Understanding

As it is the 2nd week of the cycle, the side-effects I experienced were very severe, just like during the previous three cycles.  The fatigue, nausea and diarrhea lasted until Saturday.  However, I got some relief from the restlessness by taking only 75% of the cortisone, which, although it reduced my symptoms, placed me at a higher risk for retaining water in my lungs and hearts.

29th week: Hotel Rwanda

After previous sharings about our permanent character, destiny and morality, it is natural to talk about the value system next. However, I think the point will be better made with a real example.  Hence, I will share the story of Paul Rusesabagina this week and use it to discuss the value system next time.

In Rwanda, between April 6th and July 4th of 1994, the Hutu-led Interahamwe slaughtered the Tutsi population. However, no intervention came from either the United Nations or its more powerful Western members (including the US) until after over 900,000 Rwandans had been murdered.  900,000 lives got snuffed out over 100 days.  That is 9,000 lives a day and more than 6 lives a minute (By this count, the Rwandan genocide was the most brutal one in recent history.). Each and every one of those lost lives held a unique story.  They were people who laughed, cried, ate, dreamed, and felt, just like you and me.  Every one was a mother’s child.

In the midst of the genocide, Paul Rusesabagina sheltered up to 1,268 refugees for 76 days in a hotel which he managed in the Rwandan capital.  He found food and water for them. When the militia and army came with orders to kill his guests, he took them into his office, treated them like friends, offered them drinks and then persuaded them to neglect their task that day.  And when they came back, he poured more drinks and told them they should leave in peace once again.  

Rusesabagina had a few advantages: He is a Hutu.  He managed a luxury hotel, which upheld a façade of being protected by police (4 unarmed UN soldiers and 5 local policemen.)  More importantly, as the manager, he had stored up a large bank of favors with influential and powerful people, including some of the architects of the genocide.  He had a personal directory of the elite within the circles of government and commerce in Rwanda.  He cashed all the banked favors in and borrowed heavily in order to save the lives.  

Above all, “I am simply a man who decided to hold onto his family and his beliefs.”  With his courage and integrity, when the world closed its eyes, closed its ears and turned its back, he pleaded, intimated, coaxed, cajoled and negotiated with murderers.  He acted friendly with despicable people.  He flattered and bribed them shamelessly.  He said whatever he thought would keep those people in his hotel from being killed. He had one simple goal: to save the lives that ought to be saved.  To accomplish that goal, he kept evil persons in his circle to find and play their soft spots.  By staying with monsters, he found cracks in their armors to exploit.  Had he shut them out, they would have killed him without a second thought.

His bravery and selflessness can be seen in an extraordinary example.  On May 3rd, the UN struck a deal to evacuate dozens of refugees who secured invitations from people abroad.  As well connected as he was, Rusesabagina easily secured an invitation for his whole family.  There is nothing more seductive than getting away from all the fears, the death, the blood, the stench, the killers, the machetes, the insanity, the chaos and into a safe place with clean sheets, air-conditioning, a warm bath and no worries.  However, the night before, he told his family that he was going to stay behind with the refugees because “I am the only person here who can negotiate with those killers outside” and “If people inside this hotel are killed, I will never be able to sleep again. I will be a prisoner of my own conscience”.

Finally, on June 18th, after an aborted mass slaughter at the hotel, all the remaining refugees were evacuated.  The hotel was one of the few places in Rwanda where nobody was killed during the genocide.

During the genocide, the US chose to look the other way like the rest of the world. The State Department’s official language was, ”Acts of genocide may have occurred.” When the spokeswoman of the US State Department, Christian Shelley, was asked how many acts of genocide it takes to equal a genocide, the answer was a big diplomatic hand-waving. The US avoided the use of the word genocide so that it wouldn’t be compelled to act morally and legally under a UN 1948 treaty threatening criminal penalties for the leaders of any regimen found to have conducted any genocide (which the US Senate didn’t ratify until 1986).  Of course, there is no natural resource in Rwanda that anybody cares about.  It was only human suffering. For whatever it was worth, Rusesabagina did receive the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom on November 9, 2005. (A person saved 1300 lives and a country that saved none awarded the person a medal.)

