(This is part four of a series. You can read part one here, part two here, part three here, and the free book that started it all here.) My first official treatment was the real dose of the experimental procedure. They rolled out the red carpet for it, too. The nurse spent hours readying the room prior to my arrival. …
The Seattle Journal 3
(This is part three of a series. You can read part one here, part two here, and the book that started it all — which is free, by the way — here.) How could I forget to tell you about the tentacular chest dongles? Before we went up to Seattle, I was told that I needed something put in me …
The Seattle Journal 2
Note: This is Part Two of probably a three-part story. You can read Part One here, and the book that started it all here. Not long before we headed up to Seattle, my wife, Sarah and her mother, Pam, organized an emergency family meeting. Our whole lives were about to turn upside down, so they figured we should get everyone …
The Seattle Journal
At the beginning of 2014 I was diagnosed with stage four Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Near the end of January I started chemo therapy, and four months later the cancer was completely gone. However, about four months after that it was back. And that’s where this story begins. (To read more about those initial months, though, be sure to check out my …
A Wonderful World
Sometimes it’s easy to forget how beautiful the world around us is. In fact, many of us have. We are often so consumed with hate one for another, or fear for the future, or stress about work and family and life. We are so overwhelmed with the tragic, grungy particulars screaming for our attention that we completely miss the gorgeous, …
Going Home
World-weary and travel-worn, we turned our dusty black sedan down the long gravel driveway. At the end ahead of us, waiting, was an old, Swiss-style house, all peaks and doors and sweeping curves and decks. Parking on the slab of concrete, we turned off the car and climbed into the dusky air. One of the two French double doors opened …
We Are Reborn
“This must be what it feels like when you begin to die.” That thought hit me one day when I was sitting alone in my room in the hospital. It wasn’t a melancholy thought: it wasn’t despairing. It was more of a stop-breathing, “whoa” moment. Because it was true. I had just finished a week-long stint of a lethal chemo …
Advent
There are two times a year when mankind as a collective group acknowledges the thinness between our world and another. When we admit there might be more than the eye can behold and the fingers can touch. When we all bask and bathe in Wonder. Those two times are Halloween and Christmas. And of these two, the first cannot hold …
Advent: In the Bleak Midwinter
The wind howls through the stark tree branches colored monochrome by chilled bark and crystalline snow. Icicles drape like vines of diamond from ledges and limbs and logs. The world is blanketed by the hush of a fresh snowfall, the stillness thick enough to taste as it presses against the skin and sets hairs on end. No babble from the …
Wondrous Depths
I am addicted to wonder. So then it is not surprising that I would be absolutely captivated by the ocean’s depths. There are two things that have always convinced me that God is just as weird as I am: the book of Revelation, and the deep ocean. These two have shown me that no matter how strange I feel or …