We are delighted to be able to share the audio from our Conference “Small Church, Big Problems.” Our speakers and their sessions were, in my incredibly humble and slightly biased opinion, second to none. LifeSpring Church in Crosby extended the greatest hospitality to us, and we are so thankful. I’d hold up our conference attended by 50 dear folks to any I’ve ever been to attended by thousands. It really was that good.

Thanks to all who joined us!

Check out the Conference Audio page to hear or download the sessions and see a brief intro to our speakers, or take a shortcut here

Alice: Radiation, Week 2

Ten down. Something like 17 to go. Early mornings, lots of miles, SpongeBob, Cheerio’s (with honey!), sedation, and radiation. That’s our routine. It’s amazing how fast it becomes “normal.”

It’s working. Alice’s smiles, giggles, and sparkly eyes are once again rather common sights and sounds in our old house. And that’s been wonderful.

But the joy is somehow tinged with sadness, too. This is how it goes with her kind of cancer. You knock it down, it comes back. You feel like you get your girl back, but in the back of your mind you can’t help but think you have to lose her again, and that stinks.

I try not to live there. I’m trying so hard to live in today, and if I must look to the future, I want my gaze to skip from tomorrow until 10,000 years from now, when faith is sight, tears are gone, and death is fully and finally swallowed up by completed redemption. But sometimes I fail at that.

Alice: Radiation, Week 1

Well, it’s Friday night, and we made it through the first week of radiation.

And there was much rejoicing. *yay*

Small Churches; Big Problems

If only leading a church was as easy, trouble-free, and glamorous as it looks on TV! Indeed, it is a high honor, and an inestimable privilege to be called to be a part of the local church. But since the church’s inception, the church has battled scandal, division, ravenous wolves masquerading as sheep, attacks from without, and attacks from within.

A small, rural church is usually just one conflict from major, destructive division or even extinction, and those conflicts can appear from just about anywhere for almost any reason.

Understanding, navigating, surviving, and healing from church conflicts is the subject of the Common Slaves Conference.

“Lord, give the doctors wisdom,” we instinctively plead in our desperation.

The wise doctors don’t give us the answers we wanted.

We immediately cry out, “Lord, make the doctors fools!”

Weird.

-jr

Alice: Prognosis

I left our saga in “Limbo Land,” the land of unknown between initial diagnosis and confirmation/prognosis. I’ll pick it up there and catch you up…

Last Monday or Tuesday morning, Alice woke up particularly irritable and ornery. I wrapped her up in a blanket, then in my arms, and as we laid on the couch, I figured I’d try to make up a story to tell her. Lewis did that with Narnia, so how hard can it really be?

I didn’t get far, but managed to come up with a frog she named “Ribbit” who went fishing. “Dad, I wanna go fishing.”

Alice: Thoughts From Limbo-land

At this point, we don’t have much more to say as far as Alice’s condition. Writing helps sort out the scattered thoughts of a beleaguered mind, so what follows is more therapy than journalism.

We’re home, awaiting the pathology results and then the process of working through treatment options. More thoughts on that a little later. I call it “limbo-land” because we’re sort of in our old “normal,” wondering what the new “normal” will be like when treatment starts. In the meantime, we talked with her doctor and reduced her steroids to half of what they were, and that’s having some favorable results.

Alice effortlessly ate 4 boiled eggs for lunch today. To say she’s been really hungry is like saying Spurgeon was an ok preacher. She’s been voracious. Hopefully the reduced steroids help curb some of that. Our biggest challenge is trying to help her not eat constantly, especially when everything in us wants to dote on her every wish.