of the Mountain, or the flowing Willamette river.
Our Lives take unexpected turns many times that create dips and potholes in the road that we once thought to be pretty strong flat and passable.
When I was a kid, my Father and I would go into the hills in the coast range of Oregon to cut firewood. Frequently the logging roads (which were often goat trails made by heavy machinery) were cut into by the hydraulic force of the ever present rain that fell (whenever we went to cut firewood of course). That rain, rushing down these roads would create it’s own path, cutting, and eroding away even heavily compacted rip rap (giant gravel). The rain relentlessly fell, and seemingly relentlessly eroded the path that was once passable and flat.
Sometimes our lives and the experiences that happen in the space that we call life feel like that rain. Relentlessly falling, incrementally wearing at the road surface that we took as strong, maybe even impervious to the thousands of pounds of machinery that have rolled on it before. We don’t think too much about the passing rain storms or the passing machinery. Then more rain drops starts to fall into our lives. Job changes, a health care scare, a wayward child, your social group changes, a loss occurs, a bully at work, then a year later another loss occurs, and then your job changes (for the worse), healthcare becomes a real concern. I can’t create an exhaustive list, but we as humans know what I am talking about.
Incrementally, the furrow grows deeper into the path of our life making it incrementally harder and harder to move forward or be the person that we want to be or sometimes even need to be just to function. Passing on the road becomes more difficult, more slippery and more discouraging. All we want to do is that feeling of being home. Home hopefully where we feel that safety, support, and familiarity. Home not just as a place (geographically), but as a feeling and a thought inside of us.
I was in grade school and middle school when we would cut wood out in the forest. I really didn’t like to do it very much. We got up early 4 AM (early to me) to get the “very best wood” (or so I was told).. We would drive sometimes for over an hour out into the middle of nowhere only to find that the other wood cutters were there already cutting the best wood (yea, those guys), and did I mention that it would rain. We would pull logs out of piles of slash heaped up after logging operations were over. The whole time I dreamed of being home rather than standing in the rain breathing chain saw exhaust with freezing feet. Feel sorry for me yet? 😉 …poor kid. Wanting a place to be and feel home runs thru us from our basic neurology to our profound spiritual desires.
Our pursuit of that feeling can lead us to make some really healthy choices and some really poor ones too. This writing is not about how to make poor choices because I think most people can figure that out on their own. It is an encouragement to make choices that steer our lives from adversity into the best relationship that we have with our Creator. The word that I choose to use is home because it is the best word that I can relate to in this experience. In my story and maybe in yours, the road home has been cut into by the raindrops of life.
Struggles with feeling home didn’t start when I got cancer, although cancer was the downpour that really made one of the deepest furrows in my life road. My feelings and thoughts were in flux in the financial struggles, the death of close relations, and the underlying dissatisfaction with where my life was before I was diagnosed. One rain drop I could endure, one shower of rain I could recover, but this felt like the mother of all storms furrowing deeply into my life and making the road ahead seemingly impassable. The winter of life seemed forever at that point in so many ways. Here I was 39 years old and diagnosed with lymphoma, a wife, 3 children, 2 jobs and a very old cat. The day really did seem like a February that had went on for a decade. My focus was on the rainy impassable road in front of me always just about Spring, but not quite Spring, and certainly not home. Little did I know that God was changing me to know this home in a more real way then I ever had.
In April of 2012 I knew that things weren’t going too well. Instead of improvement after 6 cycles of chemo I was having new pain in other parts of my body. I had a private practice as a professional counselor and it was declining (and so was I). The truth was that I was tired and burned out. I was working bi-vocationally as a pastor with my lovely wife who is also a pastor ( and working bi-vocationally as well). We were at a small loving Church in Springfield, Oregon. Financially, physically, and emotionally the rain was falling, falling hard, and eroding even more of my road. I called out to God in my office one day and a very still solid voice spoke into my Spirit, “I will take care of you”. I knew that it was April, it was Spring, but it was feeling like February.
In the months and years that have intervened it hasn’t been platitudes or deep sayings that have intervened in tough moments it has been that one or two profound moments when God has spoken in a dark place to create hope, when I was focused on his presence. It has been the gracious words of a believer half a world away saying that their child prayed for me every night when I was sick. It has been Christ’s face in the hundreds of people that showed up to a Papas pizza fundraiser on my 40th birthday. This is not a grandiose or magical thinking kind of hope, but a deep manifestation of his Spirit mystically and profoundly touching my pain and my joy.
In that month of April my practice income fell by 75% and a loving gracious individual at our church handed me a $1000 check and quietly walked away. “I will take care of you”.
