November 2021 - Cindy DeBoer

Sometimes holidays conjure up more pain and despair than joy and celebration. That’s true for me, anyway, on the day before Thanksgiving. It was 2013 and with the table set, the turkey stuffed, and pies complete, my husband and I spent the day before Thanksgiving driving to Ann Arbor to meet with a pulmonology specialist. She confirmed what we had already feared: I have Lymphangioleiomyomatosis (LAM) – a very rare, progressive, degenerative, and debilitating lung disease.

I despise the day before Thanksgiving.

And, in true fashion, this year hasn’t let me down. Although our refrigerator is packed with a 16 lb. turkey, every vegetable known to man, multiple pies, and drinks of every color, I cancelled the festivities for tomorrow because I (of all people who should know better) have had a significant exposure to COVID. While for the last two years I’ve done everything in my power to stay COVID free (which my doctor warned me would “not go well” for me), that little corona boogie man found me anyway.

I want to moan, whine, and throw apples at squirrels. I’d like to take about 10 Melatonin, crawl in bed and wake up on New Year’s Day. I feel like eating all the pies and using the gravy as a chaser. I don’t feel like being thankful for anything or anyone. And I sit here quarantined for 10 days just wondering if every little sniffle is the onset of the illness that will take me out, the very LAST last thing I feel like doing is creating a “Thankful” list.

Which is exactly why I must.

Before Ann Voskamp bestowed on us the beautiful posture of thanksgiving, our very own Jesus Christ had made it quite clear this wasn’t to be an optional thing (Psalm 100: 4,5; Ephesians 5: 18-20; Colossians 2: 6,7; I Thessalonians 5: 16-18 – just to name a few). To be honest, I don’t always like to do all the things Jesus told us to do and sometimes I get grumpy about it. But in this moment, in this debacle, in this wretched season of COVID, I don’t know what else to do or where else I’d go. I will choose thankfulness simply because He told us to be thankful not FOR all things, but IN all things. I will be thankful because he is God and I am not.

I am thankful that:

I’m still alive. Cliché, I know. But when I was diagnosed 8 years ago today, all the literature said that women with LAM would live, on average, 10 years. Since that time, a chemo-like medication has been approved to treat LAM and while it’s not a cure, it does slow down the progression. Additionally, most recent research reveals that while some women do succumb to LAM after just a few years, others can live as many as 20 to 25 years with the disease. Still, every year, on this day, I am reminded that I am one of the fortunate ones. I am still alive.

Mom jeans came back in style this year. I mean, seriously, who wouldn’t prefer “A” over “B”???

My grocery store is diverse. There’s a new grocery store in our neighborhood that has found the magical blend where all people from both ends of the socioeconomic spectrum feel “at home” and catered to. I often shop alongside destitute and homeless people because the store offers the cheapest bread, eggs, and staples anywhere around. The atmosphere is welcoming and quaint, not stuffy like high-end grocery stores can be. Plus, it is within walking distance from most of the poorest sections in town. But at the SAME TIME, whenever I’m there, I will also see high-ranking business folks who work just up the street. These people, who likely have 7-figure incomes, come to this store for the local flare and pricier items: the fresh homemade Italian bread, the sushi prepared on site, the signature blend coffees, and the huge selection of organic produce. I truly believe all of us feel known and accepted there. For the first time in my life, I love to get groceries. It’s a grocery-store miracle.

I live in a neighborhood where I encounter the homeless every day. That may seem like a weird thing to be thankful for – because DANG how I wish homelessness wasn’t even a thing! But Jesus did say: “The poor you will always have with you.” (Matthew 26:11), and while I’d like to argue that point with him (“But WHY, Jesus??? Why can’t we fix poverty and eliminate homelessness and hunger??? Wouldn’t that be better???), what I have come to believe is that the poor are maybe in our lives because WE need THEM. I think maybe the plan behind the homeless in our face every day is so that the comfortable ones (me) get uncomfortable. And if that IS God’s plan, I think it is a good one.

