Eulogy from Wade's Service

Greetings followers of Wade's Blog.  I have wanted to publish the Eulogy Wade's brother Will gave at Wade's service for some time now on Wade's Blog.  I decided that it made sense to publish it on February 6th, the one month anniversary of the celebration of Wade's life.  The service was a beautiful honor of Wade's life.  Thank you for reading and remembering with us.

Love,

Debra, Cate, Will and Ben

Eulogy for My Brother

Wade Robert Gillham (1967-2016)

Death should be ashamed.

I stand here today the saddest I have been in my life. A big brother whose little brother has died.

But I've also never been so grateful as I am now—because my little brother is no longer suffering.

My name is Will Gillham, slash Unkl Papi. Werd. I'm one of Wade's 3 older brothers, closest to him in age. Our number 2, Mason, died at age 12. Our oldest, Preston, is here with me today.

We're 2 left of 4 now.

On behalf of the Gillham and Hamilton families, thank you, each one of you, for being here today—even though you'd obviously be nowhere else.

We have gathered from all points to honor Wade Gillham—beloved brother, husband, father and friend—who, despite all our prayers, has blown from our skies like a cloud in a cloud-moving wind. In the end, all anyone could do was watch him fly away.

Our families are grateful as well to All Saints Presbyterian Church for hosting this gathering. Wade wanted us to meet here when it came time to memorialize him. He and Tim Frickenschmidt, senior pastor here, met at their kids' basketball games. Their acquaintance soon took root in a deep friendship that would prove very important to both of them in the final year of Wade's life.

Wade loved Tim first. And then he loved this high point of land where All Saints is, and this space where we sit.

Over the last months of his life, Wade watched all this being built, and it increasingly reminded him of the high-desert outpost of Marfa, TX, with its minimalist art and architecture, its exquisite land and skies, its palpable soul. Marfa held a particularly special place in Wade's heart—he traveled there numerous times, twice with me, and it was there he chose to go with his family on their final trip together. Those of you who have been there will appreciate the aesthetic and spiritual similarities between that place and this one, ...and why Wade selected this place for us to come together to remember him.

I first knew Wade as a four-year old.

When he got old enough, our early activities together included great fun like shooting at him with a BB gun while he sprinted across the backyard. Or sitting on him with his arms pinned beneath my knees while I thumped him many times over on his chest as he struggled to get away.

I'm lucky Wade didn't turn that table on me when he was older, cause he sure could have.

I got the good looks, but he got the size and strength.

Eventually our relationship assumed a more equitable footing, and we turned from BB'ing and chest-thumping to adventuring and making fun together—two qualities in Wade that over the course of my time with him would fill volumes of stories.

Many here today have their own volumes filled with Wade stories.

This adventuring spirit was inadvertently fostered early on in us by our somewhat conservative minister parents. To their enduring credit, our parents not only took us with them on their lecture travels around the country when we were kids, they didn't make us go to their lectures while we were there. While they were off speaking, we were left to our own devices.

Much awesomeness resulted.

Mom and Dad asked few questions; Wade and I told few lies.

In thinking about today, I remembered one time when we were kids, and we were staying at the Fontainebleau in Miami, where our parents were speaking in some church. Mom and Dad were gone all morning, and Wade and I were instructed to stay in the room. Which had a balcony many floors above the parking lot below. We spent our morning leisurely lobbing chewed-up mouthfulls of Oreo cookies onto the cars below. A direct trunk shot was so many points, contrast counted (black cookie on light-blue car for example), keeping score based on direct hits and called shots. One wet, well-aimed Oreo ball would splat across an entire hood and windshield.  

Another time, when we were a bit older and in Hawaii, we somehow procured a moped during our parents' lecture and luncheon, and we pioneered our way across the island to a nudist beach. Where we lingered for some time.

As we aged I like to think our adventures assumed a more mature character. We began partnering with Pres in our escapades, mostly on fly-fishing trips and biking.

Of all our adventures and fun together, I'm partial to the time Wade and Pres packed and shipped their bicycles to my apartment in New York City, where I was living at the time. We assembled them in my 1-room space and then hit the streets. Several times over we thrilled ourselves by racing amidst the traffic down Broadway through Times Square, using referee whistles for horns.

In the summer of 2015, Wade and I traveled to Marfa and Big Bend. We both knew he was very sick. It was early enough in his illness, though, that he was still able to ride in a car and get around. From Marfa all along the winding river road down into Terlingua, we stopped to push any large rocks we could find down the steep slopes into the Rio Grande.

Driving the dark two-lane into the park that night, we counted and inventoried the critters that got caught in our headlights. At one point we stopped, got out, and lay on our backs in the middle of the road and stared up at the starblasted sky arching above us from horizon to horizon.

This is the stuff best friends do.

In one of his later blog posts, Wade referred to his best friend as "a diamond, hard and beautiful and highly precious."

Read on and you realize he wasn't referring to me. Or to Chip or Trey or Brett or PJ or any other of his great friends here today. The subject of his sentence was his beautiful wife Debra, whom Wade went on to call "selfless in caring for those around her."

Epic warrior in Wade's epic battle. Indispensible to all of us and our collective strength to carry on, and to do what had to be done.

The person I call Tiny Boss. ...The Force is strong in this one.

The words needed to describe what Debra and Wade endured together over the past two-and-a-half years are unsuited for a holy place such as this.

Debra Gillham, I admire you more than anyone else I have known. Thank you again and again and again for how you cared for my brother during his illness, and never once failed to shine a light in the obsidian darkness for your blessed children and all the rest of us to follow.

It is of no little import to the Gillham family that Wade shares the same deathday with Princess Leia.

Who else would Wader run off with?

Debra's clearly got the Force, and we've all seen her use it. But before the Force was strong in her, it was strong in Wade.

He and I saw the original STAR WARS together in 1977—before it was Episode IV—and like any kid in '77 Kid Wade obsessively collected the 6-inch action figures. They didn't stay in their boxes either. We were always playing with them, and we each secretly knew that the other one knew that Boba Fett was the chillest of them all.

