Part 5. Journeys in Faith and Grace

Perhaps the most important journeys we can make in life are those of faith into the grace of God. It is in God’s grace that we find the strength to face the hard challenges of life and it is faith that gives us the peace to truly enjoy the pleasures of life. The essays that have preceded this point have given the reader a glimpse of a life that has experienced much of God’s grace and blessing. The next three essays demonstrate God’s grace and faith operative in three lives in a manner that is nothing short of stunning.

“On Orbit” is a comparison of my own life with its storied journeys through forty countries and that of a fellow who spent the last thirty-seven years of his life staring at the ceiling while lying in complete paralysis on an airbed. His faith was sufficient for him to see that in the long run he would experience a truly fulfilling life in eternity. He was not at all bitter about the experiences he had here on earth as compared to mine.

There are those people who face extensive challenges in life and really never do see light at the end of the tunnel on this side of eternity. Their faith sees them through the impossible. God’s grace sees them through the dangerous. “The Physics of Grace” describes how a desperately ill single mother of three special needs children received a measure of God’s grace to keep her safe during the night.

In “The Transmutation of Epstein’s Magic” we find powerful evidence of God’s grace operative across six decades. This grace gave rise to a immutable faith in a dear friend who today creates self-confidence and self-esteem in troubled at-risk children. There is every reason to believe that grace and faith are sufficient for any challenge that life has to offer.


On Orbit

If you have had the rare and singularly spectacular experience of orbiting the earth in a space craft, you will quickly agree there is almost no experience that compares to it. Seeing the corona of the rising sun as one careens along at seventeen thousand miles an hour is inspiring beyond imagination. In mere moments, one is blasted from inky cosmic darkness into blinding solar brilliance. Black shadows transform into magnificent swirls of cerulean and platinum as morning spreads across Heaven.

A most tantalizing aspect of orbiting earth is the apparent horizontal flatness of land surfaces. One can look down through a porthole at vast mountain ranges and only distinguish them by virtue of small tufts of white on their peaks and hints of shadow cast by them early and late in the day.

If I am down on earth climbing mountains, I have an acute awareness of variations in elevation and inclinations. "Verticalness" can be a dizzying, overwhelming experience when roped to the side of a ten-thousand foot wall of granite for three weeks. One longs for, almost craves, anything horizontal. A ten-inch ledge can seem like a king-size bed. Yet, from three hundred miles up the overpowering "verticalness" is completely lost in a transcendent view of the world. Nothing has changed in the mountains, only my perspective has been altered.

Many others and I cared for a fellow who was confined to an air-driven wheel chair for thirty-seven years after having been paralyzed from the chin down in an auto accident. He was quite unable to attend to any of his personal needs whatever. He was absolutely one hundred percent dependent on others.

I was visiting with Ron six years ago when we found ourselves musing about the paths we have each taken through life. Ron made the observation that I have had a life that would easily be in the top one percent of lives lived because of my opportunity to travel the world, study in six American universities, work in five different careers, live in a castle in Europe, make good on many of my dreams. I have known but little suffering. Ron went on quickly to tell me that his life represented the bottom one percent of lives because of his vast unrelenting suffering and dependency. There was no argument from me. I assured him he was absolutely correct on both points.

At that moment six years ago it occurred to me that we both had taken radically different paths to get to the same place. We were both sitting in the same room, looking at the same computer screen, wanting to do the same thing and we were both drinking from the same bottle of soda, even if I had to hold the bottle and give him his through a straw.

I said "Ron, what matters now is that we share the most important thing in common, a saving faith in the Son of God. One day you and I will both be very far from here. For unnumbered tomorrows we will walk in the New Jerusalem. You will have forgotten that you ever lived in a wheel chair or that you couldn't even wipe away your own tears, which you've had plenty of. You will be too busy dashing about, exploring the place He has prepared for you. I will have forgotten that I was able to study in six universities and travel by jet plane all over the world. I will be too busy learning the real answers to the questions that matter most. Hardly will it matter that I had a fine home and more than enough money in the bank. I will be walking on those streets of transparent gold, trying to find you."

Heaven will be like an orbiting space shuttle in some respects. From that vantage we will no longer find ourselves in dark shadows between mountain peaks. From the great height of Heaven it is unlikely we will even be able to see the shadows below. We will simply find ourselves in eternal brilliance that never ceases. Buddy is already there. We will one day see him there for ourselves.

“But for a season of darkness do we see dimly. One day the Son will rise above the horizon of Heaven.”

“Eyes have not seen, ears have not heard, the hearts of men have not even imagined the things I have prepared for you.”

