On My Unintended Absence, Being Much Better than Death

So Alabama’s losing the Sugar Bowl to Oklahoma in a lackadaisical effort last Friday was pretty awful, but I felt reasonably well physically.

Before the trip, I’d had my pee tested, once again, and I had been found clear of any remaining infection — meaning that my three rounds of antibiotics following back surgery two months earlier was finally over.

I was still recovering from the stiffness and soreness of my back surgery, and I was looking forward to finally getting back into decent shape after a brief vacation in New Orleans.

But by mid-Saturday morning after we’d returned from the game (11 days ago, back in Tuscaloosa), the feelings of infection had become overwhelming. A trip to a doc-in-a-box (operated by a premier emergency room physician) resulted in two antibiotic shots, and yet I continued to grow weaker and less responsive.

My wife had the good sense to take me to the emergency room early afternoon, where I was I diagnosed with sepsis — while no less than four medical professionals desperately tried to start an IV in me … and I just kind of drifted away wondering what the big deal was.

“Sepsis” is what we used to call blood poisoning. The primary signs are evidence of widespread infection, sudden loss of  blood pressure, and death. Death is usually the giveaway-symptom. The emergency room team had to get my pressure up to “human” just so the antibiotics could flow through the bloodstream to where they were needed.

Evidently, I had had an infection still hidden in a kidney, which got into the bloodstream and was fast creating pneumonia in my lungs. An hour or two later, and they likely would not have been able to save me.

Surgical Flamethrower (not to scale)

So I’ve been out of touch the last several days, I’m about 600 emails behind, and I’ve given no thought to future blog posts. But it sure beats death.

It’s actually a whole LOT better than death, but it did involve yet another uteroscopy, in which a surgeon cleans up kidney stones using a water hose, vacuum cleaner, rake, and flamethrower
— and the only available orifice through which one may enter the kidneys without making a brand new hole.

(I have avoided using certain images known to prompt fainting among readers.)

I’ve not been in any shape to post anything here or on Facebook. I’m not sure if that’s apt to change quickly. Despite being 10 or days removed from the sepsis attack, and finally home from the hospital, I find myself exhausted most of the day. I’m watching far more TV than is good for me, and writing — which was once second nature — has become laborious.

I figure I won’t start feeling energetic enough to be worth anything to anybody until I finish the oral antibiotics I’m on. (Antibiotic from “anti” meaning against and “bios” meaning life — hence, “antibiotic”: a substance that makes you feel mostly dead (which is much better than totally dead)).

I have little doubt that I will return to active blogging in a week or two or three. Or something like that.

In fact, it’s both encouraging and not encouraging at all to learn how very well things runs without you. Expendability is tough on the ego but still quite a relief when you are forced to step aside for a few weeks.

I keep thinking that this is the time to write the blog post on taking stock, on being kinder to your children and pets, to revisualizing the world in light of my recent mostly deadness.

But I did not undergo some sort of epiphany (it literally took me three days to think of this word … writing is so much harder …). I laid in the hospital bed knowing that my wife, children, and grandchildren are deeply loved by God and would be cared for by him, even if I were not to be around to take credit for God’s provision. I didn’t feel like I’d left a whole lot of stuff undone. I wasn’t anxious to die, but it’s not that the thought of death was all that unattractive. It’s just that I have a few more miles of tread left while I can still be of service to the Kingdom. The tread is wearing a bit thin, but I’m still roadworthy — or will be again soon enough.

I’m not big on legacy building or building monuments to oneself. That’s not the path to immortality. On the other hand, I think everyone would like to know that his days in the mortal plane were not without significance. Our significance is not measured by how well we’re remembered, but by our influence on others who remain behind.

If we live well, not only will God give us immortality to live with the angels, but we’ll arrive at heaven’s front stoop greeted by the hundreds, even thousands, whose lives were touched by us in ways that matter for all eternity. Maybe we’ll be met by a few thousand spiritual descendants converted by a missionary we gave $5.00 to as a 6th grader as part of a Bible class project. Maybe we’ll be met by the great great grandchildren of the babies we cared for in the nursery, so their parents could be in Bible class. Only known to God might be the fact that this hour or two of childcare is the only thing that kept them faithful during dark times.

Who knows? A blog posted, a Bible class taught, or just a life well lived may well be the tipping point in the lives of others that touch yours in ways you barely notice but that God sanctifies into life-changing, even world-changing, events. Make no mistake: you influence far more than than you think.

And so we foster good habits, good practices, right relationships so that our lives prepare treasures in heaven to greet us at the end of it all.

(Mat 6:19-21 ESV)  19 “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal,  20 but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal.  21 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

It’s almost a self-fulfilling prophecy. When you value eternal things rather than the temporal, then you busy yourself with things of eternal significance — and this builds up treasure in heaven.

Since your treasure is in heaven, and not on earth, death becomes relativized, that is, hardly the absolute barrier between here and there, now and then, that is so terrifying to so many. That fear comes from having too much treasure here. I’m actually looking forward to it — whenever God decrees that my time in his service is done.

And it also happens that the treasures in heaven may well be the same treasures that anchor us here. Family, friends, the pleasures of this life. These are, of course, good things given us by God — and dying seems a separation from these delights. But if our family and friends have been promised immortality by God, we’ll enjoy them all the more with the angels. Death is no separation but a movement toward a greater unity with those we love.

(Joh 17:22-24 ESV) 22 The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one,  23 I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me.  24 Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world.

My daughter-in-law is pregnant with my first granddaughter. It’s pretty exciting. If I died tomorrow, I won’t miss her. Rather, I’ll meet her at the entrance to eternity, along with all my great-grandchildren, where she’ll have some great stories to share with me, to catch me up on all that we missed.

And it will be better than life itself.

You see, we live this life mostly dead. We do. If real life is eternal life, then a mostly alive person would think and dream and plan about eternal things — the things that betoken real life, but we all spend nearly all our time and energy focused on things destined to die. We value the dead and the nearly dead. And so we live mostly dead lives.

Fortunately, God can redeem us from even that. But what a shame to live this special gift of life as though dead were alive and alive were dead.