The last movie Wade saw was ROGUE 1, and by this time his collection focus had turned from the figures onto a single clear, insulated, 16-oz plastic STAR WARS cup.

Which he drank from exclusively.

I'm sure a number of you who stopped by over the past few months know the cup, but I doubt very few of you here outside the family know that Wade composed a song and dance for the cup.

I don't dare try to bust Wade's moves here today—but the words to his cup-ditty go like this:

"STAR WARS cup (2x)

You may want my STAR WARS cup

Can you have my STAR WARS cup? Huh-uh, huh-uh"

The lines suffer without the moves.

More even than his STAR WARS cup, and possibly even more than he loved Debra, Wade loved his three beautiful children: Cate, William, and Benjamin.

And his dogchild Beau. Callout to Bubba-Dog Hound, who couldn't be with us today. He stayed at home.

Wade demonstrated an astounding loyalty and sensibility as a parent, and a devotion to his children that bordered on the unreal. It remains amazing to me how Wade could be sick as hell, and he would still go to his boys' games or his daughter's performances.

Those of you who know Cate, Will, and Ben know how they feel about their father. To those who don't know them, there's this: How many 17, 14, and 9 year-olds like to hang with their dad, see movies and walk around the block with him, and listen to his music?

I can point to 3 who did.

I so wish the reason Unkl Papi is up here talking was not because your beloved dad has died. ...I'm sorry for all of us here today, ...but most of all I'm sorry for you three.

Hear me: Because you are branded with your father's heart, in time you will see that he not only prepared you for life... but for life without him.

In his honor, in his memory, hold to his examples as father and friend, and you will do right in the world.

A party always had life when Wade was there. But of course the Wader was so much more than fun and laughs. His spirit encouraged transparency and honesty; friendship with Wade involved commerce between souls.

He wrote to all of you here in one of his posts: "I try to live in the light and the yellow joy of each new minute, but sometimes I fail and I have to sob and cry and hold onto my wife and dear friends for support. I thank them now and forever."

It's been said that you have the friends you deserve. Again on behalf of Wade's family, from the deepest bluest water of our hearts, thank you for demonstrating such true friendship throughout Wade's long, hard journey into peace.

Wade loved you all. He would want us all to stay committed to each other, to maintain our bonds of friendship, and to be ready to help any in our number again when the need arises.

For the rest of our days, Wade will be missing. While our lives in concert with his are rich with many joys and laughs, for my part I'm most grateful for the last two-and-a-half years with him.

Faced with a slow, painful, and wicked death, ...sick beyond description, the end of his life as tragic as any I've witnessed. Wade could have died a bitter, poisonous, and ruined man.

But he didn't.

Instead, he nourished and turned a light onto the beautiful in life: faith and family, love and kindness, friendship and grace.

Wade's beauty grew brighter as his light dimmed, which caused beauty to thrive all around him.

Many of you here today have witnessed this beauty. It was manifested in many ways over his last months. Just this week I rediscovered a particularly remarkable and shining example attached to an email Wade sent me last May. It was a poem he'd written, and he sent it to me because he didn't want to lose it. "It might come in handy some day," he wrote. And so it has. He titled it...

Radiance

I see me

scattering

dipping

rising

floating between earth and blue sky

waves of me

over new blossoms, yellow, white, green

passing familiar paddings of bent grass

shining on water's still movement

pieces of me

reflect and

pass through

both

to redisappear

on another blue sky day

Wade: Until that blue sky day my brother.

God

God. What kind of unknowable thing is he? Is he so isolated he doesn’t know how much I and my family are suffering? Through this whole ordeal we have been praying for divine intervention, and finally, with the facebook post and a liver less than 48 hours later that was the right size, the right blood type, and in Round Rock, it looked like God was coming through. Then we did the surgery and it turns out the radiation damage is too severe in my insides, the scar tissue too pervasive, the liver too tightly joined to other organs around it, and the doctors have to abandon the surgery. But not without all the follow-up difficulties a surgery like this brings.

Here we are 7 weeks later and I am still suffering with unhealed intestines inside. How long until they heal? Our doctors don’t know. They assure us it will heal, but they have only said, “It takes a long time, so be patient.” And so we are patiently dealing with the unpleasantness that this healing requires, including IV food, cleaning and dressing a leaking bowel that is supposed to heal up, and trying to force eat enough extra food and protein that my body can heal itself.

We also are dealing with their opinion that this could be one of the last stages I go through. We are having a lot of difficulty accepting that, and we fight it every day, multiple times per day.

I know a lot about suffering, more than I ever wanted to know. I know mental and emotional suffering. I have cried more tears with my wife than I ever thought I would. I have wrenched my belly from sobs of sorrow just in the past hours or days. My life has some very deep sadness in it right now, sadness that sometimes grabs me and demands to be acknowledged, to be dealt with, to be wrought up and held and evaluated.

I try to stay out of this sad place. I try to live in the light and the yellow joy of each new minute, but sometimes I fail and I have to sob and cry and hold onto my wife and dear friends for support. I thank them now and forever for their support and love. This sorrow and suffering is a burden I fight with several times a day. I know this suffering with an intimacy that not many do, and I do not wish it on anyone.

I also know physical suffering. I have hurt for a long time now. Some days are better than others, and some days just suck. All the time, my body hurts. All the time, my abdomen cramps. All the time, my various tubes pinch and sting. Sometimes, my body will hurt worse with no cause. It just does. Sometimes, I will retch for whatever reason and with new scars and seams on my belly, that hurts a good deal. Sometimes, my diaphragm will spasm, sending pain along my sides and front.

My body hurts. My brain hurts along with it. My family hurts. All these things bring me such sorrow and suffering that I am really just fighting with them most of the time I am awake. It is a miserable way to have to live right now. But as I said, Deb and I are fighting it.

