"Why do you ask My name?"

I’ve been asked a couple of times recently whether I feel some sense of anger or unfairness over my current situation. This is an interesting question. For some reason, of all the mental states that I have experience over the last week or two—including disappointment, sadness, peace, hope, resignation, ironic detachment and even guilt—anger hasn’t been among them.

It’s not that I won’t allow myself to be angry. Nineteen years ago, having undergone several months of chemotherapy, I found not only that I lacked the resilience to avoid feeling angry, but also that allowing myself to be angry—more to the point, to be angry at God—was an important step toward inner healing. Even Job had said, “I will give free rein to my complaint and speak out in the bitterness of my soul.” Various Psalmists complained that God had abandoned them, rejected them for no good reason, and swept them away in divine wrath. To the author of Lamentations, God seemed “like a bear lying in wait,” who “dragged me from the path and mangled me and left me without help.” In each case (with the exception of one of the Psalms citations), their unabashed anger eventuated in renewed friendship with God. It has been my experience in the past to come the profoundest sense of God’s love and compassion at the far side of an angry, open confrontation. As with Jacob at the end of Genesis 32, the limp and the blessing arise from the same encounter.

This time, however, the confrontation hasn’t yet occurred, and that suits me fine. I’ve wondered why not, though, and I suppose it involves a number of factors.

The first, to be honest, is denial. My mental state tends to be fairly primal—if my body feels good I’m happy, and if it doesn’t I’m angry—and right now I feel fine. I’ve gone from DC to Seattle to Lynden this week, and have spent most of my time doing fun things with good friends. The sheer enjoyment of this past week has somewhat mitigated my fears of what lies ahead.

Second, my life thus far has been extraordinarily rich, a fact that has been impressed upon me especially in the last couple of weeks, as people from all different moments of my past have surfaced to express their love and support. Yes, I am aware of a certain Job-like quality to my life: three bouts with cancer, heart failure, a number of related physical difficulties and a couple of major career setbacks. But there is something truly wonderful about this life that I of all people have been given. At almost every point along the way, I’ve been allowed to connect with others in such a way that my current circle of good friends includes people I knew in college in the early 80s, kids from my first youth group twenty years ago and hundreds of people who became a part of my life during my years in Carnation, Seattle, and now Pasadena, dozens of whom I would feel quite confident turning to in a moment of crisis. I think, too, that I inherited from both of my parents an ability to find tremendous pleasure in relatively insignificant things: a well-made omelet or bowl of oatmeal, catching a tiny bit of air beneath my skis, a 10-mile bike ride, or a clever turn of a phrase. My siblings are a lot of fun to be with, and I’m insanely happy in my marriage. This has been very good, and if my threescore and ten comes up a score short, I can’t really say that I’ve been cheated.

The practice of keeping an online journal has been another important factor. Blogging, I’ve found, is a different endeavor from either the public act of teaching or the private act of journaling. On the one hand, for this to be at all meaningful, I have to do it entirely for myself, without feeling constrained by the approval or disapproval of the people who read it, or by any response that I hope to evoke on their end. At the same time, however, I am aware of a large number of potential readers, and that awareness infuses the task with a healthy dose of accountability. I feel compelled to produce something more coherent and directional than the circular, introspective meanderings one might find upon thumbing through my thirty years worth of spiral notebooks. I want to say something, and that motivation guards me against getting lost in individualized sentimentality.

There’s a theological factor as well. At the center of my understanding of reality lies the narrative of God becoming a particular Jewish rebel, living among the marginalized and victimized, suffering and dying at the hands of religious and governmental powers, and rising from the dead as the firstborn of a new creation. It seems to me that this story radically calls into question any correlation between faith in a loving, sovereign God and the expectation that terrible things won’t happen.

Finally, I have to attribute some of my current mental state, albeit cautiously, to what Paul called “the peace of God, which transcends all understanding.” I feel a bit trepid here, partly because I understand “peace” in Paul’s writings to refer not to an individual’s subjectivity but to a social characteristic of the faith community, and partly because any expectation that I, unlike Jesus, should be miraculously delivered from painful, existential confrontation with whatever lies ahead smacks of the kind of hubris and hyper-spirituality which I am bound to regret. Nevertheless, mingled with the natural coping mechanisms and dispositional habits at work in me right now, I also recognize and give thanks for this sheer gift from God, a centeredness that I can’t explain or take for granted, but that has kept me on my feet for the last several days.

Tuesday I fly back to California. Wednesday I go in for a PET-scan. Thursday is the endoscopy and colonoscopy. Friday I receive my first treatment. It’s likely that a new wrestling match will begin shortly thereafter, but I can't predict it one way or another, nor would it change anything if I allowed another day's troubles to dominate my thinking today. Right now I’m well, and that’s all I can ask.