Refining Fire
Last year around this time, I framed a print with the lyrics to the old Christmas spiritual, Go Tell It on the Mountain. I decided to frame it in an entirely gold glitter frame and hang it over my fireplace mantle, above my beloved glitter houses and glittery glass-encased bottle brush trees.
I had a vision. And I’ve been waiting with anticipation. All. Year. Long.
At the risk of highly offending the rule-followers in the crowd, I pulled my Christmas décor out immediately following Halloween. Yes, that’s right, and I won’t apologize for it. As I unpacked my beloved items, I fell in love with them again: the three detailed, creative glitter buildings—one purchased for each daughter—a country house with painted gold window trims and icicles hanging from the roof; a white and silver city home with a wreath and garland hanging from the doorway, and a pale pink church complete with steeple and a sweet little nativity scene.
My daughters each bought me a few glass-encased glitter trees for Christmas last year. They completed my little faux village. As I unpacked them this year, I told the girls that the trees made me happy all over again—they were the gift that keeps on giving.
And finally, finally! I leaned my large, framed artwork on the mantle. The wild, entirely gold glitter frame coordinated with the dancing sparkles of the glittery mantle. Garlands and greenery tucked around the homes and trees—it was mantle perfection.
Perfection, except the mason screw in the brick on our fireplace, was too low, so the artwork hung too low. No worries: we would drill a new masonry screw higher to accommodate the artwork right where it needed to be.
It was chemo week, which isn’t my best week. I try to keep a quiet pace and leave my calendar open so that I can rest, visit, or work from home, whatever my body needs. My neighbor Amy came over to drink tea with me while I needlepointed. We were long past due on catching up. She walked in the door and (of course!) loved the mantle.
Oh! I’m so glad you’re here, I said as I was heating water for the tea. I need a second set of hands and eyes to measure how much higher the frame needs. Let me get in there and hold it up, and you take the measuring tape so I can mark the top of the frame and get an accurate measurement.
While the kettle began to boil, she and I worked our way to success. The kettle hissed. I leaned the frame back where it had been as we returned to the kitchen.
A piercing crash came from the fireplace as I poured hot water over our Constant Comment. I jumped; Amy screamed. There was so much glass breaking; the sound was a sudden avalanche, a cacophony of destruction.
Go Tell It on the Mountain had hurled off the mantle, shattering onto the floor, taking half of the festivity with it. Thousands of glass shards lay strewn across the fireplace, the rug, furniture, ottoman, and blankets. Glass trees were split apart and posited in portions throughout the room.
The two houses remained intact, but the little church’s steeple was broken, and the base was crushed. I’ve never seen such a mess.
And as I stood in my sweatpants, examining the scene before me while my tea got cold in the kitchen, I thought:
Well, if this isn’t a picture of my life right now, I really don’t know what is.
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A few weeks after the fireplace fiasco, I was hospitalized when a standard outpatient procedure went awry. The hospital team did an emergency CT scan to determine whether my spleen had been damaged. (It had).
Our hospitalist doctor was not my favorite. She was unsmiling, spoke down to us, and remained negative. Additionally, she kept using the word appreciate instead of the word understand. For example:
Your spleen has a large clot, in addition to the clot already in the portal vein of your liver. Do you appreciate this?
Yes, we do understand this. But, um, no, we don’t appreciate this, thank you very much.
Then came the zinger, almost in passing: We don’t know how long your spleen has had the clot, and we don’t know how long the cancerous legions in your spine have been there. Those areas were clear on the scan from 8 weeks ago.
Me, incredulous: Wait. Wait. Did you say that I have cancer in my spine? This cancer has metastasized not only to my liver but to my bones?
Dr. Grumpy: Yes. Nobody has told you this?
Me, quietly: No. Nobody has told us this.
Dr. Grumpy: You appreciate what I’m telling you?
Good grief, lady.
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I take a lot of baths these days. The hot water relieves my back pain. Also, I’m not sleeping well, so sometimes, in the middle of the night, I just get into a warm bath and spend some time with a lavender candle, soft music, and dimmed lights. My troubles and anxious thoughts melt away for an hour or so.
Ty got me a bath pillow for Christmas, so my head rests comfortably instead of on the hard porcelain. He also got me a towel warmer, and I became addicted after the first use.
Eden, who is six, has been turning her bath time into Spa Shop Time. I emptied all my old facial oil droppers. She will play for an hour just filling up those unused bottles with water and mixing her potions in a small cup, adding a bit of soap, and then, following the lead of two teenage sisters, I overhear her selling her creations: This one will moisturize your skin; this one gets your legs clean; this one stays on longer—it is called a mask.
Last week, at the end of Spa Shop Time, I sent Nell up to help her get out of the tub and corral her to pajamas and bedtime. After an hour of blissful quiet (the Spa Shop is quiet, obviously), I heard a loud, screeching shout:
No! I Won’t Get Out of the Tub without my Warmed Towel!
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We work to scrub away the impurities and toxins to make our skin, hair, and nails shine when we really need a scrubbing work on our inside.
We work on our bodies: CrossFit, gym memberships, obsessive workouts when we really need to strengthen our core— our heart and spirit.
I just had my hair cut and colored recently. I loved it. Then last week, most of my hair suddenly fell out again. I just started a new chemo drug because the old one stopped working (hence the cancerous legions on my spine). What I need isn’t a new hairstyle. My body is dying— I need healing, not hair.