I guess I am writing the above because Debra said people want to know. I am not sure. I don’t want to know about it. I wish it had never been visited on me and my family. I cry, but no one can do anything. It just is.

So back to God.

Does he know what it is like to suffer like this? I think he does. I think he knows physical suffering, and the fear of dying very well through Jesus, his son. Jesus told his friends and disciples many times that he was going to die. We know this from the historical writings in the bible, and so we know that he lived with the same longing appreciation for the beauty of the world and its glorious creation that I have when I walk my block. The breeze. The joy of sitting down. The absolute pleasure of seeing a cardinal flit from one branch high above to another. The comedic dance of a squirrel and my dog, the squirrel hanging inverted hurfing and chirping at Beau, and Beau, front feet on the tree, barking at the squirrel. Jesus saw similar things, knowing their beauty would be lost to him before long.

Jesus also suffered physically. It was not long and drawn out like mine has been. But it was a fine helping of physical pain through whipping with lead points embedded in the whip’s thongs, a crown of big thorn branches shoved on his head, carrying the crude, heavy board through an ancient town with all its steps and running sewage that he would later be nailed to, having his feet and hands nailed to the wood, and ultimately dying on that cross. Yes, he suffered physically.

And he also suffered another way that I haven’t. He lost all his friends, and even his dad when he died. His friends abandoned him one after the next as the time lead up to his arrest. And his father, whom he loved dearly, refused his request to “let this cup pass” from Jesus’s lips; said another way, he refused to let Jesus avoid all the suffering that was necessary to accomplish his goal: to allow us to be with God the father despite our imperfect lives. Then, when Jesus was hanging on the cross, his cry of “Abba, abba, why have you forsaken me?” shows a suffering that is so deeply felt. He has been abandoned by his dad. “Daddy, Daddy, why have you left me here?” Those words pierce my heart when I think of my boys in a similar situation.  

But God the father, does he know suffering? After realizing the above about Jesus crying out to his Daddy, yes, I believe God the father knows suffering; a kind of suffering that I don’t, and that I never wish upon anyone. The suffering of losing your son. Worse yet, losing your son because of a decision you have made. I can’t even imagine it.

When I think of Ben, crying out to me to save him, nothing could stop me from doing everything in my power to help him. But God, when his boy cried out to him, had to turn his back and let him die. That was the strategy that the two of them had built. Jesus would carry the gross actions of all the world to death, lose contact with God the father, and die. After which we would be able to be with both of them.

But there was deep suffering in God’s heart that day. In fact, the bible says that after Jesus died, the sky grew dark, the earth shook and rocks split apart. And that the heavy veil in the Jewish temple that separated God the father from his unclean, imperfect followers was torn in half from top to bottom.

The significance of that tear is quite important because it shows that we are no longer separated from God, but also because fathers who lost a son in that time would tear their robes using their hands, starting at the neck of course, and then all along the front. God was a father who had lost a son. He was grieving, and suffering.

So do I think God had any hand in my liver fiasco? No. Nothing. I don’t think God meddles in humanity very much, if ever. I think what happened, happened. I don’t hold anyone accountable. It’s life.

But do I think God knows what it’s like to suffer, and therefore can empathize with me and will welcome me to his arms when the time comes? Yes, I do. I think he knows my suffering and more.

I hope this note is consoling for you all, my friends. Deb and I are deeply fighting this cancer right now. It is a battle that rages by the hour. It is a long day the moment we wake up. It is hard. We so appreciate your loving dinners. They help us manage the day. I thank you from the bottom of my heart for helping take care of Debra. She is a diamond, hard and beautiful and highly precious. She is selfless in caring for those around her. Thank you for being here for her now and in the months to come.

I also thank those of you who care for Will and Ben. They are all seeing a part of life that no one wants to have to go through. It’s refining them in ways I will never see, but I know they will be more empathetic, loving individuals in the long run. Thank you all for being there for them when they need to talk, and for thinking of them when kids their age are gathering and helping to get them there so they can be part of the crowd. This helps so much to keep their lives normal. They are both working through this. They are going to be okay. But your support is so valuable and appreciated.

And Cate. To those of you who have opened your homes, your vacations, your closets, your children and your lives to her, it is a great support. Thank you so much for doing so. She is also doing well through this, but I deeply appreciate your on-going love and support to her.

And me… I can’t thank you all enough for the on-going prayers and Wadestrong bracelet snap shots. They are encouraging. Thank you.

I love you all. I will write again before too long.

Wade 

Son, I hope you get the chance...

A story of my walk with Ben, my 9-year old son, and how I hope he gets the chance to appreciate life like I do....

Last week was “Dress-up as your favorite hero” day at Ben’s school. There was never any doubt: he would go as Michael Jackson. He watched MJ videos to prepare. “Smooth Criminal” was his favorite, with MJ in all white with a fedora hat and black shirt. Ben wanted to be just like that.

By the time the day arrived, he had found a suitable outfit with an open white dress shirt and a dark grey t-shirt underneath. His Papa Mac helped him paint his top hat from blue velvet to white and bought him a sequined glove that Gigi helped him size down to fit his hand. And he also bought the crowning glory: a sparkly fake mic.

The Smoove Criminal

I couldn’t see him the morning he went to school, so I went at lunch to see his outfit. As I walked down the school mall, kids ran past me in KISS outfits and fifties dresses. Other boys, uninterested in music heroes, wore Minnesota Vikings and Miami Heat jerseys. They played tag or chase in the green lawn.

Ben was not playing tag or chase.

To the right of the green lawn in the shade of an overhead walkway, one of the teachers had set up a wireless speaker and was playing songs by request for the “second grade dance party.” Here is where I found Ben, dancing like MJ in absolute abandonment and joy. 

He lip-synched lyrics into the mic. He twirled and finished in MJ poses up on his toes. He cascaded his top hat in a single fancy move from his hands down and up to the top of his head. He was overcome with the joy of the music and dancing. No one was especially watching him…. He was just dancing and “shingin’ shome shongs.” It was a pleasure for me to watch him.