May this find you and your loved ones in good spirit and health.

Dear All,

The CT scan showed that the chemo has kept the tumors from growing. I am thankful for the news, despite what I may have hoped about the tumors completely melting away. At the outset, I was told that for the type of cancer I have, a mere 30% responded to any chemo at all, and only a fraction of that 30% responded to the first-line chemo (the gentlest one). Additionally, the label ‘response to chemo’ includes something as insignificant as delaying the disease progression by say, a month. Therefore, stopping the growth with the first line chemo means that I am one of the lucky ones among the unlucky. My prayer is that this first line chemo will continue to work for a long time.

On Tuesday’s follow-up, the surgeon removed the “plug” formed by my body inside my open wound and had a nurse show us how to fill the wound with packing stripe in order to facilitate draining and stimulate healing. Due to the removal of the “plug”, the amount of drainage has gone back to the previous level, which is inconvenient at times. Sometimes, the gauze gets so saturated that it wets the clothing next to it.

True north for morality?

Moral relativists hold that there is no objective and universal standard of morality. In other words, there is no absolute right and wrong in one’s moral opinion, and it is only a matter of individual or societal opinion/preference. Some relativists even believe that judging the morals or acts of another person or group has no meaning due to the lack of such a standard.

If morality is only a matter of opinion and preference, then what is the point of preferring a peace loving morality to a terrorist morality or a Christian morality to a Nazi morality? We might just as well build a society where murderers are rewarded with a license to kill more innocent people, pedophiles are given a prize for every child they rape, thieves are invited to break into houses, people are rewarded for cheating, and raises are given to the laggers. While morality manifests itself with great diversity in different cultures, there are universal norms such as integrity, trustworthiness, kindness, honesty, fairness, patience, nurturance, etc. If one morality could be better or truer than the other, then there must be the True Morality for them to be true about, i.e., there must be an absolute standard for morality.

Christians believe that God is righteousness and God is holiness, meaning that God is the true standard for morality. Christians also believe that we were created in His likeness in both righteousness and holiness, and therefore, we possess an innate sense of right-and-wrong after His righteousness and an innate sense of honor after His holiness. (Genesis 1:26 Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, Ephesians 4:24 And that ye put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness.) In other words, God created us with a built-in moral compass.

One does not need to look far for evidence of the existence of such a compass. Generally speaking, the idea of decent behavior is obvious to most of us, although none of us lives up to it in perfection. When we consider doing something conflicting with that idea, we are nagged by our conscience telling us what we ought to do. It is a real thing that none of us have made, yet all of us find hard to ignore.

In addition to the aforementioned subjective evidence, recent neuroscience research has found objective evidences that people all over the world process moral questions in the same way, suggesting that part of moral thinking is intrinsic to the human brain, rather than a product of culture. The research results - many of them published just in recent months - are showing that many aspects of morality appear to be hard-wired in the brain [1,2]. (Note that these evidences are about the existence of the innate sense of right-and-wrong as stated in the Bible, not about who puts it there, which is still being debated by both theists and atheists.)

Just like a real compass needs to be calibrated so that it will point to the true north, our moral compass also needs to be calibrated with the true moral standard, i.e., God himself, so that we can tell right from wrong without error. Otherwise, our journey of life will end up in unintended places or may even run aground.

May this find you and your loved ones in good spirit and health.

1. Scientists Draw Link Between Morality And Brain’s Wiring, The Wall Street Journal, May 11, 2007.
2. Roots of Morality May Ultimately Rest in Biology, Albany Times Union, Albany, NY, June 3, 2007.

