Sometimes you get a premonition that things are not quite right.
For many months last year I felt physically drained and the joy of my post-retirement ministry as a pastoral visitor in a Vancouver congregation had begun to dim. Everything seemed just too much.
And so began two months of visits to doctors and specialists, and examinations by a variety of high-tech medical machines. I suspected the worst but tried to suppress it. And then the lung specialist delivered his verdict. He was kind and gentle but could not avoid delivering bad news. I had cancer of the lung. Not only that, I also had cancer in my bones. At the time I did not realize that I had just heard someone pronounce a death sentence over me. If you have one cancer there is hope. If the cancer has spread into Stage Four—abandon hope because your time on earth is extremely limited.
As the doctor spoke to my wife and me, the words of William Willimon, that great teacher of preachers, jumped into my consciousness. He had spoken about the nature of faith and said something to the effect of, “If it (faith) doesn’t ‘play’ in the cancer ward, it is not worth much.” So here was my test. I had by now been a minister of the gospel for more than 50 years. I had been with people who faced situations like my own. Could I now practise what I had preached?
An amazing calm came over me. As we left the specialist’s office I thanked him and told him that we were people of faith and that our faith in God would be the source of our strength for whatever was to come.
It was hard to share all this, of course, with our two children and our four grandchildren, the latter being old enough to understand to some degree what all this meant for Opa.
The question had come up in conversation with the lung specialist: should I avail myself of radiation and/or chemotherapy? I had seen the results of those treatments in the bodies of others and had decided, “No, thank you. Let me make final arrangements and avoid the pain, nausea and general misery of this therapeutic treatment.”
The kindly specialist thought differently and looked at me and said, “Well, you are otherwise strong and in good health. Besides, you can always stop at any time.”
And so with the encouragement of family I am now cared for at the Richmond Cancer Clinic on an outpatient basis.
The chemotherapy resulted in unpleasant side effects, and I came to realize that palliative radiation was even more of a burden after I had one treatment at the Vancouver Cancer Clinic. However, at time of writing (July), I am holding on. I was especially encouraged that after two chemo treatments the oncologist decided that I could do without the next one. This pattern repeated itself now three times so that the next treatment is a month away!
We like to think we can handle dire situations with a stiff upper lip. Well, I haven’t. There have been tears. After what I thought was a calm acceptance of my fate, tears would suddenly well up when I thought about my wife and family, my friends, the potential travails of the final episode of my life. And with the psalmist I groaned aloud. A colleague assured me this was a normal reaction since his father, also dying of cancer, wept at least five times in each half-hour telephone conversation they had together.
There are times I feel resentful. There were so many things I still had wanted to do both for the church locally as well as nationally and to enjoy whatever remaining years would be left for my beloved wife and me to indulge in leisure activities and to watch our cherished grandchildren grow up.
Over the years, a number of folk have told me as they faced my situation, “I have no regrets.” That is no doubt how they feel but Christians especially should avoid making such an arrogant statement. To have no regrets means you believe you have lived a sinless life. I cannot claim that and no Christian can do so. I have regrets aplenty. Only Christ was the sinless one. This is not meant to be a confessional but truth to tell, we cannot live on this earth without failing to live up to our high calling as disciples of Christ. As scripture so wisely points out, “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). Our joy is not that we have conquered all temptations and never failed, but that we have sinned yet stand in the cleansing showers of God’s grace and are embraced by a love that will not let us go.
I look back and thank God for all the ways God has led me—through the latter part of the Second World War when at age seven I, together with my somewhat older sisters, was sent from the city of Rotterdam to a farm in the middle of the country, an event that most surely saved my life since I had begun to suffer the consequences of malnutrition and no nutrition! And then, the trauma of emigration from the Netherlands to Canada at age 13 and wondering what would become of me in this new country. Well, it is too long a story to tell but now I can say with even more conviction than ever that God’s hand was in whatever happened to me in all the years leading up to this time and the journey soon to be accomplished. We do not walk alone. There is one beside us to guide and to bless. No, the problems, difficulties, challenges, pain and grief will not disappear during our days on earth but when we place our trust in God, truly exercising faith, we will eventually be able to say, “He does all things well.”
