I have to confess, this quote has had a particular resonance to my heart this year: not unlike the reverberation of a gong through an echoing mountain range. This quote has struck a chord, a harmonic of pain and hope, brokenness and beauty.
Let me explain. In music, a chord usually comprises three notes of the musical scale, normally the first, third and fifth note of the scale (doe, me & sew if you recall that song!). The ‘nice’ happy sounding chords are major chords, but lower the middle note of the chord and it becomes a ‘minor’ chord, a sound which is more haunting and reminiscent of lament.
You change just one note and the dynamic changes. At a personal level, it’s an appropriate analogy. You still have the other two ‘happy’ notes of the chord, but a new element has been introduced, and because of the new sound, you ‘forget’ about the other two ‘happy’ notes.
Always winter, never Christmas.
Why the particular resonance this year?
A few reasons, centred on an event this year that changed my life.
To be clear, I am extremely reticent to share about my experience of the past year, because I’m acutely aware that many in our world have experienced pain that I cannot comprehend this year. I am blessed to live in a nation that is not at war and I do not need to worry about where I am staying or where my next meal comes from. I do not have to concern myself with whether my home will be bombed. At least not yet.
Closer to home, personal friends have walked an incredibly deep road this year when they lost their 27-year-old daughter to cancer: how do you process something like that? They were part of my former congregation in Durban and their daughter was an absolute delight – always a smile and an infectious laugh. I have some gorgeous photos of her and it’s just hard to fathom that her life was taken away so soon.
Always winter, never Christmas.
Nonetheless, I’ve been encouraged to share my experience. As I do, please understand that it is not my goal to dramatize what I went through: I really don’t want to draw attention to myself. I certainly don’t want to appear more spiritual or mature than I am (and sometimes writing can give a false appearance): I am very much a flawed “saint made by grace.” There is nothing particularly impressive about my level of spirituality, but I do give you plenty of reason to be impressed by the grace of God: despite all my foibles and tendency to get it wrong, God has not stopped loving me. It is my prayer that as I recount what I went through this past year (which was outside of my normal realm of experience), you will give thanks to God with me for sustaining me and bringing me through, and that you will be encouraged in your faith. Many of you prayed for me and your prayers were answered. Soli Deo Gloria!
Unlike many in our world who experienced genuine tragedy and sorrow, that is not how I would frame my personal journey this year. It was instead a gift which came in the form of a severe mercy. God saw fit to bring me low, because He is the potter, I am the clay, and His ways are not my ways but they are always good ways. Let me share…
It all began on the 27th March with a colonoscopy which brought to light a most unexpected diagnosis: cancer. The result was immediate admission to hospital and surgery the next day – with no time to process what had just happened.
As I was wheeled into the ward on the bed, two words were impressed on my heart which kind of became my mantra for the remainder of the year: Embrace and Trust (or put differently, surrender to the process).
The Lord provided a superb surgeon, and the surgery went well. The cancer portion of my colon was removed and then gratefully rejoined again (instead of a colon I now have a semi-colon!). I was placed in high care (which is where I spent Easter), mostly drugged up on morphine to the extent that those who visited me were wondering if I was going to make it!
Please forgive the bluntness, but a breakthrough of the colon kind was desperately needed, and I asked my wife to send out a prayer request. I cannot tell you how relieved I was that I was able to get to the bathroom and receive an answer to prayer!
I was moved to the general ward and by God’s grace started to recover well: folk who visited were amazed at the transformation, and we recognised together that God was at work. I remember I desperately wanted to get home because I felt so much better, but I had to wait, and eventually I was released (I know the correct word is discharged, but released describes my personal feeling better).
But the journey was not over. CT scans had picked up spread of cancer to lymph nodes and the liver.
I went to see the oncologist and he laid out the journey that lay ahead. I was devastated. I got into the car and sobbed like a baby, and in response to my wife’s gentle probing I confessed “I can’t do this…I can’t go through all this…Jesus has to come through for me!” We desperately prayed and hope that the MRI scan would reveal the CT scan proven wrong.
The MRI scan revealed multiple cancer nodules all located in the right side of the liver. And although this was not the outcome we had hoped for, God’s hand was clearly in it. The location of the cancer made it possible for the complete removal through surgery and the initial idea chemo first followed by surgery was now reversed. This too proved a God intervention as chemo weakens the body to such an extent that surgery after this would most likely have been fatal. To think that 20 years ago, the treatment would have palliative. The fact that there was a surgeon skilled enough to do this is itself a gift of God.
Always winter, never Christmas.
We met with the surgeon who was going to deal with my liver. The plan was to remove the right side – in layman’s terms a huge chunk – which means I’d only be left with what was left…or as one clever joker put it: I was going to be de-livered….
And so into the operating theatre I go. The staff very kindly put on worship music for me and I was so appreciative of this gesture.
I was under the knife for 8 hours and apparently I had the dubious honour of being the highly skilled surgeon’s most difficult case to date. It wasn’t meant to be that long, but there were complications.
