CHRIST IN WINTER:
Reflections on Faith from a Place of Winter For the Years of Winter…
MISDIAGNOSIS
Dave called. He had heard
from Charlie Bob that Bob had been diagnosed with terminal cancer and had six
to eight weeks to live. Bob was selling his motorcycle and the rest of his
stuff and arranging for hospice car. I’ve learned not to tarry when I get that
sort of news. I quickly wrote Bob a sappy letter about all we had shared and
hope for the future and such like stuff. That was almost two years ago.
I waited. I watched the
obits in the hometown newspaper. No news of Bob. I called Mike and John from
time to time. They hadn’t heard anything. I talked to Dave. He didn’t know
anything. We assumed we had missed Bob’s obit. I was disappointed. I thought
maybe the obit writer would say something nice about the sappy letters that had
comforted him in his death throes.
Then Bob’s mother’s obit
appeared in the newspaper. Ninety-nine years old. Survived by her son in
Florida, it said. How could that be?
So Dave called Charlie Bob
again. No, Bob wasn’t dead. Quite the opposite. After he got rid of all his
stuff, he began to feel better. He went back to the doctor. “We must have
misdiagnosed you,” was the new diagnosis. Charlie Bob couldn’t give Dave Bob’s
telephone number right then because he was in the basement, doing laundry,
since Daphne can’t do stairs anymore.
This has put us into an
embarrassing situation. How do you call up an old friend and say, “I’m sorry I
haven’t been in touch, but I thought you were dead?”
Every once in a while you
get a misdiagnosis. Not just from doctors, but from others who look at your
life and think you’re diseased when you’re only dealing with a problem that
can’t be seen by others. They tell you there is no reason to have faith, that
that there is no reason to hope. Or they give you sappy bromides when you just
need to get rid of some stuff.
At our 55 year class reunion,
Bob said to me: “Do you remember that summer when the District Superintendent
would send you around to various churches on Sunday mornings to fill in while
the pastor was on vacation or in rehab or something, and Dave and Donald Gene and
I would go along? You’d preach, and we would sing as a quartet. I always said
the best preacher I ever heard was an eighteen-year-old kid.” I pointed out to
our classmates that this showed Bob had not been to church much in the past 55
years. He protested that that was not true, that he had gone to church a lot,
but how much can you trust a guy who won’t even die when he’s supposed to?
This is very embarrassing.
If Charlie Bob ever gets up from the basement so we can get that telephone
number, I have to call Bob and take back all those sappy things I said about
him.
John Robert McFarland
The “place of winter” mentioned in the title line is Iron
Mountain, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where life is defined by winter even
in the summer!
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