Pastor's Column - Sept. 23, 2012

PASTOR’S COLUMN. Some time ago I read an article, “Futile Cancer Therapy Is on the Rise.”


This story said, “Doctors are reporting a disturbing rise in the number of cancer patients getting chemo and other aggressive but futile treatment in the last days of their lives… ‘Patients don’t like to give up,’ and neither do physicians, said Dr. Roy Herbst, a cancer specialist at the University of Texas’ M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

“Overly aggressive treatment gives false hope and puts people through grueling and costly ordeals when there is no chance of a cure, cancer specialists said. ‘There is a time to stop,’ said Dr. Craig Earle of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School. ‘It’s sometimes easier to just keep giving chemotherapy than to have a frank discussion about hospice and palliative care.’”

I imagine that the content of this article is something you have heard before. In case it isn’t, I bring it to your attention. I have known several persons who have refused aggressive cancer treatment toward the end of their lives. They had come to the point where they knew they were dying, and they didn’t want to spend their remaining months or weeks or days being sicker as a result of a treatment that was only going to prolong their life a short time. They wanted to enjoy their remaining days on earth and prepare themselves for death.

Furthermore, there are new medicines that do not put patients through the ordeal that traditional chemotherapy does. One needs to know all the alternatives. Still, in the long run prayer and faith are called for. Is God telling us to keep fighting? Or is God telling us that “the good fight” is over? That it’s time to entrust ourselves to Jesus Christ, who will do for us what we cannot - transition us into the next life?

“But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about those who have died, so that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have died.”

- 1 Thessalonians 4: 13, 14 -DJ

Pastor's Column - Sept. 16, 2012

Pastor’s Column. When we pray for another person, it is not a matter of changing God’s mind about the person or exercising some magical spell over the person’s life. Before we even begin to pray, God’s concern for this person has been active. All of us, including those we pray for, live within the force field of God’s love. God is not only the power source for people with free will, but God’s love is our environment, the grid in which we live. The inner power of a person’s life can always be turned back on, for whether one chooses to love God, God loves her. Whether a person makes good choices, God is at work for this person’s wellbeing. And whether or not one chooses to plug in to God, our power source, God is standing by to restore inner strength.


When we pray for another person, what we’re doing is adding our concern to the love that God already has for the individual. Our prayers don’t have to turn the tide, as though it’s up to us entirely. We aren’t the person’s power source. God is. Our prayers, which sometimes lead to our cooperating with God via word and deed, are but added to the force field of God’s concern. And they only have to tip the balance of courage or hope or determination or whatever of God’s grace is needed by the person to result in his/her wellbeing. Tip the balance so that this person will be moved to hang in there, or endure the cure, or take responsibility for her life, or pick himself up and try again, or turn his life around. - DJ

Pastor's Column - Sept. 9, 2012

PASTOR’S COLUMN. Cheri and I have fled a few hurricanes in our time and have known a number of people who have been “inconvenienced” or worse by hurricanes. Reports are that even though it’s been a week or more since Hurricane Isaac passed through, things in Louisiana and elsewhere haven’t returned to normal. I hope these folks haven’t lost their sense of humor. I was reminded of an article I once read titled, “What we learned during our last hurricane.”


- Coffee and frozen pizzas can be made on a barbecue grill.

- No matter how many times you flick the switch, lights don’t work without electricity.

- My car gets 23.21675 miles/gallon. Ask the people who helped me push it the rest of the way.

- Kids can actually survive four days or longer without a videogame.

- Women can actually survive without doing their hair. You just wish you didn’t have to be there to hear about it.

- He who has the biggest generator wins.

- Crickets can increase their volume to overcome the sound of 14 generators.

- People will get into a line that has formed without having any idea what the line is for.

- My four-year-old daughter says don’t ever hold a cat during a hurricane. -DJ

Pastor's Column - Sept. 2, 2012

PASTOR’S COLUMN. Nancy Gibbs reminds us that “There was a certain bracing beauty about the original seven deadly sins – pride, gluttony, sloth, lust, greed, envy, and anger – which among them could account for virtually all the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind. Anger gives rise to violence; gluttony to waste; pride to every manner of tragedy and hurt. They were judged sufficient for the past 15 centuries, ever since they were cataloged by Pope Gregory the Great…

“But not anymore. ‘We are losing the notion of sin,’ Pope Benedict XVI warns. The culture celebrates what it once sanctioned: parents encourage pride as essential to self-esteem; a group of self-rising French chefs has petitioned the Vatican that being a gourmand is no sin. Envy is the engine of tabloid culture. Lust is an advertising strategy; anger, the righteous province of the aggrieved…” Most Presbyterians agree that in modern day America almost anything goes.

Mohandas Gandhi used to say that he would consider converting to Christianity if he ever met a Christian. What he meant was that he was most interested in the Jesus he read about in the New Testament, but he’d never met a follower who actually lived by Jesus’ teachings. He had a great version of the seven deadly sins, one expanded to better deal with the situation today:

- Wealth without work - Politics without principle

- Pleasure without conscience - Commerce without morality

- Science without humanity - Worship without sacrifice

- Knowledge without character



-DJ