Later that night, I was strategic in asking him to go on a walk with me. I had something I wanted to talk to him about.

We started the walk by playing with a new light-up lacrosse ball I bought for just such occasions. It’s super hard to catch at night because its light is hard to accommodate with nighttime depth perception. As we walked, I told Ben about when I had played with a similar ball on my friend Abe’s ranch one time when he and I and several other friends went out for his 40^th birthday. It still is a lifelong memory for me.

As Ben and I progressed around the block we talked about the light-up ball and making sure to catch it or it would go down the storm drains. We talked about Ben’s whistling and how he should keep at it no matter what, that it will bring him happiness and keep him company. And of course, we talked about which girls he liked. (It’s a secret!)

I let the conversation go along like that for a while, and then I got very serious. I wanted to make an impact with what I said next. I wanted to be very careful about how I said it. I wanted to make Ben absorb what I said, and to want what I would describe to him so badly that he could see the benefit through the work it would take to get there.

“Ben,” I said, “I want to talk to you about something very serious. I want to give you a gift that you will have your whole life. It’s a wonderful gift that you can share with friends that will make those friends even better friends. It will provide opportunities to you that you might not ever even know about otherwise. It will get you girlfriends. (We laughed.) And it might even make you money one day. But above all, it will make you happy. It’s a beautiful gift, Ben. Do you want it?” Of course Ben said, “Yes, I want it.”

I continued, “Do you remember at school today when you were dancing in front of that speaker?”

“Yes.”

“How did you feel when you were dancing?”

He thought a long while, trying to put words to how he felt, “Cool. Happy.”

“Ben, do you think you felt ‘joy’ at being able to hold that mic and dance around and sing, maybe even a little bit because some of the other kids watched you and you could tell that they were enjoying your performance a little bit?”

“Yes.”

“You gotta know something Ben: that is an amazing feeling, to get to dance and sing and have other people get joy from watching you do it. You were really lucky today to get to do that.”

I then stopped walking and acted like I was sitting behind a drum kit, drumming. (Ben has been wanting drums.) I asked Ben if he thought I could dance around while playing the drums. He said no. I said, “the drums are really, really cool Ben. And there are a lot of lead singers who can play the drums…like Jack White. And they play one or two or even three other instruments.”

He began to work this over with me, and quickly figured out I was talking about him learning to play the guitar, more specifically, the electric guitar.

I told him, “Dude. As the lead singer of a band where you’re playing the electric guitar, you can control a crowd, you can dance on stage, you can sing into a mic, you can sing and play songs you have written and people in the crowd will know the lyrics and will sing your song back to you, just like you do with Twenty One Pilots.”

“Ben!” I said. I let his name settle in the darkness... “Playing the guitar is a gateway to the joy you felt today on the playground! If you learn how to play now, you will never regret knowing how to play. Sometimes it will be hard, and you might want to stop. But if you remember how you felt today, you push though those hard times because you know it will make you happy in so many ways, including bringing you joy when you sing and play in front of an audience.”

He began to think of songs we know together that have a guitar in them: Juke Box Hero by Foreigner; Separate Ways by Journey; Panama by Van Halen … And then he got quiet thinking of other songs he knew.

We walked along quietly.

To my surprise he began to sing the chorus of a song we have only listened to together once: Tim McGraw's song, "Live Like You Were Dying."

"And I went sky divin'
I went Rocky Mountain climbin'
I went 2.7 seconds on a bull name Fumanchu
And I loved deeper (Here I joined in with Ben and we walked along singing together.)
And I spoke sweeter (Here he trailed off as he didn't know the rest of the words.)
And I gave forgiveness I'd been denyin'
And I said, 'Son I hope you get the chance
to live like you were dyin'.'"

The last line left my mouth clearly. I could imagine it floating away from us.… The night air around Ben and me was silent. Ben, who usually follows every verbal thought with another one, was quiet.

We walked along the damp pavement under the slow-moving branches… a newly built fence, oddly luminescent on the right side of the road. I put my arm around him, his warm shoulder radiating through his t-shirt up through my hand.

It was a beautiful moment, filled with sadness and longing and irony.

I broke the silence, “Ben, these are moments we need to remember. Help me remember to write you a note about these things we’ve talked about tonight. They’re special, and I want you to have this memory forever. The best way for me to give you that is to write you a note.” He reminded me the next day....

I don’t want Ben to ever have to face a life with a visible end point. But the rewards of knowing that it’s all going away before you thought it would are so deep and rich that I would love for him to experience it somehow.

To relish, savor and appreciate life while we have it colors it more vividly.

I want all my family members to live like they were dying, and to play the guitar. Ben is my last shot for the guitar. Here’s hoping the third time is a charm.

...

For anyone who wants to keep reading about the rest of our fun, fun night…

Ben and I were not ready for bed when we returned, and Will, poor guy, was doing homework. So Ben and I decided to hang out in the back yard while Will finished his homework and throw the light-up lacrosse ball back and forth.

We went out by the pool and were throwing it. It kept getting past me and landing in the bushes. As I would reach down to get it, its bright glow would silhouette the leaves between me and it, and it would spook me about something being down there beside the ball that I couldn’t see, like a snake.

I mentioned to Ben that I was happy there were no poisonous snakes here in our neighborhood because I was a little spooked by the ball being in the bushes. I could see Ben’s eyes grow a little wary as he thought of trying to get the ball out of the bushes and that there might be a snake there, poisonous or not. It was a perfect opportunity to play inside little Ben’s head. Any good father would see it, but only a really good father would take it… Or maybe not. Anyway, I took it.

I said again, “Yeah, the poisonous snakes are all gone these days except the ‘Texas Yard Snakes.’ They live on the outside of the yards around a neighborhood under bushes and stuff, next to the fences.” I then proceeded to bounce the ball over his head and into the yard next to the dark fence.