I have not reached this conclusion easily. It would take more than a book to detail my faith journey. I grew up in a Dutch Calvinist home in which the intellect was honoured as a Holy Spirit-inspired tool to perceive God’s Word and God’s will for our lives. One was not encouraged to engage in “enthusiasms,” to dwell on personal experiences of God in the Pentecostal manner. There was a deep conviction that God had chosen us for God’s work and that we could be assured of our salvation as we lived out our Christian vocation.
And yet faith and our faith journey are complex. I remember walking home from a meeting of the Air Cadets when I was in my early teens. We had moved to Canada only a few years back from the bustling, orderly, renewing city of Rotterdam to the rough-hewn town of Haney, B.C. Life had not been easy. I worried about the future, my family’s and my own. The night was dark and drizzly. As I rounded the corner from the main thoroughfare into the silence and utter darkness of the road on which we lived—called “Lover’s Lane” due to the immense trees that stood watch on both sides of the pavement—a strange calm descended upon me, a kind of warmth of assurance that all would be well. It was so unsuspected, so out of the ordinary, so not something “me,” that I could only conclude that this was the Lord’s doing. It marked me. I then knew that I was “His” and that God was more than an intellectual construct.
My life moved on through further studies at university and Knox College, Toronto, student mission fields, and marriage and then ordination. I rejoiced in life with Margaret and ministry in my first congregation, Goforth, Saskatoon.
After almost five years, we moved by call to Richmond Presbyterian, a congregation I had founded as a student in the late 1950s. And here I flourished in building the church. How I loved the work. How I loved preaching. But sometimes I wondered if my love of preaching and the work of the church had become idolatrous, that I spoke all the right words and did all the “right” things but that my personal relationship with Lord had faded into the background. Jesus, I recalled, had something to say about this.
And, yes, I have rebelled against the Lord when I faced unimaginable tragedies in peoples’ lives; where I stood by helpless because all I could do was to listen and pray. Who of us has not wrestled with the question both the world and faith ask: Why? Why the pain and heartache that draws so close when we survey the world’s agonies nearby and far away? Where is God in all of this? I do not reject the sincere atheist and true seeker who cannot embrace the faith.
Yet somehow the Lord has not let me go. Finally, for me, it comes down to Peter’s answer to Jesus when our Lord, after many of his followers left him, asked, “Will you also go away?” And Peter answered, “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life” (John 6:68).
In a personal note to me someone wrote: “The subtleties of our faith are always in flux … sometimes we see darkly, then briefly we see clearly … the texture of our relationship with God shifts, is intellectual this moment, is tactile at another.” I have found this to be so.
I do not know what shape the immediate and long-term future will take. What does it mean to die? What does it mean to confess, “I believe in the resurrection of the dead?” What does it mean to embrace the Christian hope of life eternal? Some folk have told me they know exactly what that future will be like based on their reading of scripture. I confess that I do not know. It is a mystery as deep and profound as is the mystery of faith and the God in whom we place our trust. All I know is that God is at the centre of that mystery and so here, too, I confess that I believe “He does all things well.”
In an address to the General Assembly I quoted a part of the first question and answer of the Heidelberg Catechism. “What is your only comfort (strength) in life and in death?” The answer: “My only comfort in life and in death is that I belong, body and soul, to my faithful saviour Jesus Christ.” We belong to God. We belong to each other. We belong to “all the saints who from their labours rest” (Book of Praise #611). And so in faith I will enter into the mystery of that new and boundless life that God has prepared for all God’s people and of which, by God’s grace, we may receive a foretaste even now—just as I did on that dark and dreary night when I experienced the beauty of the Lord and knew a peace that passes understanding.
As I said, I have many regrets. Yet one thing I do not regret: having placed my faith in God and Jesus Christ whom God has sent, the one in whom we find peace, hope, joy and love.
When Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor and leader of the Confessing Church in Germany during the Nazi period, was led away to be executed he is reported to have said, “This is the end. For me the beginning of Life.”
May such be also our conviction when our time comes to enter into the full glory of the love of God.
Editor’s Note: Rev. Dr. Tony Plomp passed away on Sept. 24, 2016. His devotion in life, and his grace and faithfulness in the face of death, served as examples to us all.
