How ya doin’?

Let me introduce myself.  I’m Earle; my wife’s name is Sierra.

I’m chronically ill.  I’m obese, I have high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and diabetes.  Sierra is the healthy one in our family.  She almost never goes to the doctor, is rarely sick, and eats a healthy, balanced diet, while I’m the original junk food junkie.

On October 2, 2013, Sierra had a massive stroke.  Her blood pressure was off the scale (over 300), and she burst blood vessels in her brain.  She was airlifted to Harborview Medical Center, where she underwent emergency surgery to remove part of her skull and cauterize bleeding blood vessels.  Testing revealed evidence that she had long standing problems with high blood pressure.  As one surgeon said, getting your blood pressure tested once a year is not diagnostic, it doesn't tell you anything except that at that particular moment you do or don't have high blood pressure.

There are several ways to find out if you have high blood pressure.  One is to go see doctor.  That is what Sierra did, once every couple of years, and her test results were always normal or “pre-hypertension”, 120’s to 130’s.  A better way is to use the free testing machine that is available in many stores.  Every time you walk past one, stop and sit down for a few minutes and test your pressure.  If your top number is over 135 more than once, you need to check with a doctor, sooner rather than later.  They may not do anything until it is over 140, but you need to get busy controlling it.  Another way is to spend $15-$20 and get an inexpensive automatic wrist cuff blood pressure monitor.  They are not terribly accurate, but if you take it with you when you see your doctor or when you use a tester at the store you can compare readings, and if you test yourself daily at the same time, you should be able to keep an eye on your blood pressure.

Sierra came out of the ICU 10 days later paralyzed on the left side, but able to speak and see and hear and comprehend what was happening.  Good thing too.

You see, Sierra and I had only been married a bit over 2 years.  Because of my health issues, when we were married I made sure that Sierra was listed as my next of kin, as the beneficiary on my policies, etc.  But we hadn’t worried too much about her paperwork, after all, she is healthy!  And Sierra had a legal name change when we got married (her name was not ‘Sierra’), and much of her paperwork still carried her birth name on it.

Sierra recovered enough to be able to give me a Durable Power of Attorney, to file paperwork to make me her beneficiary on her policies.  We started getting her name changed on all of her paperwork, and adding my name onto her accounts.

After a couple of months, Sierra passed away on December 19, 2013.  As I write this, I have had a month of working on finishing up all the paperwork.  I’m still finding things that need to be taken care of, but I have all the paperwork that I need to complete it.

So why am I writing this?  Like many people, we had not adequately planned for the future.  Almost daily we passed a sign on our street advertising “Aging Options”.  We joked with each other about what kind of options there are, after all, you grow old and you die, right?  And we were planning on going together, one wasn’t supposed to leave without the other.  We had light conversations about what to do if something happened, but we never sat down and looked at “what if” scenarios.  Sierra was barely 51, I’m a couple years older, we are still young.  We don’t need to worry about this stuff right now, plenty of time later.  And we both knew better; we both had attended, separately and together, seminars put on by our employers dealing with this subject.  We had even talked to her parents about putting together a plan (they did).  But we never did anything ourselves!  We talked about doing something (“next Saturday we should sit down and talk…”) but something else always came up that was more important at the time.

We were, however, prepared for one thing.  We knew where she was going when she died; we knew that she was going to heaven, to be with her Master and Savior.  You see, Sierra had repented of her sins and asked Jesus to be her Master.  The Bible says that “All have sinned and fallen short”.  All of us have broken at least one of the 10 Commandments.  All of us have at some point in our lives considered some “thing” to be more important than God.  All of us have worshipped something other than God, whether it was money or things or other people.  Most of us have not shown honor to our parents at least once.  Most of us have not committed murder, but Jesus said that the intent of the law included anger, and most of us have been guilty of that.  Many of us have not committed adultery, but Jesus said that the intent of the law covered lust, and there are few who can say that they have never lusted after another.  Do I need to continue?  Who has not coveted what your neighbor has?  Or stolen a pencil?

Sierra had repented of her sin.  This is more than just saying “I’m sorry” and paying penance.  There is no penance great enough to pay for any sin other than a life.  Yes, God demands that you pay for your sin with your life.  Death is the penalty for sin.  Repentance is admission of your sin to God, and a determination on your part that you will not commit that sin again.  And when you repent, you can accept the gift that Jesus gave of his life.  Jesus had no sin, the only person to have ever lived in complete obedience to the commandments.  And he died to pay the penalty for our sin, but ONLY if you accept the gift.  And the gift is a conditional gift.  The Bible says that we are slaves to sin, but when we repent, we become slaves to Jesus.  And Jesus does not accept grudging slaves, he only accepts willing slaves, slaves that obey him out of love.