God wants us to move into the Spring he has designed for us, but he won’t shove us there, he nudges. There is an interesting passage in the Bible (John 5:6) where Jesus approaches a man that had been ill for 30 years and asks what I used to think was a really strange question, “do you want to be healed?”. Now one would think that after 30 years someone wouldn’t want to be healed, want to be whole, want to change from just existing, even just surviving, to living, and thriving.The assumption is that Jesus was looking for something more in this man then a demonstration of healing, but change of focus, a focus on living not just surviving, a focus on Christ himself and not just on what we get out of knowing Christ. Christ has made his home in my heart and although the rain falls I know that my place and my identity with Him is my home.
Thank you to my God, my wife Daleasha , my kids, Nate, Daisy, and Silas, and all those who have prayed and stood by us when things were tough.
Gene is Husband to the amazing Daleasha, Father to the amazing Daisy, Nate, and Silas, lover of Christ, licensed counselor, ordained pastor, writer, and artist. Gene is originally from Veneta, Oregon and currently resides in Washougal, Washington. As Therapist in both local Eugene agencies, as well as private practice for 15 years, and as a Lead Pastor in Springfield Oregon for 5 years ( along with many other church based ministry roles thru the years) Gene has a heart for those that are both in the spiritual and mental healing professions. As an artist Gene focuses on sculpture and functional art items that take up space and have to be noticed.
Other Parts of this narrative will eventually find their way into this blog.
I remember looking at the Hong Kong restaurant on 18th Ave from the back window of an office building on Willamette St. I built the best forts in that little room. The smell of the pile of vinyl bean bags drifting thru the air. I could peak out of the crack in the door and see my mother sitting across from another man talking. It was weekly and it always felt long. Off course most things felt long at 5 years of age. I don’t remember everything but I do remember the things that happened over and over again. This was one of those things.
So were the weekly visits to Lane County Mental Health on Garden Ave, usually on Wednesdays.
Dunkin Donuts was down the street and I could get a cherry filled mountain of goodness if I sat still outside the group room. The other people, all adults, filling the air with a steady stream of cigarette smoke as they awaited their appointments, or whatever it was that they were there for. It was super great when they put in a soda machine and I got a bottle of Sunkist for 25 cents.
I could see thru the rear view mirror of the truck as my father struggled to get my mother back in the cab. We were in the middle of some state driving home from Yellowstone Park. There was a lot of loud talk and a physical struggle. A police officer stopped to see if help was needed, all I remember is that things got calmer. I remember being afraid sitting in the middle of the cab as we drove straight thru from Yellowstone to Veneta. I slept. My Father told me years later that he was afraid that my mother’s psychotic and paranoid state at the time would have caused her to be hospitalized far from our home. He drove straight thru to get her to help in Eugene near where we lived. He also told me that my mother’s counselor told her to quit taking her medicine and take a vacation. We went to Yellowstone.
All though I did not really know, years later I learned that my mother had gone for eight full hospitalizations from 1970 to 1981. I remember my father taking me to work. My father said that “she could not think rationally”. I used to sit in my dad’s truck waiting for him as he went into visit her at Fairview hospital in Salem, always with a stern warning not to unlock the doors or get out of the truck. I played like the truck was a spaceship and fell asleep. Ice cream was to follow.
This was the life that I knew as a young child. There is so much more both very beautiful and very tough thru those years and beyond. It is one story in thousands that should be told to let people know that they are not alone.
When I was starting out working as a therapist in a local agency,
I remember a person telling me that he was glad that “he didn’t need that kind of help”…
I guess I was glad too.
The statement highlights the stigma that asking for help has, especially help that involves our emotions, our minds, or our spirits. My mother was a quiet and vibrant person. My mother was able to facilitate life in the midst of the difficulties of mental illness (anxiety, depression, paranoia, and delusions). She did this with professional support (such as it was in the time), several close friends, the commitment of my father, and with her faith in Christ.
This is my call and my encouragement for those who are helping, those who are struggling, or those that are watching someone they love struggle.
It is time to set aside the stigma and the underlying fear that you may have and get or give support. If you are a helper then accept the help and support that you will need to assist others to health. If you are struggling with issues realted to mental health click below for resources.
https://www.mentalhealth.gov/get-help/immediate-help
I read that there is as much as 40% drop out rate for those working in the mental health field each year. I am not sure if that statistic is entirely true, but even if it was 30%, it underscores the incredible challenge of the field. If you are going alone, stop being a lone ranger. Do the health inspiring things that you know you need to renew!
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/151715081174805807/
Gene is Husband to the amazing Daleasha, Father to the amazing Daisy, Nate, and Silas, lover of Christ, licensed counselor, ordained pastor, writer, and artist. Gene is originally from Veneta, Oregon and currently resides in Washougal, Washington. As Therapist in both local Eugene agencies, as well as private practice for 15 years, and as a Lead Pastor in Springfield Oregon for 5 years ( along with many other church based ministry roles thru the years) Gene has a heart for those that are both in the spiritual and mental healing professions. As an artist Gene focuses on sculpture and functional art items that take up space and have to be noticed.
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