Living The Good Life?

Duplicity.  It's the word that won't escape me this week.  As I put my key in the lock of my back door, during that silent moment between songs on my iPhone, as I shampoo the color out of my client's hair... the word weaves it's way through my week.  I don't know why it's there.  I haven't heard it used in a sentence in years, but now the voice in my mind has started providing them for me...

Here it is, so you don't have to look it up:

du·plic·i·ty  (d-pls-t, dy-)

n. pl. du·plic·i·ties

1.a. Deliberate deceptiveness in behavior or speech.

   b. An instance of deliberate deceptiveness; double-dealing.

2. The quality or state of being twofold or double.

It's the word that describes what doesn't work in so many areas of my life lately.  Really the second definition is the one I'm dealing with in my mind mostly- "deliberate deceptiveness" is too strong for most of my thoughts...

In the beginning of the week, the voice in my mind used the word to describe my romantic relationships.  (My fallow heart was still kicking out, pulling up, the remaining weeds that had tried to stick around.) "They wanted this but also, that... they were duplicitous."  I kept thinking.  "That can't work."

Then as the thoughts evolved, they got more personal.  "You say this, but sometimes do that Collene."  Ugh!  Right to the core... but, it got me thinking.  I am sick to death of being stuck somewhere in the middle of who I want to be and who I actually am.

Soooooo, timing being what it is in this process I'm in, the second part in the set of challenges I'm working through started this week.  I should also add, that I wasn't planning to actually DO my book-work this week.  I was busy and exhausted and furthermore, some of those health challenges I skimmed over in last week's blog, sorta hit me like a brick this week...

Today, as often happens, my mind drifted to a few conversations I had with my friend Patricia a few years back... They stick with me, mostly because they were deathbed conversations.  Those conversations aren't about the weather, usually.  She was a laugher.  Before I met her she had survived brain cancer.  She actually seemed to be in the clear for a long time.  She was vibrant, spunky, gorgeous, witty, wise, intelligent, grounded, humble.

The day she told us that there was another tumor, I remember thinking: "Well good, another surgery, and life goes on. She's strong, healthy, a survivor."  It didn't actually turn out to be so simple.  The tumor was located in a place that made surgery impossible.  Oh, and it was the fastest growing kind.  Interesting, because that diagnosis, and the resulting prognosis, didn't fit with her attitude.  She was downright happy.  Excited even.  Her words?  "Oh, good!  I get to see Dr. So and So at the treatment center again.  I love him, and his staff..."

Ladies and gentlemen, we are not talking about a delusional woman.  I told you she's intelligent, grounded...

As it turns out, Patricia was accepted into a research treatment program at UCLA.  Every other week she and her husband would fly to L.A. from Anchorage for exhausting, painful, slim-hope treatments.  Her outlook?  "Well obviously, there's someone in L.A., or at an airport between here and there, that needs me to tell them about Jesus' love, grace, mercy..."

I know that if you are not one of the extremely blessed humans that got to call this woman "friend", you cannot fathom the attitude I am trying to describe.  I wouldn't believe it myself if I hadn't seen it.

Oh, there were hard days.  She had a few wigs.  (This is what she and I spent the most time laughing about.  I was her tucker/straightener/fashion consultant- like she needed it, FASHIONABLE she was!)  No woman wants to lose her hair.  That was hard.  It was hard when the tumor started pressing, causing facial disfigurement and partial paralysis.  It was hard when she had to ask me, after checking her wig, if she was drooling.  It was also hard that we, her friends, had to drive her everywhere during her husband's "slope weeks"- while he worked hundreds of miles away.  It was hard, for her, when she was no longer able to eat her meals alone and she had to rely on us to take turns feeding and medicating her.  We, of course, were completely blessed to be allowed to serve her this way.  It was hard when she no longer could master the stairs to her bedroom and she had to have a hospital bed moved into her living room.  It was hard when her family decided to call hospice...  Still, until the very last day of her life, we visited.  We laughed.  We sang her favorite songs to her.  We loved her.  Even more remarkably, she loved us. She ever encouraged, taught, smiled, thanked, praised.  Why????  Because, as she would say, "God is SOOOO faithful to me.  He loves me."

She wasn't dying from cancer.  She was LIVING with cancer.  That woman lived until her last breath.

C.S. Lewis said "God cannot give us happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing."  James Bryan Smith said "God is not being stingy and withholding joy apart from (my) obedience; there simply is no joy apart from a life with and for God."  Patricia would have wholeheartedly agreed with both.

So then, if that is how to live, and die, with such grace and peace and JOY... I want it.

Duplicity.  It can't work.  So why do I still faithlessly, untrustingly, continually try it?