The Need to Change

No matter how good their evidence, the doctors don’t always know. Doctors from three major hospitals told us that Bea had only three to six months to live, so we borrowed a credit card and with three hundred dollars friends had given us, we set out for California for a last visit with Carol’s sister. That was forty-some years ago. Bea died last year (not of cancer). The doctors don’t always know. On the other hand, the doctors usually prove to be right. I had been their pastor only a week or so when I was told that I should visit a very sick young mother who lived on a farm seven miles north of town. I was new and I was young and it seemed to me that Mae more endured than appreciated the pastoral visit. A few weeks later she was in the hospital forty miles away. When I arrived, the lady at the desk directed me to Room 312. A doctor was leaving 312 as I walked down the hall. I asked Mae how she was doing and received the bitter response, “How would you feel? What would you do if the doctor had just told you that you had cancer and only six months left to live, and you had a son who is only six-years-old?” These unexpected words hit me like a slap in the face, but I realized that the doctor’s words had been a far greater blow to her. It was early afternoon when the doctor came to her room and told her. She was alone. Friends and family were home and about their business, and the doctor had not been expecting that I would be arriving. He merely had told her the devastating facts and left her alone, without any available support expected. I was glad I had showed up. We were virtual strangers, but at least I was another human presence, someone she could absorb some of the shock. I had a six-year-old at home myself, and found myself replying to her “What would you do?” question with: “I don’t know, but I think I would spend that six months putting into that son all of myself that I could.” Within a few weeks I conducted her funeral. Whether my word were of any value or not, I don’t know. What I do know is that now, more than forty years later, I still think that would be my most honest answer as to what I would attempt to do. With Bea, the doctors were wrong and our visit of 1963 was not our predicted last time together. We had many good visits in the years that followed. With Mae, the story was different. Her time was up. I was not allowed to become anything other than a stranger. Someone else raised her son: his father, and then later on, a stepmother. Yet another story, more recent, speaks of a different kind of opportunity. Recognizing that she has come to a fork in life’s road, which will she take before death takes her? Will she choose, or merely drift? Again, a young child is involved. For long years the mother has been careless about her own health, to the point that she now realizes her life is at risk. Her fear of death seems to be like that of Mae’s: “What if I were to die and leave this precious child behind?” More to the point, “How selfish and inconsiderate of me if I were to die because I refused to change my way of living, and thus deprived my child of her mother?” In this situation, I responded, as I often do, with the words of an old Russian proverb: “No matter how long you have been traveling the wrong path, turn around.” Bad eating habits, lack of exercise, failure to follow doctor’s instructions, or even to see the doctor as often as needed–no matter how long these have done their damage they all can be turned around. As Carlyle Marney often said, “You don’t have to go on living like you have.” I remember reading somewhere: “Wisdom is knowing what to do next. Skill is knowing how to do it. Virtue is doing it.” Most of us have the essential life skills. Many of us, if we stop to think, know what should be done next. Most of our failure most of the time lies in our not doing what we know we should, and what we know how. There is still time for this mother to turn around and move toward a more promising future for mother and child. Most of us realize the need to turn major elements of our life in a new direction. But will we do it?