In Spring 2003 we found out that Tracey’s sister Stacey, a divorced mother of three children (one had died before I met Tracey, a victim of severe birth defects, but two girls came after him), was diagnosed with breast cancer. The treatment called for a mastectomy, reconstructive surgery for appearance’s sake, chemo and radiation.
Stacey was almost exactly as old as I was; in fact, her sister Tracey is almost exactly as old as my brother. Her life was very different from Tracey’s; they were raised in practically identical circumstances, but had gravitated to two extremes. Tracey wanted nothing to do with society as a whole, at least not the society of her peers in school, and Stacey wanted nothing more than to be accepted by them. Not being born into that rare place in society where leadership comes inevitably, like puberty, she became a follower, and chased the lowest common denominator in high school. She was thin, and pretty, and extravagant to her friends; she would give you anything she had if it would bring a smile to your face and something she recognized as acceptance. She ran with the stoners and musicians, and eventually married one, a confused young man who had never been held accountable for anything. He didn’t stick it out long after their son with his many needs was born, and roved in and out of her life until the last time he was seen by any of us, at his son’s funeral. By then she had had two more children by him, and was getting by with the help of friends, her family (the rock to which she always returned), and the state.
I showed up a few months after this, married her sister, and became an uncle. I felt for these kids; Stacey had been emotionally and psychologically worn so thin in the course of the life and death of her son that she had little left for anybody else from then on. She chased her dreams, which were littler by the day, and she and the kids struggled on. The kids loved attention, even when I met them (at ages 3 and 1)—in fact, they starved for it. It was hard to stand back through the years and watch Stacey make one mistake after another, dragging the kids into danger and deprivation time and again without any thought for the future. I never understood why everybody in her family let these things continue, but the fact is, I didn’t learn to love her at all until it was almost too late.
The last straw for us was when she received a few hundred thousand dollars in a settlement related to her son’s health problems. We saw it as a chance for her to weigh anchor and make a small future for her and her family; she saw it as the fulfillment of all her dreams. Within a couple of months, she had bought a Firebird for herself, a tractor-trailer for her boyfriend, a truck for his sister, and put down a down-payment on a house in Florida. She disappeared with the kids in tow, and we all had to learn to let go again.
A few months later it was over—she had lost the house, the boyfriend had disappeared with his rig, the Firebird had been smashed up a bit, and she was left with a few baubles and a few “friends” who disappeared the minute the money ran dry. Never have I seen a more true-to-Scripture reenactment of the story of the prodigal son. She came back, and eventually got on public aid and lived in cheap apartments with others in similar circumstances, scraping by every month on the welfare check, and getting a little extra help from relatives now and then. It was in the midst of this life, which seemed like it would never end, that the news came from the doctor, and the world changed.
It seems like the doctors were always cautiously optimistic about her chances, but looking back, I think nobody counted on how much she had used up her body’s capital over the years.
Spiritually speaking, she always paid lip service to what we brought home from the ministry, and she even came to hear me teach a few times, particularly when she was living with her parents. At the same time, she was nodding along with other relatives, who were in other (slightly more mainstream) circles, as well. Back then I figured she was just playing everybody; now I suspect that her mind, like a river, rushed along so quickly that she really agreed with pretty much whoever was speaking at the moment. The teacher had definite opinions about her; he told us, and her parents, that she was a lost cause, and even named one of her daughters as a lost cause as well. He was just certain that there was little or no chance that either would ever repent; they were hard cases.
I regret to say that I believed him, partially because she did seem like a hard case (and I had not learned about God’s specialty in bringing the dead to life at this time; every unregenerate person is a hard case, in fact, an impossible case, but all things are possible with God), and partially because he was the teacher, to whom God gave revelations, and if God told him that Stacey was out, then there’s no point in wasting our breath; the best we can do is reach out to the one savable child (this is really hard to write).
If I had to pick the act or word of that teacher that was hardest for me to forgive, I think this would be it. I still feel my face and the backs of my hands turning red when I write this—but it isn’t anger at him specifically, it is the anger I would feel now if anybody came to me and told me that the gates of the New Jerusalem were closed to my daughter. It is one thing to discuss, as we have done, whether there was a ghost of a chance that John Paul II could have been saved, in some fleeting final moment of repentance for being a false teacher and antichrist for his whole life; it is quite another to tell me that the child I hold in my lap every night is damned for eternity because she is just like her mother. “Man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart” (1 Sam. 16:7). Never forget that.
My wife made time for Stacey; she came along when she had surgery, when she had appointments and treatments of various kinds. She was there when they found evidence of cancer in other places. Sometimes we watched the kids, but most of the time Stacey’s mom and dad did. Before this my wife had also invested time, going through some Scripture passages with Stacey, and it was hard; we expected a lot out of others when they studied with us, and it was tough to scale back and encourage Stacey to press on when it didn’t seem to us like she really cared at all. When Stacey knew she would lose all her hair, her father shaved his head, and my wife cut her hair down to a buzz cut; I was selfish, it was sad for me to see her beautiful hair disappear, but it meant a lot to Stacey. It was easy, in the confusion and chaos that resulted from Stacey’s diagnosis and treatment, to forget about our problems with the ministry for a while, but soon we had to return to ground zero.
The crisis, along with a few other things happening in the group, caused me to want to return to a Biblical foundation for teaching, as I started to press through Romans. I determined to stop relying on commentaries so much and really try to read Scripture for all it was worth. Soon I found that I needed more; I had been trained by the teacher to distrust Christian translations, but I didn’t know where to turn when I couldn’t trust the NASB, so I ended up deciding, in the interest of furthering my secular career and my understanding of Scripture, to take ancient Greek at SIUE. Tracey and I took it together, and it kept us busy enough to have to pull out a little bit from the lives of those in our extended family. Soon enough, though, the tables would turn completely.
One more note. Tomorrow would have been Stacey’s 34th birthday, and it will be the second one she celebrates in the presence of the Lord. The parties at home were fun, but nothing will beat the party the angels threw the day when, against all the odds, God saved her, in spite of her rebellion against God, the sin of Adam, and the words of the teacher to whom we were enthralled. Now she’s with her Redeemer. But that story has to wait; a lot happened in the meantime.
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