Two Women Give Me a Shocking Experience!

I went to my ALS Clinic to get a nerve conduction test back in December. The test was to determine if I was a candidate for a Diaphragm Pacing System which is something like a pacemaker for my lungs. The test involved putting electrodes on my ribs and shocking a nerve in my neck. The shock was noticeable but not bad. I have done worse to myself when I replaced a wall outlet but forgot to flip the circuit breaker. That should explain my decision not to be an electrician.

The doctor and the nurse who administered the test were women. My arm was in the way when they put the electrodes on my ribs, so the attractive nurse who was assisting held my arm. She was also turning dials so she put my hand on my knee. At some point during the test I realized that a woman had placed my hand on her knee and another woman was shocking me with an electric current. This was a mixed message, to say the least. I have the following thoughts:

(1) I am sorely tempted to make a broad philosophical statement about the behavior of women. I will abstain because I am the father of two women, have many female friends, and most of my nursing home caregivers are women. Any such statement could be injurious to my health. Suffice it to say I have dated women like this. Ouch.

(2) I will never put my hand on a woman's knee again. Having reached that conclusion, I think we may have an addition to high school sexual abstinence programs. Bring teenaged boys one by one into a dimly lit room and seat them next to an attractive young lady. Turn on some mellow jazz heavy on saxophone. As soon as the boy touches the young lady on the knee or anywhere else, zap him. Repeat until the boy runs screaming from the room. In no time, the rate of teenaged pregnancies will drop, all the high school sports teams will have more than enough players, and stock in the electric company will see a meteoric rise. If we elect enough Republicans this Fall, I will present this idea before Congress.

(3) There may be a wee bit of exaggeration in this article. The staff at my ALS Clinic always treats me professionally and with care. I wish I had said to the attractive nurse, "I realize you are married, but when I had my hand on your knee I could swear I felt electricity!" I hope she reads this and laughs.

In other news, please help me raise money for the Jim "Catfish" Hunter (NC) Chapter of the National ALS Association. The Catfish Chapter is having a Walk to Defeat ALS in Charlotte on April 28th. Come join me at the Walk, contribute money for the cause, or become a fundraiser yourself. To find out how to do these things, contact me at tmswift1 at gmail.com. Thank you!

(This article first appeared in the Asheville, NC Citizen-Times newspaper.)

Unconditional Love

Valentine's Day celebrates romantic love. I want to write about a love that is deeper and more powerful. I want to write of unconditional love.

Unconditional love can support and sustain all other loves. It can hold a loving couple together when romance fades and companionship is strained. It can maintain a friendship when there are hurt feelings and all affection is gone. It can cement family relationships when differences in politics, religion, and lifestyles threaten to tear it apart.

Unconditional love is a decision to be made, not an emotion to be encouraged. It is an act of will to love "no matter what." There is no falling into this kind of love. It is a choice and, because it is a choice and not a feeling, it can be commanded. We are told to "Love God," "Love your neighbor," and even "Love your enemy."

Unconditional love is not easy to give. It is most easily recognized when it is given with self-sacrifice. The supreme example of unconditional love is the crucifixion of Jesus.

Unconditional love is not easy to receive because we do not trust it. We do not trust it because we believe every gift has a price, but unconditional love is a gift with no strings attached. We have learned through hard experience that declarations of love can be used to manipulate and subdue, but unconditional love wants only what is best for us. It seems too good to be true.

Unconditional love is not easy to receive because it can lead to a feeling of unworthiness. We shrink from this wonderful love because we know we are not wonderful. We do not deserve it. In time we learn that deserving this love is not the issue and, in fact, we cannot deserve it. We can only accept it.

Unconditional love depends upon the worthiness of the giver, not the recipient. Receiving unconditional love makes the recipient worthy. The unworthy recipient is transformed by unconditional love into a worthy giver, for once it has been received it can then be given.

Unconditional love is the most powerful force on earth. When we think of power, we think of bombs and bulldozers, but unconditional love does not force its way upon us. It can be rejected. When accepted, it has the power to change us from self-centered creatures into sons and daughters of God, bright shining as the Son.

All of Christianity is a response to God's unconditional love for us because God is love. God became human so that humans might become like God. In no other way is this more evident than by our ability to love as God loves. When we are filled with God's unconditional love, and it overflows from us to others, the world will be transformed and the Kingdom will come.