Sierra didn't have a religion.  She had a relationship with Jesus.  She loved Jesus, and wanted to please him more than anything else.  She wanted to please Jesus more than she wanted to please me, more than she wanted to please herself, more than life.  She was looking forward to being with Jesus.  Some people have the idea that heaven will be boring.  Sierra knew that heaven would be exciting, because she would get to be with the one person who she loved more than anything else.  She was looking forward to going home.

Sierra loved “Action Points”; here they are:

1.  Check your blood pressure.  And I would add, check your cholesterol and hbA1c.  Many drugstores now offer the blood test for as little as $35 each.  The Cholesterol and hbA1c tests give you a summary of the condition of your blood, for most people once a year is sufficient unless those tests show a problem.  Personally, because of my health, I get mine tested every 3 months or so.

2.  Sit down with your spouse or significant other or son or daughter or whoever will need to make decisions should you become incapacitated.  Make sure that they are OK with those decisions.  Write a document that details what you want done under certain circumstances.  I was totally blind-sided when I discovered that I needed to make decisions for Sierra when she was in a coma, and I just “winged” it.  Not a good place to put someone.  Sit down with them, talk about it, write it out.  Make sure that they understand and are OK with your instructions.  Perhaps you do not want extraordinary measures done to keep you alive.  Will they be OK with telling the doctor to “pull the plug”?  If you are incapacitated then you need to be confident that the person you designate will follow your instructions.

3. Have you written and notarized a Durable Power of Attorney?  A “fill in the blank” form is available online, just search for the one for your state.  Sierra’s employer required a specific one for their files, we did that and also the state generic one.  And it must be notarized.  We had to have a notary come to Sierra because she could not travel, that cost $60.  But you can get a form notarized for $10 if you go to your bank, or to a mailbox store, sometimes free from your employer.  They usually charge once per document, so if you make 3 identical copies of the Durable Power of Attorney at one time they will charge you one fee.

4.  Review your insurance policies.  Have you updated your beneficiaries?

5.  Review your emergency contacts.  Sierra’s employer called her brother, who then called me when she had her stroke, because I wasn't the emergency contact.

6.  Get your life right with God.  A good place to start is by reading the Gospel of Mark and the book of Romans.  You can read these online at www.biblegateway.com or at https://net.bible.org.  Find a believer, visit a church.  Talk to me.

The Hammer, the File, and the Furnace: 3 viewpoints

Isa 48:10  "Behold, I have refined you, but not as silver; I have tested you in the furnace of affliction.”

Samuel Rutherford in 1637 wrote in various of his “Letters”:

  Oh, what owe I to the file, to the hammer, to the furnace of my Lord Jesus! who hath now let me see how good the wheat of Christ is, that goeth through His mill, and His oven, to be made bread for His own table. Grace tried is better than grace, and it is more than grace; it is glory in its infancy. I now see that godliness is more than the outside, and this world's passments and their buskings. Who knoweth the truth of grace without a trial? Oh, how little getteth Christ of us, but that which He winneth (to speak so) with much toil and pains! And how soon would faith freeze without a cross! How many dumb crosses have been laid upon my back, that had never a tongue to speak the sweetness of Christ, as this hath! When Christ blesseth His own crosses with a tongue, they breathe out Christ's love, wisdom, kindness, and care of us. Why should I start at the plough of my Lord, that maketh deep furrows on my soul? I know that He is no idle Husbandman, He purposeth a crop. O that this white, withered lea-ground were made fertile to bear a crop for Him, by whom it is so painfully dressed; and that this fallow-ground were broken up!

Think therefore of the Lord, as of one who cometh to woo you in marriage, when ye are in the furnace. He seeketh His answer of you in affliction, to see if ye will say, Even so I take Him… Then let our Lord's sweet hand square us and hammer us, and strike off the knots of pride, self-love, and world-worship, and infidelity, that He may make us stones and pillars in His Father's house (Rev. 3:12).

…ye take it as the mark of a lawfully begotten child, and not of a bastard, to be under your Father's rod. Till ye be in heaven, it will be but foul weather; one shower up and another down. The lintel-stone and pillars of the New Jerusalem suffer more knocks of God's hammer and tool than the common side-wall stones…

...Years and months will take out, now one little stone, then another, of this house of clay; and at length time shall win out the breadth of a fair door, and send out the imprisoned soul to the free air in heaven. And time shall file off, by little and little, our iron bolts which are now on legs and arms, and outdate and wear our troubles threadbare and holey, and then wear them to nothing…

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A.W. Tozer, in "The Root of the Righteous”, Chapter 38, writes

 “It was the enraptured Rutherford who could shout in the midst of serious and painful trials, 'Praise God for the hammer, the file and the furnace.'