In this third week of the third cycle, my blood counts have gone down like before, while I have regained my appetite and energy. The wound drainage has been at a reduced level since the week before. I had a CT scan Tuesday and what happens next will depend on the results. If the CT shows that the chemo cocktail is effective, I will continue with the fourth cycle. Otherwise, a different, more brutal chemo cocktail will have to be devised. Either way, I will know tomorrow morning. Naturally, I am somewhat anxious because so much is riding on it. I will also go back to NYC on Tuesday for the 3-month follow up with the surgeon, because this kind of cancer is known to recur in the original site even if the original tumor was removed with negative margins.

Opportunities offered by suffering:

Prior to this illness, one trick that I had always used in dealing with a formidable challenge or an unpleasant circumstance is to keep on reminding myself that everything will pass in due time and will be no big deal when I look back afterward. Well, the trick does not work this time. I could not possibly know how long this illness will last or whether and how it would end. I can no longer aim at my old goals in life because I cannot see the end of my illness, and because this illness is so monopolizing and dominant. Planning and living for the future seems difficult when my future might not even go beyond the expiration date of my vitamin pills. In other words, this illness has broken my dream. My previous personal mission statement and dream were just another house of cards, to collapse in the first blow of fate.

So the dream was broken and the hope was dashed. The real opportunities of life appear to have passed. Have they?

The truth is that this senseless illness has presented some real opportunities of life; make no mistake about it. I have wished that this is just a nightmare, and I will wake up from it tomorrow. Regardless, I see two opportunities.

A difficult situation such as this one affords opportunities for us to either uphold or to give up our beliefs and values. C. S. Lewis once said: “You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.” It is easy to say that we trust God until we have to hang by that trust over death and fear. We would then find out how much we really trusted God. In suffering, we are offered an opportunity to determine if we would exercise our freedom to practice our beliefs and values or if we would just get molded into a bitter victim of circumstances. Regardless if we believe there is any meaning in suffering itself, the way in which we deal with our sufferings (take up our cross) gives us an opportunity to add a deeper meaning to our life. (While I disagree with the belief system of the person who said the following, I do approve his statement, “He who has a WHY to live for can bear with almost any HOW.”). Our imaginary bubble of security can burst at any moment and everything earthly such as our life, health, wealth, loved ones, etc. can be taken from us in an instance, all except for this one thing: our freedom to choose our attitude and response toward a given set of circumstances, and to choose whether or not to submit to those powers which threaten to rob our very self, our freedom, our value and our character. (Rom 12:2 Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.)

Additionally, suffering presents an excellent opportunity for personal growth. First, suffering tears open our soul and spirit to expose their depth and true condition, in order to show us our learning areas. Second, by forcing us to deal with difficult circumstances that we cannot change, suffering challenges us to change ourselves. When we face great sufferings, we are challenged to meet them with equal spiritual greatness. Thirdly, suffering enhances our mental receptiveness to intellect and spiritual enlightening.

We cannot live without hope. If we lost hope, we would lose our present and our future, and we would be doomed. So, if it is our destiny to suffer, parts of our future are the opportunities presented by our suffering such as the two mentioned above. Minimizing the suffering by having false illusions and fostering artificial optimism is counter-productive. Let’s suffer proudly for HIS glory, not miserably. If we have to die, let’s die with dignity, character and courage. (2 Tim 1:7For God did not give us a spirit of timidity, but a spirit of power, of love and of self-discipline.) After all, what really matters is not what we have expected from God, but what God expects from us.

Let’s pray that our God will equip each and every one of us with a life of inner riches and spiritual freedom to deal with the terrible suffering which most of us will encounter in due time.

May this find you and your loved ones in good spirit and health.

People always ask me how I feel, and it really is not easy to answer this seemingly simple question, especially when it is asked in passing. Hence, I am going to try to describe how I feel a little more in detail this time.