As we stood in the safety of the lighted side yard, he and I went back and forth about how to go about getting the ball quickly out of the dark bushes beside the fence while avoiding any Texas Yard Snake bites. Once the ball was retrieved, I would tell him, “Whew. Okay, now we know there are no Yard Snakes there…,” as I would bounce the ball past him “accidentally” into another, unexplored dark section of the yard.

We both laughed so hard at ourselves being scared. And then at the end, I told him there were no such things as poisonous “Texas Yard Snakes,” and we walked the perimeter of the lawn to prove it to ourselves. (And a few days later we found “Barney” the Texas Brown Snake. Sure enough, he was totally harmless and fun.)

After we finished throwing the ball back and forth and talking, Will came out and it was time for shooting it into the lacrosse goal. Will and Ben would whip it in and I would stand a good five feet behind the net, having learned the hard way that the net gives a good bit when a ball hits it going 40-70 miles an hour. (Will threw it once when I was videoing and hit my ‘special purpose,’ causing me to utter words that are not-suitable for work, but which are captured forever on digital video.) 

The two of them throwing that light-up ball into the net was an absolute blast because the ball seems to come at you so fast. It was a great surprise gift for the two of them. And a great, predictable and anticipated memory for me.

Live like you were dyin'...

The Radiance

A drive-home experience with a podcast changed my outlook on God's presence. He met me where I was, and I realized it...

To set this story up I need to tell you that in early February Deb and I visited Houston Methodist hospital to discuss my pending liver transplant.

The doctor was kind, but as we have discovered about doctors in this line of work, he only told us the bad news.
-       The procedure for my type of liver transplant is new and its success is not quantified.
-       They don’t have a long history of statistics to rely upon.
-       They don’t know why some people live and some don’t.
-       They don’t know if my body will accept a perfect fit, or throw a perfect fit.

They can’t tell, apparently … much at all. Or if they can, they’re not telling.

Frankly, and I apologize in advance to my doctor buddies, that approach gets tiresome. I know it’s the result of our litigious society. But man it would be nice for someone to tell us something like, “It might work! Of course there are no guarantees. But based on my experience with this, Wade, I think you have a great chance.”

That would be a nice little nugget to carry around in my mind’s lock box. But under the current CYA system, we got dark news about my lack of a chance.

And driving home from receiving that news is where my real story begins. 

Who can paint this for me? I will buy it.

In November, a friend of mine recommended that I listen to a guy named Rob Bell.

Rob is a former pastor who has turned his passion for understanding God into a pursuit that goes outside the traditional religions most of us grew up with. Somewhere along the way he became disenchanted with the god we accepted from tradition as the “one we got,” and began pursuing a God that is more relevant to us today—at least that’s my interpretation :).

As Deb and I were driving home to Austin I queued up a pod cast from Rob. It was an interview with his colleague Alexander J. Shaia, a child-refugee from Lebanon who grew up in Alabama, gained a Phd in psychology, trained and practiced for decades in religion, and now pursues various other spiritual disciplines.

I had heard Alexander late last year talking with Rob about the four gospels and their application to life’s journeys. It was a new lens for me and I enjoyed hearing it.

This particular “Robcast” interview with Alexander was about the Christmas story. It was February, and I knew we were late to hear it. It was recorded for December; but better late than lost.

It was regarding the gospel of Luke; the “good news” for his audience.

As a quick aside, objective historians will attest that there is no reasonable doubt that Jesus lived in the first part of the first century. Likewise, there is no reasonable doubt that his life started Christianity and that his followers wrote several books about his life, four of which are the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

But that is where the objective certainty ends. People wonder…
-       Why are there inconsistencies between the gospels?
-       Why do some of the authors mention some events while others do not?
-       Why are some of Jesus’s statements different?
-       Why are there contradictions?
-       Why?

Ultimately, the questioning should lead to one thing: how do they work for “you,” the reader?

For me, I have come and gone from these books. In college I was fascinated by the apologetics, searching for historicity and accuracy to the original manuscripts. At another point I was caught up by their comparative study. At still another I searched for their relevance to “the big me.” In each case, my curiosity was satisfied on some level and I left them with more than I brought.

But lately, as a result of listening to Rob and his friend Dr. Shaia, I have gotten new insights that make the gospels more real to me; more commonsensical; more textured with the authors’ sweat and blood as they scratched at their parchments, pouring their creative minds and spirits out onto the pages.

It has become obvious that each one wrote for their specific audience—specific groups of early Jesus followers in specific times and specific states of maturation and distress. They wrote to minister to them, teach them, and encourage them. They likely wrote with some fear for their own lives. They wrote with inspiration and passion about their subject, and about their audience.

And let’s be clear: each gospel was hugely successful. Each one filled its readers with hope, encouragement, light, spiritual security, and any number of other requirements. And as a result, each was selected to be canonized and subsequently reprinted something close to five billion times.

But I digress.

On that day after Deb and I heard the dark news the good doctor shared, we listened to Rob and Dr. Shaia talk about the gospel of Luke.

Luke wrote his letter to early Jesus followers who were in deep, dark distress. Their families were not safe. Romans were rounding them up to be killed. They were ostracized from their mother religion, Judaism, for following Jesus. They were isolated and alone from friends and family. And Judaism itself was in shambles and trying to rediscover its way.

As the story goes, the times were dark. No one could be trusted. Secret signs scratched hastily in temporal dirt identified other believers. Tears were common. Corners were never just corners. Work and money were hard to come by.

When I think about Luke’s audience—meeting in secret in rooms with the shades drawn low, looking from face to face to see who was missing—I realize that while I don’t have it very easy right now, things could be worse. These people were who Luke was thinking about when he sat down to write his gospel—his good news. He wrote to them with their dark times in mind.

He starts by talking about the story of Mary and Joseph. She was from a priest’s family, an honorable thing. And Joseph, her identified husband, was from the kingly line of David.