It seemed I helped improve a lot of prayer lives.
This hospital recovery was very different to my previous one, and it really did feel like an ‘always winter never Christmas’ scenario. Why?
Perhaps it was the tag on my wrist which said I was a fall risk…not a flight risk (it wasn’t Tom Cruise of Mission Impossible lying in the bed). If I had any thoughts of fleeing I wouldn’t have made it out of bed let alone the door of my room.
Perhaps it was all the times I would just well up in tears for some inexplicable reason. I didn’t know the liver played a huge role in emotional regulation, but I sure have experienced it.
Perhaps it was the realisation of how difficult it was for my wife and daughter to see me in the state I was in.
Perhaps it was the mental playlist of three inane tunes that just kept playing over and over in my head like a stuck record despite the fact that I have access to probably hundreds of Christian songs in my head! Yes I had Spotify on my phone; what I didn’t have was the physical capacity to lift my phone.
Perhaps it was the time when they gave me ketamine and I had the wrong reaction: it sent me on a psychedelic hallucinogenic trip where I saw very weird things, and I remember trying to cry out help but all I could muster was a whimper which no-one could hear me saying ‘help – I’m tripping.’ I remember calling on the name of Jesus as well. Fortunately my physiotherapist walked in and realised something was wrong.
Perhaps it was the time when I started coughing, wanting to vomit, but nothing came out. Instead I experienced excruciating pain when I coughed, and a few minutes later the nurses came in and asked if I had drunk berry juice. What had happened prior to this is that my drain (for the purpose of draining fluids from abdominal cavity) had fallen out during a physio session (not the physiotherapist I share about shortly). This could not be replaced and fluids had subsequently been accumulated, and during my coughing spell these burst through my stitches and wet the bed. In order to collect the fluids a colonoscopy bag was put over the open area. I was sent home the same day, and my wife was required to measure the amount of fluids being drained, and I averaged 1-2 litres per day. It brought new meaning to the expression of feeling drained…I had no strength left (as I share shortly) and my feet were so swollen I couldn’t put on slippers. The fluids that drained became a fatty substance which meant that lymph was draining (losing all important nutrients). If this was not resolved quickly it would mean another trip to hospital for total nutrition to be given intravenously. This has a side effect of liver inflammation, which I could not afford. We prayed for the miracle of less fluid draining and lymph drainage to stop and from the early morning when it looked dire to the late afternoon no fluids were collected in the drainage bag. However after being elated over this, we realised that it was the wound that closed and that fluids were building up again. We continued praying for a miracle for the fluids to stop accumulating (which is an indication of liver and kidney functioning) and gradually this subsided without the wound opening again. I have had perfect healing of the wound, and eventually the swelling subsided.
In a nutshell, perhaps it was just the feeling of utter helplessness and vulnerability, and being reminded that biblical deliverance is not escape from the trial but preservation through it.
I have had better years. Human nature tends to perceive and expect future reality based on our current state. If things are going well for us, we presume it will always be so. If we are in a point of weakness, that becomes our reference point for living. And I must admit, given the weak state I was in, it was really hard to conceive of the idea of getting stronger. But if in our lives we only focus on the circumstances which define the middle note of the chord (especially if the circumstances are difficult), it would be pretty sad and an inducement to self-pity. That is a nasty pit to be in.
Instead we need to consider the context of that middle note (the circumstances). There are two other notes of the chord which give a context and turns the brokenness into a harmonic. I’ll call the other notes the goodness and the power of God.
Make no mistake: I had my struggles, and my second hospital stay was traumatic. But the best place to process struggles is the presence of God through prayer. It was a bit of a balancing act to allow myself those dark moments (which was par for the course and in retrospect I would say my body needed the space to grieve its loss – sounds weird I know but then we are knitted together and fearfully and wonderfully made as per Psalm 139). The balancing act was to give myself the space to experience it, but not to camp there: I wanted to walk through the valley, not live there. A sermon I heard preached by Paul Negrut reminded me that when one is in the pit, it doesn’t help to look down on the floor or at the walls: you have to look up. My astronomer friend David Block has as his motto to Always Look Up! When you’re lying in a hospital bed it fortunately lends itself to looking up, and you further discover that the green pastures we get made to lie down in are not always green – they can also take the form of hospital beige…
All trials for the child of God are rooted in the goodness of God because God is incapable of evil intent. And I just have to share how I experienced the other two notes this year.
This might come as a surprise, but despite the prayers of many I didn’t have any amazing feeling experiences of God; but I think that is the point of a test of faith. Trials not only develop faith, they also reveal it, and I believe God wants to see us trust Him even if we don’t ‘feel’ Him.
Having said that, I can also say that I observed God at work. I can honestly say that even when it got really dark, I never doubted the goodness and power of God and I never doubted that He was with me. I definitely had questions (if you get told to embrace and trust, you just have to know that things you don’t understand are going to happen), and because of God’s grace I knew I had the freedom to question Him, and I definitely prayed for relief and had a few things to say. I remember being in tears telling my wife I wanted to come home – it just seemed so far in the future. It was not always easy, but I clung to those words “Embrace and Trust.” I observed the necessity of community.