I don’t own a gun. Several weeks back, on an extremely hot and muggy evening, I left our upstairs bedroom to go sleep on the couch on the main floor. The air-conditioning just doesn’t reach the second floor in our century old home, and no one wants to see a cranky menopausal woman after a long, sweaty night without sleep. Instead, I fell fast asleep on the couch. Somewhere around 3:00 in the morning, I awoke to the sound of someone fidgeting with our door locks. We don’t live in the best neighborhood. I’d been warned that nighttime burglars in our neighborhood often look for purses set out on kitchen tables that they can just grab and go. In a milli-second I glanced at our dining table and saw my purse sitting out in the open. The burglar would have to walk right past me to get it. In the second milli-second I scanned my reach for something to use as a weapon. My choices were a book, a remote control, and an empty Diet Coke. This was not looking good. With my third milli-second I said a prayer: “Lord, see you soon!” because I was certain I was going to die. The door burst open, my heart stopped beating even before I saw the burglar. A short black shadow entered the room and I steeled myself for the bullet. The person was so short, in fact, I thought, “My God! Is this a child about to murder me?” – but my eyes wouldn’t focus in the dark. In a very NEXT milli-second I remembered my youngest daughter was short. Very short. She had moved out several months prior, but still had a key. She had fumbled at the door because it was so dark out and she was hysterical. About a half hour earlier she had learned that a dear friend of hers had been killed in a tragic car accident only an hour after he had left her apartment. She was one of the last people to see him alive. She fell apart with the news and needed support, so she drove directly to her mom. If I had had a gun, I totally would have taken it with me to sleep on the couch – that’s logical in our neighborhood. If I had had a gun, I have no doubt in my mind I would have killed my daughter.

We’ve had sunny days in November!!!

Some friends don’t give up on the chronically ill. I’ve not been a good friend to my friends, I know that full well. I don’t have the energy to go out for coffee/lunch like I once did, or hang out at the beach together, and I’m certainly not baking anyone cinnamon rolls anymore. I sometimes even look at my phone, consider a text or call, but don’t – because the phone looks like it weighs about 300 pounds. Somehow, some way, a few of my friends have stuck with me in all of this. I’ve heard it said that those who suffer from chronic illness are the loneliest people anywhere. I believe it. But God has given me the gift of a few good friends and they have made all the difference.

God made Olipop. If you’ve never heard of this heavenly healthy beverage, let it suffice to say that the Diet Coke in my fridge is afraid. Very afraid.

Some people never give up on a neighborhood. Our lovely, fragile, diverse, and economically challenged neighborhood is breaking, bursting and, as always, crying out for help. Paul and I were utterly blown away when we moved to the city by the amount of people relentlessly doing the hard, thankless, and tiring work of community care through neighborhood ministries. These brave and devoted few are bringing the shalom of Jesus to a worn-out world and we are so privileged to journey with them.

I’ve been given a baby to love. I’m so thankful that a neighborhood couple who needed a little help with childcare thought of me. It’s no secret that COVID has forced me to quit my job as an RN, has kept Paul and I from many of the things we enjoy, and has even wreaked havoc on my mental stability. I didn’t even realize how much a baby brings HOPE and JOY and LIFE into a bleak existence, but it’s true: a baby changes everything! (Even my shitty attitude)

Please, share with me some of the things you’re most thankful for this year. I’d love to hear them and God gets the glory!!!

I have a friend who was raised in an atheist home surrounded by her atheist family, friends, and community. When she was in high school, she did a semester abroad and ended up on the other side of the Atlantic – in a CHRISTIAN home!

My friend recalls how as time went on and the host family shared the love and knowledge of Jesus Christ, her whole atheistic worldview came crashing down. But as much as Christianity was making sense, and as much as she wanted to accept it as truth, she had one major obstacle: accepting Christianity as ultimate truth would mean that everything she had been told, everything she had read (and she was a voracious reader and owned MANY heady books proving the validity of atheism), and every person she had always trusted, were actually wrong.

To fully accept Christianity, my friend had to first acknowledge she had been misled and the very people she desperately wanted to believe (including loving parents!), she really couldn’t anymore. It was a big leap for a teenager, but she did it and was then able to accept Jesus as her Lord and Savior.

On the flip side, one of the most heralded evangelical Christian authors of our day, Philip Yancey, recently gifted the world with his memoir, Where the Light Fell, where he portrays life growing up in a fundamentalist southern Baptist church in the 60’s. Even though his parents were missionaries and raised Philip in the church, he now describes his upbringing as “toxic.” Yancey says it wasn’t until he became a young adult that he came to understand just how racist, hypocritical, verbally abusive, and unloving his upbringing had been. Yancey describes needing to completely dismantle the Christianity of his childhood in order to truly fall in love with Jesus and accept him as his loving, forgiving, and inclusive Savior.

What he always thought was right was actually wrong.

Both conversion accounts – my friend’s and Philip Yancey’s – are SO compelling and pertinent for our day and age. It seems that today, more than ever, deception is rampant and the great deceiver has figured out how to lead us into destruction by confusing the heck out of us when it comes to which figures in authority we should be listening to.

And one thing we ALL KNOW is true: God is never the author of confusion.

In our very divided nation, some of us who believe we are trusting the right voices and are absorbing truth are most certainly listening to deception (which has to be true because we can’t ALL be right). Somehow, some of us have chosen to trust people and voices that we shouldn’t and have shut out the voices we need.