They were like a former UT quarterback’s teenage son who is engaged to the beautiful teenage daughter of the First Baptist Church’s Lead Pastor. The two were like the Home-Coming King and Queen of Nazareth.

And then she got pregnant.

Now today of course, when we see this sort of thing happen and the girl says that she is, “pregnant by the Holy Spirit with the Messiah,” we all rejoice that the second coming is here.

Right. Maybe we think instead that the two teenagers got carried away and made a stupid choice and now their promising lives, poor things, are ruined.

The second thing above is what happened to Mary and Joseph. They were excommunicated.

When they traveled alone to Bethlehem, their ancestral home town, they found locked doors and frowning faces from relatives they would have known for decades.

They had to stay in an animal shed, owned by a stranger; an outright animal barn. They fell from privilege to poverty in nine short months.

And then the baby came.

I can’t imagine how hard this was for them. Their baby, the joy of any new parents’ lives, and one they believed was the Christ, was born in a stranger’s animal barn, with no blanket or midwife or even a clean place to put him.

They wrapped him in whatever cloth scraps they could scrounge up and put him in an animal’s feeding trough so Joseph could tend to his wife, who was likely pretty worn out from the ordeal.

It was a dark place for the two of them. But Luke points out they each had faith.

But he wasn’t done with the allegory. He wanted to tell the story of faith in a dark place one more way, and so he reminded his audience of the shepherds.

Shepherds, according to Dr. Shaia, were dirty, diseased, outcast people in that society. They tended sheep because that was the only work they could find. If you saw (or smelled) a shepherd coming down the street, you ducked into a store front until they were gone. And you hid your kids. Shepherds were not acceptable society. 

These guys were out tending their sheep on the hills surrounding Bethlehem at night. There was no ambient light from the city. The Sun was long set. It was dark, dark, dark, with wild animals, and criminals, and stupid sheep.

And then a blinding light covered the entire scene and these shepherds fell on their faces, absolutely terrified. According to Luke’s story an angel told these outcasts about the Messiah first. Why?

Because it made a point for his audience.

The light was bright, but it was blindingly bright because of where it was—in the darkest possible place. The indescribable Light of the Gospel—The Good News—shown even more brilliantly in the dark fields outside a first-century town precisely because it was intensely dark. The Light of Hope for the world, entrusted to Luke’s persecuted readers, was announced in a dark, dark place—by design.

Kapow!!!!

In the same way I now believe it was no accident that Luke chose to make this point for his audience, I believe it was no accident that I picked that particular Rob Bell interview. The God Rob searches for found me and my wife on that road in that dark time, and by all that’s holy, he showed me a bright light; a bright and radiant light that still shines for me in the darkness of my days and nights.

Wow. That is a God I can love. That is a God I can appreciate because He loves me back. Not every time I need it, but sometimes. And when he does, it leaves a mark.

It makes me pause for a moment to let that sink in before I continue..........

Okay. Eyes dried. 

But for my doubter’s sake I just want to think through the set-up to determine something: Did “Today’s God” really put this content in this moment for me and my wife?

Here’s the set-up: This was about four weeks ago. I have not listened to a single Robcast since. (Sorry Rob, if you ever read this :) .) I have had time in the car to do so, and in very similar situations, but I have not done it. Nor had I ever played Rob Bell for Debra—or anyone—prior to this. In fact, I don’t recall that I have ever queued up a “sermon” style audio file for Debra to listen to, ever, in twenty-one years.

And yet, here we were in February, driving along in silence having heard some really devastating news, and out of nowhere I opened my pod cast app, found a Rob Bell interview about a just-passed Christmas season, and pushed play.

And it’s that one? So perfect for our moment? Come on! Deb and I won the spiritual power ball!

The message that found us continues to provide light in our dark place. I have leaned on my awareness of it many times since hearing about it. For me, it shines the brightest because it was no accident.

The radiance of that light on the dark hills of Israel is Hope in a hope-poor time. It tells us we are not lost. It shows us the way. It reminds us that God knows what it’s like to be alone and suffering. He knows, and so He gives us these beautiful messages and images. He is here, now, like He was there, then.

His radiance shines today. It is hope. It is light. It is relief. It is with us when we’re alone. It is for us in our struggles.

My family’s dark times are made lighter.

Thank you, Today’s God, for inspiring the gospel authors to write down the words of their ministry so long ago. And thank you, Today’s God, that the words are still relevant today.

How I Learned to Stop Walking and Just Be

I have written a lot about walking. It’s how I decompress. And how I exercise. When I walk in my neighborhood, I sometimes head to a north/south street called Las Brisas. It has no outlets. There are cul-de-sacs at either end of its long, dark, tree-lined blacktop. I walk undisturbed in the middle of the road. One night last week I was out for a walk with Beau. I had reached Las Brisas and was going north, downhill, and thinking.

Las Brisas looking north. Beau's in the shadows to the left. 

Walking along I realized that I was dwelling on bad things. I was hurting in my chest and abdomen. My job was presenting some stressful situations. My wi-fi wasn’t working…. The typical stuff we all deal with was in the way of my walk.

I stopped and stood still on the road. There were no cars. The moonless sky was dark and clear. A cool front had blown through and the air was crisp. As the moments passed I became aware that I needed to be present in their beauty, not missing them because I was mulling over my hurts and concerns. I needed to be thankful for my ability to be outside, and walking.

Honestly, it wasn’t so long ago that the best walk I could take was the eighty-three steps around the nurses’ station at MD Anderson, passing under fluorescent lights and across alternating shades of green and gray tile. Being outside, under the stars, walking on a dark street with Beau was so much better, with so many more pleasant things to think about, that there was really no comparison.

Consciously, I began to appreciate the walk more.