March 4
Anderson, South Carolina


The Physics of Grace

I have had the great fortune of having received a fine education that has allowed me to paper my office walls with diplomas, degrees, and certificates from seven fine universities and colleges on both sides of the Atlantic. This is no small grace in a world where less than 1% of the population will ever even see the inside of a university or college. Some of the things I was privileged to study included physical chemistry, physics, and mathematics at Northwestern University. I learned that there are many laws of the universe that are immutable – always dependable. Knowing the behavior of various substances is profoundly important if you are sitting in a spacecraft on top of a solid rocket booster bound for the stars. Predictability is absolutely essential if you are designing a powerful life-saving drug that is going to have minimal side effects.

Even before getting this wondrous education I learned something back in Boy Scouts, even earlier if the truth be known, when playing with matches and electricity while Mom was at work. Wood and electricity do not like each other, or perhaps in a unilateral way, electrons like wood too much. Put them near each other, and wood becomes an incendiary testimonial of the electron’s power. This is a consistent predictable reality. Countless nocturnal house fires cause the death of thousands every year when electrons in old frayed wiring comes in contact with ancient wood, burning up the dreams of those sleeping within.

I just received a refresher course in the yet greater power of another unseen force I was never told about in any of those hallowed halls of higher learning. None of my Newtonian physics texts mention this power but I have found it to be as real as any of the four fundamental forces of the universe, so well described by quantum physicists.

I went by a dear friend’s house to put up a coat rack and a clothes rod. It was no big deal to put up these two items. I enjoy good physical health and was a building contractor before going to medical school. It took me perhaps ten minutes with a power screw driver using those predictable electrons and some of those fine non-stripping square-drive screws. My friend thought she had won the Powerball. Danielle struggles with catastrophic illness, as do her children. Home repairs just aren’t on her agenda. Doing “the next thing” is all that matters.
While I was doing these tiny home improvements, my friend left to go collect her three special needs kids from the nearby elementary school. While she was gone I went down the hall to the bathroom and when I came out I noticed that the WOOD lamp on her night table was listing about 30 degrees. When she got home moments later I asked her about it. She said it had fallen over and broken some weeks earlier. With the intent of repairing it, we unplugged it with some considerable effort from a mass entanglement of plugs and cords under her big bed, the very one where her three children often come during the night for safety.

I looked at the lamp and was astounded to see that the insulation inside the lamp on both wires was completely missing and both copper wires were touching each other and the soft dry wood of the lamp base. I asked her when she last used it. “Last night.” I know enough physics to know that there is no way short of a miracle that this wood lamp had not exploded and set the house on fire and taken her and the three kids.

This entire family is on heavy medication and would never have awakened. The newspaper missed out on a spectacular fire story because I needed to go to the smallest room in the house, and noticed this lamp on my way back down the hall. A force far more powerful than the four fundamental ones described by the physicists has been operating in this small rental house, where a struggling family learned of this greater force long ago – the Grace of God.
With a chill I realized I had witnessed a quiet tiny miracle that had saved four lives and spared this safe little house from an incendiary disaster. What it also did was warm my heart greatly to this great power which is available to all, not just those fortunate ones of us with access to prestigious labs and universities.

It was with some awe and reverence that I took that little wood lamp home with me, intent on making it like new, and making certain that the wood and electrons never saw each other again. I stopped at the hardware store and bought the necessary parts to rewire and rebuild this lamp.

The lamp itself is another story. I called back in the evening after working on it to ask about it. Made entirely of wood by an immigrant Hispanic woman, the shade is twelve sided with hundreds of small holes cut through thin sheets of plywood to look like stained glass windows, each hole covered with a different bit of colored fabric. My guess is that this lamp would have taken 100-200 hours of tedious labor to make. This woman makes these lamps to pay the hospital bills of a three-year-old boy in Mexico in renal failure. This particular one was an important gift to my friend. It was with even greater reverence that I took this lamp apart to rewire it and to repair the broken wood parts. I knew that I was working on the most sacred wood project I had encountered yet. I thought of the One Who was Himself a carpenter and made everything sacred. It seems my drills, sanders, and table saw have become my instruments of worship the past few days.

I had that sacred gift back in that little home within a day. Some things get priority in life. My friend needs the spectral glow of that beautiful lamp to remind her that the Greater Force is always predictable and sustaining. It’s hard to remember sometimes when the struggle seems too big.

“Look at the birds of the air, that they do not sow, nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they? …Observe how the lilies of the field grow; they do not toil nor do they spin, yet I say to you that not even Solomon in all his glory clothed himself like one of these. “But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the furnace, will He not much more clothe you? … “But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. “So do not worry about tomorrow; for tomorrow will care for itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”

March 20
Anderson, South Carolina


The Transmutation of Epstein’s Magic

Fred Epstein is one of those guys who believes in magic, but he is a realist in that he also knows magicians have to practice and do their homework to get their tricks to work right. Even as a master magician of his craft, I am not sure he knows just how much his magic has been transmuted into so many different forms in far flung places. I do know he gets an intelligence folder put on his desk each day, suggesting that he does hear of some of it.