But I went out and bought two wigs. Because a girl’s gotta try.
These things we do are band-aids. They make us feel good momentarily: shopping, self-care, my wigs. But the truth is, you’ll pitch a fit when the plans go awry, and things don’t turn out as desired.
No matter how pure we think we are or what kind of changes we’re making, we’re all just like Eden: demanding comfort and ease—a hot towel—in our own way.
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Bless our God, O peoples!
Give him a thunderous welcome!
Didn’t he set us on the road to life?
Didn’t he keep us out of the ditch?
He trained us first,
Passed us like silver through refining fires,
Brought us into hardscrabble country,
Pushed us to our very limit,
Road-tested us inside and out,
Took us to hell and back;
Finally, he brought us to this well-watered place.
-Psalm 66:8-12 The Message
A friend told me about a woman who visited a Silversmith. She had come across some verses about refining, and she became curious about the exact process of refining silver. She called on the master and watched him work, learning more about the methodology of turning iron ore into what we know as beautiful, shiny silver.
First, silver most often comes from Argentite ore, also called Silver Sulfide. The Silversmith heats the chunk of black and brown ore to remove the sulfur, being careful not to inhale the toxic fumes of sulfuric acid.
Second, the Silversmith burns the remainder in shallow pans so that the lead will form a lead oxide, dross, or impurities. He must totally separate this dross from the lead oxide.
Third, he collected the pure silver, now separated on the bottom of the pans. This is a dirty and lengthy process. Sometimes, it doesn’t even work—the dross won’t divide. There are bad apples: pieces of ore that won’t release the dross. Despite the heat and the process, the ore simply will not release the impurities.
After watching this lengthy, laborious process, the woman watched the Silversmith lean over the caldron and peer in. She asked: After all that, how do you know when it’s ready?
Oh, that part is easy, he responded.
I know it’s ready when I can see my reflection in it.
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When Nell—now sixteen— was a little girl, I regularly asked her if she wanted to do this the ‘easy way or the hard way.’ She was a tough cookie. Nell almost always chose the hard way. The thing still had to be done: cleaning the room, setting the table, turning off the TV, or basically being asked to do anything that she didn’t want to do. In our house, this typically meant: Do you want to do this with or without a spanking? You choose by your attitude.
Esther, now seventeen, used to whisper to Nell, but I could still hear her: Choose the easy way, Nell. Just do it. Choose the easy way. You’ll be done soon and can keep playing.
I’ve said it before: I have cancer, but I hope nobody reads this as a Cancer Blog. That would be dull, indeed. I aim to write about faith, hope, community, doubt, and all the actual ins and outs of walking a road that has taken a complicated and unexpected turn.
My thing—my family’s thing—is cancer. You have a thing, too. Hardship and suffering come in many forms: Debt and financial stress, marital tension and disappointment, secret addictions—to phones, shopping, alcohol, food, porn, painkillers, exercise, and comfort. There are wayward children, fear of death, loneliness, and shame.
You can’t write about these things. You probably don’t even speak of them. They are private, weighty burdens, and sometimes you feel like you’re barely keeping your head above water, trying to live with the weight of it.
We all have a choice: will we choose the Easy Way or the Hard way?
I think it’s more accurate to ask: will you choose the easier way or the harder way? In God’s economy, this doesn’t mean with a spanking or without. And most of the time, there is no easy way through a road of suffering. That’s part of the package with suffering: you can’t find a way around it; you must go through it.
It means with Him or without Him. That’s your choice.
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I spoke at the Women’s Christmas Candlelight Dinner at the Church of the Apostles in Atlanta. It was a sweet event, although much bigger than I anticipated! They warmly welcomed me, and several women sought a word with me after my talk. The best part was connecting one-on-one with those ladies whose spirit was pricked in some way by my story.
My favorite conversation was with a woman I’m going to call Rebekah. She approached me hesitantly and told me how much she appreciated my story and faith, but she just had a question.
How do you do it? She asked. How do you still believe Him and have faith and joy when you know He can heal you, but He’s not?
Rebekah then told me that she lost her 14-year-old daughter in a fatal car wreck. It was twenty years ago, and she is still struggling with God. Can she trust Him? Is he actually able? Is He willing? Is He in command of the universe? Then why would He let this happen?
I listened and invited her to sit with me at an empty table. Her story pierced my heart. It can be tempting to jump straight to heaven. We all want—and need—Good News. But we aren’t there yet. I will be, probably sooner than later, yet my husband and daughters still have a lifetime ahead of them without me. Rebekah has had twenty years of life without her child.
It’s fair to sit with that and say, “Really? Is this what life with God looks like?”
It’s not only fair, but good. We call this wrestling with God.
Faith is not a blind acceptance or false happiness. Faith isn’t a rose-colored glasses approach to life and suffering. Faith does not provide pat solutions. Faith sometimes stirs up more questions than answers.
And when you take all of that honestly before God, it’s a beautiful, sweet, angry, tender sacrifice to him. He peers over, looks deep into your soul, holds your face in his hands, embraces your heart, wipes the tears, and sees his reflection in you.
This is faith, and it is beautiful.
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A deeper healing has already begun if we let it. The iron ore that refuses to release the dross is left unchanged: it begins and ends as a lump of worthless rock.
But the refining fire awaits, purging impurities and extracting the precious metal. And so, I leave my life—my diseased liver, lungs, questionable bones, and brain— in the hands of the Master Silversmith to do with as He sees fit.
There really is no other way.