(This article first appeared in The Epistle, the newsletter of St. James Episcopal Church in Hendersonville, North Carolina.)

I Have Decided to Live, or Die Trying

 (The following article first appeared in the Asheville (NC) Citizen-Times newspaper.)

When I was a hospice chaplain, one of the people I served said to me, "I don't know whether I should prepare to live or prepare to die." For the past five years that I have had ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease), I have been preparing to die. I have had a change in plans. I have decided to prepare to live. There are several reasons for this change.

First, there are exciting developments in ALS research and treatment. For the first time in many years, there will be new drugs available to fight ALS. Four drugs that have shown promise in delaying the progression of the disease are in clinical trials. Stem cell research is proceeding well at Emory University in Atlanta and gives hope for reversing the effects of ALS. I do not know when these treatments will be available, but when they are, ALS patients will have hope for longer lives and a cure.

Second, the FDA has approved a Diaphragm Pacing System which is similar to a heart pacemaker. The System stimulates the diaphragm electrically to help the person breathe. It can delay the necessity for a tracheotomy for many months. I have been tested to see if I am a candidate for the System and I await the results.

Third, I have a Swedish mother and an Alabama sweetheart who are absolutely convinced that I will overcome ALS. When I get discouraged they encourage me with their hope, enthusiasm, and unconditional love. I have thought that unconditional love is the greatest force on earth. Now I know it.

Fourth, I have become a better advocate for my health care. This advocacy is both a cause and a result of my decision to live. I have pushed for small changes like getting a comfortable toilet chair to big ones like getting tested for the Diaphragm Pacing System. I am learning to take a more active role in my treatment and the results are good.

Fifth, I have decided to expand my faith in a healing God. I have decided to take God at His word and take seriously all the verses in scripture about the power of prayer. I have started to pray for my cure from ALS with more hope. I meet regularly with members of my church who pray for my healing.

When I told a friend I had been diagnosed with ALS, he said, "I don't know anyone who is more prepared to handle this than you are." God's gift of faith and my experience as a minister and chaplain have helped me accept the eventuality of my death to ALS. There is, however, a difference between accepting my death and being resigned to it. ALS may still kill me, but not because I have given up hope. Instead, I will be full of hope and faith and the love of friends, family, and God. If I go down, I will go down fighting.

Worship Defines My Reality, Not ALS

 (The following article first appeared in The Epistle, the newsletter of St. James Episcopal Church.)

For the last five years, ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, has been a constant presence in my life. It is a fatal illness characterized by decreasing muscle strength. I have watched myself lose the ability to walk, talk, eat, and lift my arms out of my lap. I had to resign from work and move out of my home into a nursing facility. My life is punctuated by quarterly trips to an ALS Clinic in Charlotte where the progress of the disease is assessed and treated. I sleep every night with a machine that helps me breathe. I spend much of every day connected to another machine that pumps nutrients into my stomach through a feeding tube. ALS is ever present, deciding for me what I can and cannot do. Some people might say that ALS determines the reality of my life.

They would be wrong. Worship at St. James Episcopal Church determines the reality of my life.

When the bell rings at the start of worship, a profoundly different reality begins. We enter into an experience that transcends time and place as we commune with our spiritual ancestors and descendants. A foretaste of heaven is spread before us. We sing praises to our Creator and God. We hear the words of God spoken to us and we speak our words to God in prayer. We eat spiritual food in the sacrament of Jesus' body and blood. We join the crucifixion and resurrection of our Lord. We await His return with eager expectation, for we are already partakers of eternal life. We are sent forth to serve our Lord with gladness and singleness of heart. We are strengthened to live as citizens of heaven on earth.

It might be more accurate to write that God determines my reality. While true, it is in worship that I experience the majesty of God in the liturgy, vaulted ceiling, and stained glass windows. It is in worship that I experience the intimacy of God in words heard and sacrament consumed. I associate with people I might not know otherwise who turn out to be my sisters and brothers in the faith. I learn that God loves me just as I am and helps me to become better than I am. In worship I am confronted by the tremendous mystery of a loving God. All of these things shape the reality of my life.