But here’s the thing – that word TRUST is what’s biting us in the butt.

Whether we’ll admit it or not, we are all trusting someone or something. And it’s so important that we step back and analyze the voices we’ve put our trust in. If we say we don’t trust the CDC, NIH, or the AMA, we’re then saying we DO trust the online doctors and social media stories that contradict those medical entities. Whether the recipient of our trust is our school boards, my friend on Facebook, black/white people, immigrants, police officers, evangelicals, Muslims, atheists, Democrats, Republicans, Tucker Carlson, Don Lemmon, my grandmother, your neighbor, ZDogg or Zindaya – if we are listening to ONE person/group and saying, “Yes, I trust you and what you are saying,” we are inevitably choosing to NOT believe in the counter-narrative.

Are the voices we’re listening to SO trustworthy that we’re willing to risk our well-being, our character, our health (or our kids’), relationships, our children’s futures, our nation or our democracy on what they’re telling us?

Let’s be extremely careful before we answer that question with an emphatic “yes.”

Yet many of us will insist this conversation is unnecessary because God alone is to be trusted. And, as is often posited subconsciously by well-meaning Christians, by trusting God alone we’re exempt from deception (we trust God will lead us to the TRUE news sources, the TRUE medical experts, the TRUTH about history, the morality of and intentions of leaders, the values of a political party, etc., etc.). Oh man, what a dangerous, deadly belief!!! Of course, God alone can be fully trusted, but as fallen humans living in this sinful place, we cannot escape deception! It’s Satan’s favorite (and really, his ONLY tool) and he can, and does, target Christians (maybe, even more so). Because we live and breathe and walk on this planet and must interact with other humans every single day, we have no choice but to choose who we will trust and who we will not. There’s no way around it.

As evidenced by several of his previous book titles, Where is God When It Hurts?,or What’s So Amazing About Grace? or Church, Why Bother? or The Question That Never Goes Away: WHY? Philip Yancey reveals something Christians are afraid to admit: it’s NOT a sin to ask questions! We owe it to ourselves and the world to research the sources of our information and ask a LOT of questions. We owe it to ourselves and the world to check references and credentials. We owe it to ourselves and the world to ask if we’ve been stuck in an echo chamber or if we’re really listening to all points of a debate before deciding our position.

Maybe we need to be asking more questions.

If you haven’t seen the film The Social Dilemma yet, I highly recommend it. This poignant film describes how we (internet users) are all recipients of a very carefully curated feed finely tuned to our specific interests, fears, and beliefs. In other words, “they” know what we want to hear and “they” pummel us with it. “They” know exactly what it takes to lead us down the proverbial bunny trail and are experts as doing it. If you’ve ever wondered why THE WHOLE WORLD isn’t up in arms about XYZ because it seems it’s everywhere and evil and going to destroy us, there’s a good chance that you are being fed a whole lot more of XYZ than everyone else. You may have clicked a time or two too many that initiated the bunny trail, but soon, “they” had you pegged for the exact kind of person who will get all fired up about XYZ so “they” pummeled you with it. Your sources are amplifying the thing and making it appear so much bigger, so much worse, so much more dire. It’s no wonder many Americans feel the sky is falling. “They” told us it was.

Who will we trust?

Maybe the voices we’ve been listening to that we’ve been SO VERY SURE we could trust (as with the case of my friend’s family and with Yancey’s parents) are not trusted voices.

Maybe we’ve been so caught up in a political quagmire that we’re not even able to see up from down. Right from wrong. Good from bad.

Maybe we need a healthy purging of our internet feed and instead drive to the border ourselves and ask a bunch of questions. Maybe we need to invite a local epidemiologist, or a school board member, or a law school professor, or a homeless person over for dinner and be the LISTENER, not the speaker. If we’re white, maybe we need to attend a black church for a while and make some new friends. And vice-versa. Maybe we need to ask our long-time family pediatrician what we should do in this current public health crisis. Maybe we need to really concentrate on the reputation of our news sources by asking all kinds of questions about where they get funding, who’s their target audience and why, and what political motivation they might have to bend the news. Maybe we need to study media bias charts (here) and ask ourselves if we’re getting skewed or biased news reporting.

Maybe – MAYBE MORE THAN ANYTHING ELSE – we need to step back and say, “How important is it that I have a STRONG opinion on XYZ and then try to convince others my viewpoint is correct? What if I refocused that energy and instead just try to love others as I would want to be loved?”

What kind of a world would that be?

I don’t know. It’s been too long for me to remember.

Thanksgiving Eve Sucks

What I Always Thought Was Right Is Wrong

Archives for November 2021