The Waiting Room

Our friend with the lung tumors has finished his chemo and will have his final radiation tomorrow. And then comes the waiting! Eight weeks! Then a scan will reveal what’s been happening in his lymph nodes. Waiting gets hard. Although I’m still in treatment, I feel like I’m mostly in the “waiting room.” I don’t know where all this is heading. And if I could know, would I want to?

I realize we started this blog relationship because I was so desperately in need of your prayers. I still am! But there’s not much to say about my physical condition from day to day. So I try to keep my mind engaged with big ideas, and from time to time I share them here. I hope you don’t mind.

On December 25, 1991, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev called US President George Bush, Sr., and said, “I have a Christmas present for you. The Soviet Union is no more.” Most of us welcomed that news because we felt the end of the Cold War brought us a measure of safety. But others saw something far greater. In fact, for some years already, as the “Iron Curtain” was rusting away, Paul Eshleman, International Director of The Jesus Film Project, had been arranging film showings and video give-aways in the most unlikely places in the USSR and Eastern Europe. Now he and other Christian leaders saw a window of opportunity to expose the educational system to the Jesus who had been banned for 70 years.

They formed a consortium of more than 80 Christian organizations, and called it the CoMission. During the five years of its existence (1992-1997), they showed the JESUS film in 65,000 schools and 278 teacher-training colleges, and trained the public school teachers to teach biblical ethics to their students—with the approval of the Ministry of Education. Thousands of "ordinary" Christians invested a year or more to live in Russia, sharing their faith and working in the schools. Thousands of teachers became believers, and hundreds of thousands of children met Jesus through the film and related curriculum.

Yesterday afternoon I finished reading the book about that amazing effort. Here’s a quote: “ No one dreamed that 82 organizations could work together under the umbrella of the CoMission or that they would take down their own organizational ‘flags’ and work as one, in unity representing the body of Christ.” I discovered that one of the essential principles of the CoMission was repentance. That's a concept we don't hear much about these days, but apparently it derailed a lot of self-seeking, misunderstanding and interpersonal conflict. I found enormous encouragement as I read about the CoMission.

Kemo #11 starts at 8:30 this morning. As always, we pray for a good vein, and for the medicine to search and destroy all the cancer cells. Next Monday we'll do another test for CA 125. We're asking for a miracle drop.

Bless you, my prayer partners,
Carol