I have bet my life on the reality of God I find most fully expressed in worship. Every Sunday I vote with my presence in worship that the reality of God will be my reality. Not ALS or even the joy I find in friends and family will become more important to me than God.

I sit in the back at St. James in my power wheelchair and watch my brothers and sisters arrive for worship and take the sacrament. We have our stories of diseases to fight, children and grandchildren to love, marriages to make and sustain, lost loved ones to grieve, work struggles to overcome, loneliness to endure, and all the other circumstances of life that try to consume our attention. Distract us they will, but consume us they will not, for we have decided that our worship of God will define and create the reality of our lives.

O Holy Night! The stars were brightly shining

We are approaching the time of year when stargazing is particularly rewarding. If you look to the southeast tonight around 9 p.m. you should be able to see the Orion constellation. Orion is easy to find because three bright stars equal distances apart and in a straight line form his belt. According to legend, Orion was a mighty hunter. With the help of a star chart, you can see that he has a sword, a shield, and a club. In his right shoulder is the huge star Betelgeuse. It is so huge that if it took the place of our sun, which is 93 million miles away, Betelgeuse would extend beyond our orbit and almost to the orbit of Saturn. This is what I like about looking at the stars. It combines the legends of ancient people with the science of today. I have looked up and seen Orion, Taurus the Bull, and the Gemini Twins and regarded them as old friends.

Outer space is not a friendly place, however. It has frigid cold and inferno hot temperatures. It is full of black holes and dark matter, quasars and binary stars, novas and nebulae, many of which are safe only if viewed from a distance. Such distance is not hard to find in outer space. It is everywhere you look. The objects in space are so far apart that the distances between them are calculated in light years. A light year is the distance that light can travel in a year at the rate of 186,000 miles per second. Betelgeuse is 643 light years away from us. This means that the light of Betelgeuse we see today started traveling in our direction in the year 1368, over 120 years before Columbus sailed west in search of the West Indies. Even so, Betelgeuse is a near neighbor to us. The center of our Milky Way galaxy is nearly 30,000 light years away and there are billions of galaxies even farther away.

When I stretch out on a blanket underneath the stars and look heavenward, I am overwhelmed by my insignificance. What possible difference could my grain-of-sand little life make in the vast expanse of interstellar space? I have a shrinking feeling from the enormity of it all.

Three thousand years ago a Hebrew looked up at night and wrote, "The heavens declare the handiwork of God." The Hebrew people believed the Creator of the universe was involved in their lives and spoke to them through their prophets and in holy writings, miracles, and dreams. Some time later, a child was born among these people who many people believed was the Creator come to earth in human form. They wrote that "all things came into being through Him." Wise men, who were astrologers, came to see him when he was an infant. They who understood the stars paid homage to the One who created them. The child grew up to tell the people of the earth that the Creator of the universe loved them.

The Creator of Betelgeuse, the constellation Orion, the Milky Way galaxy, and all the billions of other galaxies loves us still. The message of the universe is not my insignificance, but the enormity of God. The stars show us the majesty and wonder of their Creator. The Child born under them shows us His love. It is my Creator's love that gives my life significance. That is a gift brighter than any star and greater than any universe.

"We look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come."

I started writing two months ago about the teachings of our faith that give me comfort as I face the end of my life. The first is the forgiveness of my sins and the resulting restored relationship with God. The second is the resurrection.

The resurrection of Jesus after his death is our model of what our own resurrections will be like. The authors of the gospels go to great lengths to show that the resurrected Jesus had a physical presence. He ate fish, started a fire, walked down a road, and offered his wrists and side to be touched. The resurrected body has physicality. God's experiment of joining body and spirit is not abandoned in the next life. It is perfected.

 I like that a lot. I have some pictures of myself before I became ill with ALS that I look at from time to time. In one I have just finished a kayaking trip in the Bahamas. For over a week, my friends and I kayaked from island to island, camped out under the stars, and enjoyed the beauty of God's creation. I am tanned and strong and confident in the picture. In another photograph I am out for a hike on the Appalachian Trail. It was good to be healthy, to eat good food, to hug my daughters, to kiss a woman, and stretch my legs on a mountain trail. I eagerly look forward to doing those things again.