One incident stands out. A dear brother in Christ is part of the home fellowship I belong to and he is also a physiotherapist. I was grateful that he was able to attend to me post-surgery. I had some pretty vulnerable and undignified moments, but this brother always treated me with dignity, and furthermore had the audacity to plant hope in me when I was experiencing those dark moments. On this one occasion we had to do a bit of walking, but owing to some commotion in the ward we just had to pause a bit. At that point I simply put my head against his chest and there and then I realised that all I needed was a brother to walk this road with me. I subsequently realised that it was Jesus I was leaning against.
That was one way I saw the goodness of God. I saw it in other ways too: my wife shared stories with me of how God brought things together in perfect timing: ranging from administrative medical aid issues, through to the prayers of all those who lifted me up to the throne of grace, through to how my church community helped in whatever way they could, and through the visits from the surgeon who attended to my colon surgery and still popped in on me to see how I was doing even though I was no longer under his care for my second stay in hospital. Another story relates to the colonoscopy bag mentioned above: it needed replacing and none of the pharmacies had available. Fortunately we were referred to a STOMA sister who had in stock and very graciously supplied us – yet another example of God’s goodness to us. And then of course I saw the goodness of God at a very personal level through the true heroines of my story: my wife and daughter. As if my wife and daughter did not have enough on their plate because of work and school, they had me to look after as well!
The unconditional love I received from my wife and daughter was incredible. When I got released from hospital the second time, I was very weak. I needed help to walk. I needed help to walk to the bathroom. I needed help to shower. I needed help to get dressed. God’s goodness was displayed to me through the help I received.
So many ways that God’s goodness was seen: the love of family, the love of community, the love and prayers of the young people in the youth group I have the privilege of hosting, the prayers of friends and the timing of happenings, the calls from my brother in the UK – it all contributed to a path of healing.
But I also saw God’s power at work.
In February I had booked a family getaway to the Eastern Cape to go and be in nature. This was before we knew what was lying ahead. We wondered about whether I could cope with this holiday, but we decided to give it a go. I was made comfortable in the car, and my wife drove, and as we were leaving George my daughter put on her playlist and immediately I could start feeling restoration taking place. I was leaving the tension behind.
I began that two week holiday in a weakened state not being able to do anything for myself. I returned being able to walk unassisted (including stairs), and being able to shower and dress. I still had a way to go but the improvement made was phenomenal and a testament to God’s power.
After that it was time for chemo.
Another journey, and as of writing I only have one more session to go (the treatment was 12 sessions, each session being every second week provided blood tests allowed for it). It’s been up and down, sometimes having chemo delayed because of a low platelet count, and having to put up with some minor side-effects. But I’ve been incredibly fortunate in terms of the chemo, and I’ve been blessed with an amazing oncologist and the staff here at the facility are marvellous. My main side effect has been fatigue and it has been weird to finally have time to tackle projects but not having the energy to do so. If there are no further delays (I don’t expect any because God just provided me with a platelet count miracle), the needle will come out of my port from my final session on Christmas Day.
And this is the heart of the message I want to encourage you with. It is tempting to view life from a perspective of weakness as ‘always winter, never Christmas.’
But our middle note of difficulty and brokenness are part of a broader chord which has the notes of God’s goodness and power, and those three notes sounded together makes for a beautiful sound, even if it does sound haunting. Brokenness becomes part of a beautiful harmonic when combined with God’s power and goodness, because when we are weak, He is strong.
Christmas reminds us afresh that God entered our brokenness because of His good heart towards us and enabled to do so by His power. I’m reminded of how Gavin Ortlund put it in reflecting on Jeremiah 1:5 where it reads
''Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations”
Gavin points out how encouraged we can be by this, because God has formed us, consecrated us and appointed us for a purpose. This means we are part of a far bigger story, and I love this next point: It’s a great time to be alive.
It really is. Our world is filled with brokenness and pain, and as children of God we have the opportunity to spread hope like never before.
You know how the pipe organ plays that “Amen” at the end of a prayer? It has two parts – the “Ahhh” which is held onto a bit and creates that expectation and longing for resolution and completion which comes when the “men” part is played.
Well, we live in the “Ah” of the “A-men.” One day there will be completion, but until then, may whatever we go through be lived through a conscious faith in the goodness and power of God, because He has indeed formed us and is shaping us and has consecrated us for a purpose. Trials are part of that process and winter will become spring, and Christmas proves our God loves us. That’s why we can embrace and trust through whatever God sees fit to bring our way.
It really is a great time to be alive. As the Apostle Paul put it in a verse in 2 Corinthians, I’ve been holding onto this year:
16 Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. 17 For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. 18 So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.
Amen. Or should I say “Ah…”