Epstein is not a teenage kid living next door trying to figure out how to make cards disappear or rabbits come out of black top hats. His magic tricks have much higher stakes results. He has learned how to make time come out of nowhere, how to give years of precious life to his audiences of one; you see, Epstein is a pediatric neurosurgeon who has figured out how to make things disappear, dreaded things like astrocytomas, gliomas, hemangiomas, things that steal time and life itself, if left to their own devices. He especially knows how to make these disappear from the brainstem and the spinal cord.

Having studied medicine myself and having spent three decades in those tall towers of academic university medicine, I know these terms well. I also know enough neuroanatomy to know that you never ever ever want to have one of these monsters show up in the brain stem or spinal cord, and you never want to have to use these words with anyone; especially parents who love their kids really hard. There is no way to sugar coat them and make them go down easier.

I am in the magic business myself in a way. I don’t use Cavitrons or retractors or electrocautery units to make neurological monsters disappear, but I have for years used paint, masking tape, old plywood, and, disintegrating two by fours to create make-believe worlds in a community playhouse. I never would have heard of Fred Epstein’s magic if it were not for the fact that I am still plying my own magic trade in the playhouse.

Every year we have a volunteer appreciation party in which we acknowledge the directors, producers, actors, paint meisters, ticket takers and even grunts like me who do magic tricks with old plywood building sets. Last month we had our annual event and it was on the front row of stage left that I first heard about Epstein’s ability to make things disappear, things you really never want to see again. The last thing Epstein ever wants to do is give a repeat performance to the same audience.

The party, the presentations, the food all faded away as I sat mesmerized listening to how this New York magician, who likes to sail his small boat at sunset, had made a monster disappear from my new friend’s brain stem. During the month that has ensued there has not been a day where we haven’t talked for hours on the phone, swapped e-mails, or made assorted expeditions. I learned that Epstein pulled at least nine years out of the hat for Joanne, and as far as she knows she can expect another thirty. It would seem Epstein learned his tricks very well.

Joanne’s two boys have grown up with their mother after all. She is able to order pizza for her boys and their friends every Friday night. Yet, brainstem monsters don’t let go easily and they often exact a price. Joanne is in a wheelchair most of the time because she has no proprioception – a nice neurological medical word for describing the normal ability to have an idea how one’s body is oriented to the planet underneath it. But even in her chair, Joanne stands taller than just about anyone I have ever known.

She has managed to take Epstein’s surgical wizardry and transmute it into another kind of magic that also transforms lives. Like most states, public education is really suffering from funding cutbacks, teacher burnout, violence, and countless other impediments to learning. As an unpaid volunteer on permanent disability, Joanne shows up at the Centerville Elementary School every day for four or five hours and works in what she describes as “My Magic Room.” She spends the day coordinating the volunteer tutor-mentoring program that gives some of the 729 students in the school a chance of making a way in their young lives.

She described to me the case of a fourth grader who did a math test and got every single problem wrong. He was sent to the Magic Room for help. With her own magic Joanne was able to encourage this young math phobic that he didn’t have to be one. She was able to help him in a way that can only be described as magical. He was able to retest in math and get every problem correct - and no she did not give him clues as to the correct answers. Wanna guess what Joanne does every afternoon? She has four different students come to her house for individual tutoring at her kitchen table.

Epstein is able to do his magic in Operating Room 11 on the sixth floor of New York University Hospital, because a teacher believed in him early on. Children are the most prodigious learning machines in the universe, if properly nurtured and encouraged. Because Epstein got encouraged in his early struggles in school, he developed the confidence to believe in himself and ended up a brilliant surgeon with a good set of hands, and was able to allow Joanne the gift of time to do her own magic in the Centerville Elementary School and in her kitchen every day.

I have unwittingly become a beneficiary of Epstein’s magic myself. I don’t have any monster growing in my head that I know so I don’t need surgical magic, but my life journey has presented me with monsters of the type that can’t be taken out with Cavitrons and a good set of hands. How often I have wished that my monsters could be just taken out with a scalpel and some high tech gadgets in a pair of good hands.

Joanne describes herself to me as “your messenger.” The magic of her message is one that was written down before the foundations of time. “Just believe and all things are possible.” Epstein believed it, and has given the gift of time and life to thousands. His wife, Kathy, believes it, and allows him to climb to the top of the mountain. Joanne believed it, and took a big risk, and now is able to show thousands of insecure school kids in uncertain times that all things are possible. She is showing me that even now, where Cavitrons can’t go, monsters can be made to disappear.

March 11
Regency Park, South Carolina