Beau was in the woods on my right side, the east side of the road. He is built low, maybe 12 inches tall, 30 inches long, and 10 inches wide, and he has big paws that flop around when he walks. His short, domesticated steps make a racket in the brush to stir the dead. He would certainly starve if left to kill for food. If I could hear him so clearly with my human ears, a wiley rabbit would be watching him from the safety of a thicket long before Beau’s snout even picked up his rabbity scent.

But in this case, his thrashing in the undergrowth made me pause. As I silently appreciated the fact that I was there at all, I suddenly realized I had been missing the things I heard too. So I decided to systematically step through each of my five senses, paying attention to what I was hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, and seeing. 

I breathed deeply and heard the air pass through my nose and into my lungs. My troubled thoughts slowly became past tense, and I began to pick out each, discernible sound track of the night.

While it was cold, there was still some little living thing in the bushes singing for mates. It’s amazing that night calls in Texas are so pervasive and omni-seasonal that there is hardly ever a truly, silent night. Always, the click and hum of life surrounds us.

Above me, the cold breeze moved through the trees and across my skull cap. It shushed past, branch on branch, leaf on leaf, murmuring and whispering with indescribable sounds. Wind is as wind does. It screeches. It moans. It whispers. I heard it there above me. I drank it in, and imagined what made the sounds from its passing.

Air poured through my nose and down the back of my tongue as I inhaled the cool night's tastes and smells--the dense cedar fragrance of hill country and neighborhood run-offs; the tangled aroma of wood and bare brush and decaying, brown oak leaves; lingering mountain laurel and rosemary; the familiar smell of a wood-burning fireplace.

My fingers were cold. The thick barrel of the big, black police flashlight I carry sat in the curve of my hand, buried in the pocket of my old Carhartt, its scored surface and rubber push-button switch familiar. My other hand clenched in my left pocket. I felt my finger pads in my palm, and it was warm.

I explored the feelings of my face. We are normally not aware of how our faces feel. They generally are a one-way message out from us, “I’m busy. I’m stressed. I’m happy. I’m sad.” But when I paid attention, my face was letting me know the air was cold and my hat was tight and warm. My ears bristled as the cold breeze swirled in them. My cheeks couldn’t decide whether to be cold or hot, and so teetered on both sensations from the corners of my mouth to the sides of my eyes. The cold on my forehead stopped where my black hat started. Below that line, I could feel coolness tingling, above it, the pressure of elastic.

When I paused to concentrate on my legs I regretted not wearing my long underwear. But my feet, ah! my feet were toasty warm in my new boots from Mac, my father-in-law. Taking steps now, I could feel my weight and the scrape of their soles on the asphalt, and I knew I was going down a hill without even being able to see the slope.

Darkness enveloped me. There are no lights on Las Brisas, and the house porch lights sit back by 50 to 100 feet. I have been on Las Brisas when it’s so dark you can’t see your hand in front of your face. This night was not that dark, but only starlights pin pricked the sky. There was no moonlight filtering through the woods on either side of me. Branches above me were coarse, dark brushwork on a deep blue canvas. The white curbs of the black road were only notions of a border.

Beau came out of the woods and found me. I knelt down on one knee and scratched his neck in the deep folds. He looked up. I looked down. We made a visual connection, imprinting that we were two in a pack, safe, no danger. Off he went, and me too, further on our explorations.

Lights from a home I had never appreciated before shone through the bare undergrowth. It sits twenty feet higher than the street on a carved-out hillside to my left. Party lights swayed over a large, Spanish courtyard above me, encircled by a low stone wall. I imagined a bustling party there: waiters with trays of drinks and hor d’oeurvres held shoulder high, and I wanted to be standing in a clutch of friends, sipping a margarita with salt and laughing at long-known insider jokes.

I circled the cul de sac and began to walk back up the hill. I was so far from where I started. Quiet. I was struck with the word "Be." "Be. Be. Be....." I breathed it in.

Be. Where you are, Wade.
Be. With who you're with.
Be. And don't miss the joy of being.

Yes, there are unpleasant things that I and everyone else must deal with. They are the facts of life. But not the only ones!

There are spikes of pain in our lives that pinch and crimp and wake us up. We all face demons at work, whether in an office or an SUV. Each of us has daily opportunities to mull our injuries and pet peeves, nursing them into brimming wards of 24-hour-care patients.

But stop. Hang on. Don’t do that. You don’t have to. We can do something else.

Spend time being without those hurts. Invest your observation power by walking through your senses one at a time. Find yourself in places that are rewarding—the woods, a basketball game, a lake, a dinner table. Dwell on hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, and seeing. Soak up the cold, the hot, the sounds, sights, feelings—the sensations of life. Absorb each as a chorus and then in their individual voices. 

Beaches become so much more than broad strokes of sand, sky, water and bodies; forests, more than trees, dirt, stones and trails; roads, more than the fastest way from one thing to the next; people, more precious; time, more rich, and maybe even a little slower.

Hope Revealed

I have been thinking about Hope. The real meaning of the concept, for me anyway, is easily missed. The word is too easy to say as a throwaway thought: “I hope it rains today. I hope you have a good time.” But in a greater sense, it requires a pause, and a careful new thought to appreciate its strength--and its weakness. I have lived with “hope” in my vernacular for 48 years now, and I think I really only understood its subtlety a few weeks ago.

I have been talking with a trained therapist about pain. Since the bowel obstruction occurred in late October, pain has been constantly with me. I don’t know why this is the case, because it was supposed to go away after my surgery. But it pulls on my abdomen all night. It nags after meals, and if I haven’t eaten and my stomach is empty, it sends sharp messages to let me know I need to put food into the process. And the damn tube is aching as well, more later in the day after sitting for awhile. These days, pain is hardly ever not with me in some form. It’s so tiring.

So I have been talking with someone trained in how to manage it. Her specialty is post-traumatic stress disorder. She sits across from me in a classic therapist’s office with comfortable couches and Kleenex, and asks me to describe the pain in a single word. “Weakness” comes to mind among five or so other words. We decide “weakness” is the word that most describes where my thoughts go when the pain takes a mental front seat.

