A slightly different Stephen Story- Humor and Hope.

Hey everyone,

This Stephen Story is a little different.  It’s mine.

There are a lot of Stephen Stories I could tell, but I decided to give more of a testimony rather than a singular story.  It just seemed more appropriate and after reading it, I hope you can see why.

My sense of humor often gets me into trouble. I like the inappropriate joke. I enjoy them mostly because I enjoy watching people’s reactions to them. If you can knock people just a little off their game, force them to react to something that they aren’t quite prepared for, then it opens up a whole world of insight into who they are that they try their hardest to not let you see. I enjoy those moments because they are often more honest and real than most of the moments we experience in life.

The other thing I like about joking about the things you don’t joke about is that it denies that very thing power in your life. I remember reading an interview with Mel Brooks where he was asked about making jokes about Hitler in The Producers. They asked him how he could take such a tragic event and turn it into a punch line. He responded by saying that if he didn’t then he let the Nazis, Hitler and the Holocaust have a power over him that he just wasn’t willing to let them have. When you can look something horrible in the eye and crack a joke, that speaks volumes. It means there’s hope.

Stephen’s cancer has been like the goose that laid the golden egg in terms of inappropriate jokes for me. It’s the gift that just keeps on giving. It’s been a gold mine. When the prospect of radiation treatment were first mentioned, Stephen was telling us about the 6 tattooed dots he was going to have to get put on his chest so they’d know where to line up the machine. We immediately thought of how to best turn him in to a human die. Obviously a single dot would have to go on his back and rolling him might be a bit tough, but the prospect of tossing him down a hill and shouting “Six!” while jumping up and down when he lands face up is just too good of a mental image to pass up. And how can you not give him grief for using the Sweat-n-lo in his drink and that it might give him more cancer? Stephen, liking off color humor as much as his friends do, usually said it didn’t matter since he was already on the treatment for it, so he had the liberty to use as much of the pink stuff as he liked.

That is, it was until a few months ago. After over two years it just reached a point where I didn’t feel like joking about it anymore. I was talking about it with a friend and there was something in the conversation, which involved a lot of sighs and long periods of silence, that went unspoken. We had hit a point where we had run out of hope. No hope, no humor. We had given Stephen’s cancer an incredible amount of power in our lives.

Early on in Stephen’s treatment it was easy to not be TOO concerned with the fact he had Hodgkin’s. There have been several professional athletes that have had Hodgkin’s, shut it down for the year, undergo treatment and then are good to go by the next season. If someone was going to have a lymphoma, Hodgkin’s is the one to have. It’s treatable, very treatable. So the humor was easy to come by. That and there were just so many opportunities for good humor. When they removed part of his rib to biopsy the mass in his chest, it was a time when the Genesis jokes flew fast and furious. What kind of a girl was he going to get? Or was this just payment for the one he already had? It was worth every penny of the five dollars I paid him to ask the surgeon that removed the part of his rib, just as they were about to put him under and start the surgery, if he could put in a request for a girl that didn’t like fruit. It was also easy to do things like this because I had an unwavering faith that God wasn’t finished with Stephen and his story just yet. Even with the setbacks and the second round of treatment, I never lost faith. Maybe it was naïveté on my part.

With the news of the results of the two PET scans (for those not familiar with a PET scan it’s like a CAT scan but more general) in January reality set in. This wasn’t how it was supposed to play out. Except for the fact that apparently it was how it was supposed to play out. Looking back I feel a little foolish in loosing faith. God still wasn’t done with Stephen yet. To see what He’s done over the last 2 months has been incredible. One of the advantages I’ve had being one of the more public faces for helping to raise money for The Stephen Shirley Medical Fund is being able to see all these stories play out. Seeing people offer their thoughts and insights into who Stephen is with the Stephen Stories we’ve been posting on the web site has been reaffirming. Hearing that The Gathering Place had taken an offering for this person that they didn’t know and raised $16,000 spoke volumes. Watching Lakeside Orangevale come together to help their worship leader means so much too so many different people. Lakeside has truly been a blessing and an answer to prayer. Not many people know that when Stephen and I left the last church we were ministering at that we had discussed starting our own church. We explored several opportunities and nothing seemed to fit. He and Rose went to Lakeside one Saturday and he called me shortly after that and said I needed to check them out. A few months after that they announced they wanted to start a campus in Orangevale. I remember Stephen telling me he was talking to Brian Chandler (be sure to click on the link and explore Brian’s website and find out how you can support him as he goes off to fulfill God’s calling for him in working with the Ethos Church in San Diego) about leading worship for the new campus and Brian telling him to pray about it. Brian didn’t realize at the time that this opportunity WAS the result of over a year of prayer.

There are a lot of stories I’m forgetting and a few I can’t tell you, but trust me when I say you can see God’s provision in them. The last two months have brought the hope back. And with it comes the laughter, because I’m just not willing to give cancer that kind of power over my life again.

-eric

The anticipation is killing me

So now that this Houston thing is a go it’s driving me crazy just waiting. I feel very good about this treatment. All along its seemed almost too easy too get to Houston. What I mean is we had looked into some other treatments centers over the past year for a few trial type drugs but nothing ever materialized. Then the moment we read about going to Md Anderson both Rosemary and I felt excited about the possibility. It seemed like over night people were excited too and wanted to know how to help. To raise over $40,000, which is the new total already, in just 2 months seemed absurd. Not that I wasn’t excited by the talk of donations, I just had no idea people’s level of generosity. Now we are less than a week from beginning the initial testing and could be on treatment as soon as the week of the 20th. Just amazing. I know i blogged before about how God’s seems to work in my life. He gives me doors open to walk though and it’s my decision to peek inside. Other times he slams the door in my face leaving me questioning what’s next. But later it always makes sense. Music has been like that. Jobs have been like that. Leading worship has even been like that. When i left 1830 and the worship service i lead for quite awhile and had come to love, I didn’t understand some of the changes God was making. But leaving turned out to be only months before starting to get sick. Ultimately I would have had to leave. I don’t know why God allows the things to happen in my life this way but it makes it obvious and clear when a really important decision is at hand. Instead of planning everything out which never goes to plan, we are walking in faith that this is the place and treatment we have been waiting all along. Even if it took all this time to get there. I know the maturing i have had in the last 3 years could have never been learned another way. Thank you for being a part of that.