“The hammer is a useful tool, but the nail, if it had feeling and intelligence, could present another side of the story. For the nail knows the hammer only as an opponent, a brutal, merciless enemy who lives to pound it into submission, to beat it down out of sight and clinch it into place. That is the nail's view of the hammer, and it is accurate except for one thing: The nail forgets that both it and the hammer are servants of the same workman. Let the nail but remember that the hammer is held by the workman and all resentment toward it will disappear. The carpenter decides whose head shall be beaten next and what hammer shall be used in the beating. That is his sovereign right. When the nail has surrendered to the will of the workman and has gotten a little glimpse of his benign plans for its future it will yield to the hammer without complaint.

“The file is more painful still, for its business is to bite into the soft metal, scraping and eating away the edges till it has shaped the metal to its will. Yet the file has, in truth, no real will in the matter, but serves another master as the metal also does. It is the master and not the file that decides how much shall be eaten away, what shape the metal shall take, and how long the painful filing shall continue. Let the metal accept the will of the master and it will not try to dictate when or how it shall be filed.

“As for the furnace, it is the worst of all. Ruthless and savage, it leaps at every combustible thing that enters it and never relaxes its fury till it has reduced it all to shapeless ashes. All that refuses to burn is melted to a mass of helpless matter, without will or purpose of its own. When everything is melted that will melt and all is burned that will burn, then and not till then the furnace calms down and rests from its destructive fury.

“With all this known to him, how could Rutherford find it in his heart to praise God for the hammer, the file and the furnace? The answer is simply that he loved the Master of the hammer, he adored the Workman who wielded the file, he worshiped the Lord who heated the furnace for the everlasting blessing of His children. He had felt the hammer till its rough beatings no longer hurt; he had endured the file till he had come actually to enjoy its bitings; he had walked with God in the furnace so long that it had become as his natural habitat. That does not overstate the facts. His letters reveal as much.

“Such doctrine as this does not find much sympathy among Christians in these soft and carnal days. We tend to think of Christianity as a painless system by which we can escape the penalty of past sins and attain to heaven at last. The flaming desire to be rid of every unholy thing and to put on the likeness of Christ at any cost is not often found among us. We expect to enter the everlasting kingdom of our Father and to sit down around the table with sages, saints and martyrs; and through the grace of God, maybe we shall; yes, maybe we shall. But for the most of us it could prove at first an embarrassing experience. Ours might be the silence of the untried soldier in the presence of the battle-hardened heroes who have fought the fight and won the victory and who have scars to prove that they were present when the battle was joined.

“The devil, things and people being what they are, it is necessary for God to use the hammer, the file and the furnace in His holy work of preparing a saint for true sainthood. It is doubtful whether God can bless a man greatly until He has hurt him deeply.

“Without doubt we of this generation have become too soft to scale great spiritual heights. Salvation has come to mean deliverance from unpleasant things. Our hymns and sermons create for us a religion of consolation and pleasantness. We overlook the place of the thorns, the cross and the blood. We ignore the function of the hammer and the file.

“Strange as it may sound, it is yet true that much of the suffering we are called upon to endure on the highway of holiness is an inward suffering for which scarcely an external cause can be found. For our journey is an inward journey, and our real foes are invisible to the eyes of men. Attacks of darkness, of despondency, of acute self-depreciation may be endured without any change in our outward circumstances. Only the enemy and God and the hard-pressed Christian know what has taken place. The inward suffering has been great and a mighty work of purification has been accomplished, but the heart knoweth its own sorrow and no one else can share it. God has cleansed His child in the only way He can, circumstance being what they are. Thank God for the furnace.”

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When first I read of Rutherford's "Oh, what owe I to the file, to the hammer, to the furnace of my Lord Jesus!" My first thought turned to my experience in forging steel.  Heating it to the right temperature to make it pliable, but careful not to burn it.  Our Master knows (none better!) the proper temperature to take the temper, the pride out of us.  He knows just how hard to strike the hot metal with His hammer on His anvil, and forge us into a useful tool.  How to quench us and then file us and sharpen us for the day of battle, then heat us again in His furnace to put His own temper into us, resulting in a sword that fits His hand and His purpose.

But we have the volition to exclude ourselves from that process.  We can jump out of the furnace.  In Daniel chapter 3, Nebuchadnezzar gave Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-nego the chance to escape the furnace in verse 15, and in verse 16 they refused the opportunity.  Were they men of God when they refused to bow to the image?  Of course.  Can you imagine how much stronger their faith in God was when they came through and out of the furnace?

I think that those who choose to walk in the Way of the Master will each find their own version of the file, the hammer, and the furnace.  There is no doubt that those who choose to walk in this way will meet these tools, and they will be tailored by the hand of the Master who loves us.