She then asks me to dwell on that feeling and its effects on me. She tells me, "Hold them for ten seconds in my thoughts, and then let my mind go, noticing the words and images that come." I am not yet sure where this is going, but I comply. My mind tumbles forward, building on the word “weakness.”

After two or three minutes, she breaks me out of the thoughts. We talk about them for a short time. And then she asks me to pick up where those thoughts ended and let my mind begin again from there.

It’s surprising that it doesn’t cover ground it has just run across. It leaves it behind and finds new articulations of my situation, each time deeper inside my psyche than the last. And each time looking at the original pain from a different vantage point, showing me how it affects me in ways that I haven’t uncovered until now.

We do this maybe seven times until Hope comes into my mind. I find it buried several minutes beneath “fear.” It is the guarded hope that this pain will one day be behind me, and I will feel physically normal again, able to be present without feeling my body under me. Able to be happy and with my family without first making the conscious choice to do so by ignoring the pain and all it signifies.

And I realize for the first time in my life that without pain, fear, sadness, failure, death…, there is no Hope. The concept of Hope depends on undesirable outcomes for its very existence. Without the very real possibility that I will never be whole again, the hope for a revitalized life is not necessary. 

It hardly ever crosses our minds when we are healthy to hope that we stay that way. We may pray for it. We may be thankful for it. But we don’t hope for it.

Somehow this realization that Hope depends on imperfection and uncertainty helps me appreciate what it means to have it at all. Because it’s uncertain, I appreciate its presence with me and my family. I can grasp its importance as a buoy for my drowning thoughts.

There is good news on this front. I have recently been added to a very unique liver list. It’s not the classic liver list that we are all familiar with in theory. That list is called the “in-criteria liver list.” An “in-criteria” liver is one that comes from a healthy individual, under sixty, without a jail record or history of drug use, etc. These livers are jokingly called “prom-king livers” because it immediately conjures the concept of a young kid, drinking and driving on prom night who unwittingly saves someone’s life through the loss of their own. It’s a tragic moniker, but now that we know it we will never forget it.

I am on the “out-of-criteria liver list” because my cancer was slightly too large when they found it. These are the livers from the people that Jesus hung out with. They are the drug abuser livers, the chronically-ill person livers, the jail-bird livers. They may also be livers from an older person, or a person who has too much fat. These are commonly called the “ex-convict livers.” I am honored to be the potential recipient of their gift of life.  

Classic liver recipients are not generally healthy enough to receive these livers, and a liver transplant using one of these livers might not be successful with someone who has cirrhosis and is close to death. But I, I am a great candidate for these ex-convict livers. My body, ironically, is healthy enough to receive one of these livers and live through it. I can tolerate the time it takes for the liver to adjust to a healthy person’s body.

The good news here is that the out-of-criteria list is relatively short: I am already number two on the list with my blood type and body size. They’re also only allocated on a hospital-by-hospital basis instead of a nation-wide, government-regulated regional list. The Methodist Hospital in Houston is one of the only hospitals in the South to transplant convict livers, so they get all of them in the area; Fat Southern Ex-Convicts Give Good Liver!

More good news is that my  doctor, Dr. Ghobrial, is very experienced with ex-convict livers, having used them for decades now. And even better, he has a good record of success with them.

And the final piece of good news is that he and his physician’s assistant, Dawn, are deeply kind people who want me to live. They want to save me. In fact, they have—gasp—proactively reached out to me with emails telling me they are praying for me and rooting for me this Holiday Season. They want me to live. I am glad to have them on Team Wade.

But because I understand I may not get a liver, or may not get one in time, I can also appreciate what it means to hope for one.

To hope for one means to hope to remain present on the sidelines or in the stands, to remain cheerfully in the snow where a sled track runs down a hill to a kick-ass jump, to remain quietly on a walk through a forest with my kids looking for critter trails, in the auditorium for a dance recital, or at a special dinner with my wife. It means getting to be a dad and a husband. It means walking through an autumn field, sitting with friends, petting my dog, driving my jeep…. In short it means living, and enjoying it for a few more years if not decades—and without pain. 

Hope is the longing and determination to achieve a triumphant survey over past obstacles and struggles. Like a hike up a long, steep and rocky mountain trail, hope is the vision of standing at the summit, looking out over the checkered valley below as clouds cascade upward one on top of the other against cliffs that fall thousands of feet beneath me. Being there on that crest is the point of beginning the trail at all—reaching the summit. And for me, my reward is so much richer than a view and sense of accomplishment. It’s a beating heart and an evolving mind.

I live with the pain for now, such as it is. But I know the reward as well. It is a normal life. And I have tasted that before. I know what it’s like to feel good, to throw a ball a long way and watch it spiral into my son's hands, to stay up late talking, to sit through a movie. I know that is what I am hoping to regain. Without the pain of today, hope would remain foreign and intangible; lost because I wouldn’t need it. Without pain, I wouldn’t have these thoughts at all.

From the mud-soaked arms of the fighting soldier, hope is warmth and home.

From the tired legs of the cyclist, hope offers the cold beer and warm burn of accomplishment.

From the red eyes of the post all-nighter, hope holds honor roll and college admission.

From the anxious sender of a secretly passed note, hope may be a girlfriend or boyfriend.

… Without the black, sad version of the above, the lighted Hope doesn’t exist.

This “Wade revelation” may not apply to everyone’s experience with Hope. My wife has lived with an appreciation of Hope for decades. It wakes her up in the morning and keeps her infectious smile in place throughout the day. Thank God. She hopes for the same things I do, but her hope lives without the burden of seeing the potential negatives.

Maybe it’s needless to say, but I am a little jealous. Her version is an upbeat soundtrack that starts with coffee. My version is a bleary-eyed walk across a hard-packed dessert, focusing on water and bootless, stretched out relaxation at the end.

Nevertheless, we hope for the same things.

And I hope Hope makes a difference.