After Monday’s chemo, I began to have diarrhea at night. It was unexpected because it hadn’t happened in the previous two cycles. However, I was told that it is normal for the symptom to show up now because of the cumulative effect of the chemo. The chemo drug never gets completely flushed out of the system, and the body never really gets to recover fully; hence the sideeffects will become more and more severe. The diarrhea was brought under control with yet another drug. Thereafter, I experienced severe nausea, fatigue and restlessness between Wednesday and Friday. For example, I had to try five times just to get a bowl of soup down on Friday evening. While all of the side-effects are more than unpleasant, I would have to say that the worst was the sense of restlessness. It made me feel very agitated and vulnerable. It was like having an attention deficit disorder (hyperactivity) that prevented me from concentrating and staying in one place for more than a few minutes at a time. Sometimes, it took me 30 minutes of meditation and praying to reign in that feeling, only to lose control again in another five. Fortunately, the drug for controlling severe nausea takes care of it to a large extent. Regarding the fatigue, it is like the fatigue that I had experienced in my worst bout of flu, only several times worse, with the nausea and the restlessness on top.

On the positive side, for reasons unknown to me, the amount of drainage from the wound reduced significantly on Thursday and has stayed that way so far. I have also been feeling OK since Saturday, although I am still kind of tired. It is nice to be able to eat again without popping nausea pills. My brother, his wife, and his mother in-law came over Saturday to help with fixing a number of things around the house.

After reading my 24th week’s sharing (Our permanent character), a pastor friend reminded me about our need for God’s transformation into heavenly creatures which I omitted to a large extent to keep the sharing brief. However, I think it is important enough to deserve a sharing on its own right and here it is.

Free to be morally excellent?

When we discussed the character, we talked about forming heavenly character by attempting virtues. What I have not mentioned is that as creatures with notions of decent human behavior, as well as being creatures with egocentric fears, jealousies, hopes, desires, greed and pride, we are doomed in such attempts. Attempting moral excellence brings understanding about our true condition and how strong the temptations are. For instance, for those who are trying real hard to tame our tongues, we will soon learn a great deal about the true condition of our own heart; we cannot do this alone due to the inevitable repeated failures.

Most of us don’t fully realize how serious the situation is because we have not really tried very hard. Without fighting against the tide of our sinful nature, we could never fully appreciate how strong the current is. Those who are complacent stay ignorant to their own wickedness and to the strength of the temptation. In fact, complacency leads to ignorance, ignorance to indulgence, and indulgence to total breakdown. For example, seemingly harmless gossip behind somebody’s back often ends up as a full-scale attack on the victim’s character with unfounded accusations and projection of the accuser’s own darkest thoughts.

We are not free to attempt moral excellence due to this self-centered, egocentric, and self-seeking self. We are very much influenced by our own negative feelings such as pain, fear, resentment, jealousy, and anger, our own negative moods such as irritability, sadness and sullenness, our own counterproductive thoughts such as “It is impossible” and “This won’t work,” and our own desires such as greed, lust, and thirst for power and position. Furthermore, both our genetic make up and the culture and societal conditionings play a significant role in determining our personality and our ways of interacting with others and the circumstances. In other words, we are slaves to our sinful natures and hence have little freedom in attempting moral excellence.

How can we be free from ourselves so that we can act in a heavenly way? The paradox answer is that in order to be free we have to become a slave first. More specifically, we have to become slave to the righteousness in order to be free from sin. (Rom 6: 16 - Don’t you know that when you offer yourselves to someone to obey him as slaves, you are slaves to the one whom you obey—whether you are slaves to sin, which leads to death, or to obedience, which leads to righteousness?) Let’s use the sixth commandment as an example to illustrate this point. The commandment is: You shall not commit adultery. At first, it may seem like a prohibition against lust. In reality, it actually means that we will be free to bring others blessings if, by submitting to this law and to the giver of the law, we can love people without taking advantage of them. In general, a universal principle to live by is to submit to God’s absolute moral standard, so that we can be blessed and be free to receive His abundant grace.

