It is generally accepted that there is a certain trickiness involved in doing two things at the same time. Some well-known examples come to mind. Patting your head and rubbing your tummy at the same time. For some people, chewing gum and walking at the same time. For many people, chewing gum and keeping your mouth closed at the same time. More recently added to the list: listening to your spouse and checking your Facebook at the same time.
The particular trickiness I am working on these days is perhaps an example less generally accepted, which if true is a shame. This trickiness can be compared to running hard and standing still at the same time. As for running hard, I have recently been drawn into a fight. A fight for my life. To begin, this fight involves six weeks of radiation treatment and chemotherapy, beginning next Thursday (which is the anniversary of D-Day, by the way.) Plainly, this fight must also involve faith: faith in God; faith that God will strengthen me and help me, and heal me. Things have been made pretty clear to me. Without God's help, this is a fight I am not likely to win. So I am working on being like young David of Israel, with one sling and five stones in hand, running hard towards the giant in the name of the Lord. This is the first thing.
The second thing is standing still, by which I mean quietly accepting the reality of my own mortality and the plain fact that I, like everyone I have ever met, will die someday --- and maybe sooner than later. Having had the privilege of pastoring a church for lots of years, I never would have been able to escape this truth. But I don't think I have ever been tempted to. For just as many years as I have been a pastor, I have been held in the grip of a number of writers, mostly pastors, that I have always referred to as "My Five (or Nine) (or Seven) Dead Men" (I change my mind from time to time about who belongs on the list). "My Five-or-whatever Dead Men" were all individuals and they didn't agree with each other on certain fine points of theology, but they do have a number of things in common, one of the most notable being that they ARE all dead. This, I am sure, has always been helpful to me -- and is helpful to me now. I mean, now that I might be about to die.
So this is the trickiness I am working on. These are the two things I am learning to work on at the same time: to brace myself to run hard toward my enemy, wholeheartedly fighting for my life and trusting God and praying with all my heart for strength and health and healing and a long life, while at the same time, quietly and peacefully accepting the reality that this might in fact be the beginning of the end of my life (as we know it), just as God has always intended it to be. Deb and I are trusting God to see us through the battle that begins on this coming anniversary of D-Day. "We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender…" But at the same time, I am working on humbly accepting the fact that I always was going to die some time, and with it the fact that the time might be some time in the months ahead. "Come now you who say,`Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a city and spend a year there and trade and make a profit' --- yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, "If the Lord wills, we will live and do this and that." James 4:13,14 (ESV)
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