N. T. Wright, an Anglican bishop, wrote about the afterlife in appealing terms in his book, Surprised by Hope. He emphasizes the new heaven and the new earth that we read about in Scripture. The Lord's Prayer which the Church has been praying for 20 centuries will finally be fulfilled. "Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven," will be a reality. The earth will be put right and we who are willing to submit ourselves to God will enjoy a new Eden. (I assume we will have an updated wardrobe.) I like this idea, too. The earth is a beautiful place with magnificent opportunities for happiness. A corollary to this idea is that every good deed we do here and now will make a positive difference there and then. Nothing good will be lost in the new creation.

In my opinion, and I could be wrong, the streets of gold and the gates of pearl we see in the book of Revelation are a metaphor. Heaven will be so wonderful that the most precious things on earth--gold and pearls--will be used to pave the streets and for hardware on doorways. The insipid picture of heaven that includes clouds and harps and white clothing looks like a crushing bore. I look forward to a robust heaven full of great tastes, aromas, beauty, music, and adventure. (Read C.S. Lewis' book The Great Divorce for more on this.) In addition to all these good things will be the even more wonderful presence of God.

There is disagreement among Christians about how all of this will play out. Depending upon the theory they accept, there are pre- millennialists, post- millennialists, and a- millennialists. One of my professors joked, "I am a PRO- millennialist. Whatever happens, I'm for it!"

Me, too.

(This article was first published in the November issue of the St. James Episcopal Church (Hendersonville, NC) newsletter.)

If I was asked to give an after-dinner speech

I am honored to be here with you this evening. Thank you for your invitation to speak and for the delicious meal. I hope that no one will take offense that I did not eat it. For the last two years I have gotten all my food in liquid form through a feeding tube into my stomach.

I have an illness called "ALS." It is also known as Lou Gehrig's disease after the great New York Yankees' first baseman whose career was cut short by the disease. ALS destroys the nerve cells that control voluntary muscles. As the nerves die, so do the muscles they control. The person with ALS loses the ability to walk, talk, eat, and eventually, to breathe. During my work as a hospice chaplain I held people's hands and prayed with them as they faced their deaths. I can no longer speak or hold a person's hand, and now I am the one facing death. The average ALS patient dies within two to five years of diagnosis for there is no cure.

I am not here tonight to talk about how terrible ALS is. I am here to talk about the good things that have come into my life and the lives of others because we have ALS. Jeff Lester was diagnosed with the disease eighteen years ago. When he was diagnosed, people told him to prepare his funeral and to put his affairs in order. He writes, "Something happened on the way to my funeral. The day of my diagnosis marks the turning point in my life. I began to understand the true beauty in life, what is important, and it marks the moment I began truly living!" Kevin Connell is the 51-year-old father of five children. He was diagnosed with ALS a year ago. He writes, "Today I choose to focus not on what I've lost, but on all that I've gained: a closer walk with Jesus, many new friends, appreciation for the simple things, and the outpouring of love and support from family and friends."

Tom Ohlson was a member of the United States diplomatic corps when he learned he had ALS. He writes, "Probably more than anything, ALS has taught me appreciation--of others, of our wonderful world, my friends and family, and even of myself. Most of all I now recognize, cherish, and appreciate the gift of life." A self-acknowledged workaholic, Rob Tison was forced to slow down by ALS and spend more time with his family. Rob writes, "ALS may take my children’s father from them, but will leave them as stronger, more caring, more independent children who take few things for granted and make the most of every day. I try to lead by example by staying positive and continuing to do as much as I can; making the best of each day I am given."

My time with ALS has taught me to treasure the present moment rather than wait for happiness in the future. My life is surprisingly good despite my illness. That amazes me. It is evidence to me that God is at work bringing good out of evil and joy out of despair.

Every person in this room will face hardship. We can use hardship to become better people. When a loved one dies or we get bad news from a doctor, when our children get in trouble or our marriage ends in divorce, we can look for the opportunity to grow. We may be put into the fire, but God can use that fire to refine us and make us stronger people. We will know that God is with us, redeeming our hardship, preparing us to help others undergoing similar hard times, and giving us hope for the future. God is with us and at the end of our lives we will realize that this is all that really matters.

(This article was originally published in the Asheville (NC) Citizen-Times newspaper on 6 November 2011.)