The aforementioned submission is an active submission of offering ourselves to Christ. Through active submission, we allow Christ to get a hold of our sinful nature so that He can kill all the self-centeredness and self-will by injecting His kind of life and thoughts into us. (Mat16:24 - Then said Jesus unto his disciples, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.) By getting close to God who is the source, we can be clothed in holiness, righteousness, light, and life. Hence, we can successfully attempt moral excellence and build our heavenly character in turn. At a minimum, God helps us to have the power to try over and over again.

May this find you and your loved ones in good spirit and health.

Previous updates can be found in http://highspirit.blog.com/ or http://lcj1.org/WordPress/highspirit.php

I got the chemo on Monday. (This is the first week of the third cycle.)  The fatigue and nausea were mostly gone by Wednesday.  The open sore is a little bit smaller and is draining more freely.  The upside is that the incision is under less internal pressure to open up even more.  The downside is that there is more drainage and hence more need for a frequent change of dressing.  If everything goes well, I will receive the two-drug combo on the coming Monday and deal with the more severe side-effects for the most part of the next week.

Sow a character; reap a destiny

Last time, we talked about our permanent character, (the inner being that determines if I am a heavenly creature or a hellish creature), how a heavenly one can be built by forming good character habits and breaking bad ones, and how our character will determine if we will feel at home in the heaven.  One might think that none of the above is very relevant unless there is indeed an afterlife.  On the contrary, our character matters as much in this life as in the afterlife.

First of all, our words and actions constantly broadcast our character to others which, in turn, tells others who we really are, not who we pretend to be.  Our lives will have a silent influence on others, one that stems from our character.  The influence can be positive or negative, but it is always there. Real, effective leadership depends more on the influence that flows out of a good character than on power or position. We may work for those who have money and power, but we cooperate with those whom we respect.  In fact, if we lead by power and position alone, we are fostering weakness in our character because it makes us more dependent on borrowed power.  It also fosters weakness in those whom we are trying to lead, because it discourages independent thinking, transparency, a sense of empowerment, growth and creativity.  Furthermore, it fosters weakness in the relationship, because it discourages communication, and it replaces cooperation with fear and trust with resentment.

People are inspired by positive models and by light.  Therefore, most leadership failures are character failures (competence failures come as a distant second). We won’t have influence if there is no faith in our character and integrity.  Others won’t trust us unless we are trustworthy, and communication is impossible when there is no trust.

Secondly, our character is also the lens through which we see the world, and what we see is often what we get. For example, if we see ourselves as the victim of our circumstances and take the easy way out in explaining our current problems in terms of past and present circumstances, we give up our ability to take initiative and our freedom to choose the best actions under the circumstances.  It is like a self-fulfilling prophecy.  We become a victim of the circumstances because we see ourselves as a victim, and then allow ourselves to be a victim.

What we see depends largely on who we are.  The perception of a hellish creature is a distorted one, just like seeing through a droplet of water. A saint would be mistaken as an evil and a selfless act would be interpreted as motivated by self-interest. (The sinless Christ was nailed to the cross because HE was perceived as blasphemous.) A heavenly creature, on the other hand, sees reality as it is and others as they can be. Our character affects our perception, our perception affects our feelings and thoughts, our thoughts affect our attitudes and behaviors, and ultimately, our behavior and attitude lead to different destinies. Since our vision is highly related to our basic character, it would be futile if we just concentrate on techniques about changing attitudes and behaviors, because they are hardly the root of the problem.  For example, no amount of “communication technique” will help if we do not have a loving heart. We cannot see the worth and potential of others and show a sincere respect for them and their viewpoint, feelings, experiences and convictions.  People are pretty smart about this sort of thing, and they will not hear us out if they sense the lack of respect.

May this find you and your loved ones in good spirit and health.