No guy really wants to discuss such matters, but I guess we don’t get to choose our testimonies 
First, I want to thank so many for prayer, kind notes, and words of encouragement. Thursday, August 11, I had surgery and they say things went as well as they can in such an operation. I was quite asleep and don’t remember a thing. I sometimes thought my wife, Susan, was a bit of a wimp when those c-sections slowed her down a few days, but now I realize she’s a little tougher than I am Thursday, August 18, I got my staples out. The surgeon seemed quite surprised with the pathology report. He told me he was going to use my case as he spoke in a doctor’s conference at Emory. (I never really wanted such an honor…) The tumor was a plasmacytoma, which is totally related to multiple myeloma. This was very good news since we did not want to deal with a whole new type of cancer.
The key thing now is the protein level in my blood. You healthy people have a zero count. In July, mine measured 1.1 and has climbed to just over 2. (When I was diagnosed in 2000 it was 6.2 and I was in pretty bad shape.) The hope is that this protein level will start dropping after the surgery. I will be stabbed a few more times in upcoming days as this number is observed.
So… what I think I’m going to do is head to a part of the world where the doctors can’t find me. This week, Susan and I and another dear couple, Joe and Sybil McReynolds, are going to visit our missionary friends in Jerusalem. We were invited a long time ago and had made plans before all the cancer talk began. My oncologist, a God-loving doctor, has given his full permission for the trip, as have my bosses at school. As always, I cherish and need your love and prayers.
I thought I would send a page from Oswald Chambers’ MY UTMOST FOR HIS HIGHEST to encourage disciples when things don’t line up the way we thought they would. From August 3, entitled ‘The Big Compelling of God’:
“Behold, we go up to Jerusalem.” Luke 18:31 Jerusalem stands in the life of our Lord as the place where He reached the climax of His Father’s will. “I seek not my own will, but the will of the Father which has sent Me.” That was the one dominating interest all through the Lord’s life, and the things He met with on the way, joy or sorrow, success or failure, never deterred Him from His purpose. “He steadfastly set His face to go to Jerusalem.” The great thing to remember is that we go up to Jerusalem to fulfill God’s purpose, not our own. Naturally, our ambitions are our own; in the Christian life we have no aim of our own. There is so much said today about our decision for this and that, but in the New Testament it is the aspect of God’s compelling that is brought out. “You have not chosen Me, but I have chosen you.” We are not taken up into conscious agreement with God’s purpose, we are taken into God’s purpose without any consciousness at all. We have no conception of what God is aiming at, and as we go on it gets more and more vague. God’s aim looks like missing the mark because we are shortsighted to see what He is aiming at. At the beginning of the Christian life we have our own ideas as to what God’s purpose is – “I am meant to go here or there,” “God has called me to do this special work”; and we go and do the thing, and still the big compelling of God remains. The work we do is of no account, it is so much scaffolding compared with the big compelling of God.
Have a great week!
Dana