My Heroes

I need to write about two sets of heroes who are playing prominently in my life right now.

The first set, as I type, is on a beach in Maui. They can watch some of the world’s most beautiful sunsets over the world’s biggest ocean from their window. They’ve been there for a few days and they’re just now beginning to notice what’s around them.

Chuck and Sue Bost, my first set of heroes, are on their official decompression trip. It’s a trip they probably didn’t really want to take. It’s the we-don’t-know-how-we’re-doing-it-but-we’re-doing-it trip to Hawaii they’ve promised themselves for the last 10 years. It’s been the teeniest, tiniest, babiest carrot at the end of a big, arduous stick.

But a stick full of love.

In December 2000 Chuck and Sue gave birth to the beautiful Natalie Catherine. But before she would turn one year old, she would be diagnosed with a brain disease (Canavan, a leukodystrophy so rare my speller doesn’t recognize either of those words) that usually claims life before one year. Natalie lived past 10, to April 8, 2011. Chuck and Sue left for their decompression trip eight days later.

Over these 10 years I have had a front row seat to action-packed unconditional love. I watched Chuck and Sue tend to every need. I watched grandparents, the blessed Jim and Billie and the blessed Chuck and Betty, nurture and love. I watched the body of Christ mobilize to form Team Chuck and Sue, a team that took many forms over the decade. I watched the Bost and Harrison family navigate, in inspiring ways, the pain that you have to navigate when you realize that you’re not going to get a textbook child-rearing story.

I watched countless friends, nursery workers, family, Tuesday-group people, and nurses care for Natalie.

And I watched Dana hold Natalie.

And there is my second set of heroes.

I need to be completely honest here. After Dana and I began battling recurrent breast cancer, and we knew the outcome could be iffy, photos like the one at the top of this blog spooked me, be it ever so slightly. Seeing those two framed by the edge of a picture would send me into a little tail spin. I would think to myself that I never wanted to be looking at a picture of those two someday with both of them gone.

And here we are.

And they are heroes. They went yard on any curve ball that was thrown their way. They made the finger-tip, last-second grab in the end zone. They put the rest of us at ease while we tried to make sense of it all. And they’ve taken the brave bold steps to the Other side.

Now that photo at the top of this blog is like a giant picture window into heaven. It is a picture of resurrection. It is a picture of The Resurrection. It’s The Resurrection that tells me, and Chuck, and Sue, and Jim and Billie, and Chuck and Betty, and anybody else who held Natalie or knew Dana that there is more to this life!

Thank God.

And now back to Chuck and Sue. Before they left I wanted to give them a two-week supply of t-shirts that said, “Heroes!”--- T-shirts they could wear every day so that people would inquire of their story and then, of course, ask for their autographs. They really are 9/11-NYC-Firefighter-grade heroes. They are the most famous people on any airplane they’ll be on, any site-seeing excursion they’ll take. I know they plan to visit Pearl Harbor while in Hawaii. Their heroism is on the same scale as those who dove into oily, fiery water to save crewmates on December 7, 1941. The National Parks Department should seat Chuck and Sue behind the little table where they’ll have a couple Pearl Harbor survivors.

When I was at Pearl Harbor myself last December I met four survivors of that attack. Truly, you could gain the same wisdom on sacrifice and bravery from those four men as you could Chuck and Sue and their parents. And funny thing: I’ve heard all of them, battle survivors and care-giver survivors, say, “You just do what you’ve got do.”

It’s the hero’s refrain.

In the story of Chuck and Sue and their families, what they had to do was love. They did that heroically.

And if I might make a feeble attempt at tying it all together: Sue was the person in our Bible study on that September 2006 evening on my and Dana’s chemo eve who said, “tomorrow I’m going to look for a rainbow.” Thus began our first round of God stamps. Natalie was a girl Dane and I sort of adopted as our own, especially since our first round of chemo, which came just before Natalie’s birth, took away our ability to have kids. And on the day of Natalie’s passing I drove through a neighborhood where I, for the first time ever in this neighborhood, saw five deer.

(And here are refreshers on rainbows and deer in our story to help that last paragraph make sense.)

As a side, I think I’m actually starting a new collection: heroes. As I think of everyone mentioned above, I’m also realizing all the other heroic people in my life who have withstood, and are withstanding, near-insurmountable circumstances.

It seems only fitting, especially during this Holy Week, that I close with a reminder that Chuck and I have been shooting back and forth since long before either of us were dealing with Canavans or breast cancer: The Power of Christ’s Resurrection is in You. Which is to say (from Ephesians 1), that same power that God used to raise Jesus is able to be unleashed in our lives: on our hurt, our pain, our anxieties, our frustrations, our directions or lack thereof.

Or in reminder-speak: tpoCriiy

In my inbox this morning was an e-mail from Chuck with a picture of a sunset view from their window. I’ve posted it below. Maybe breathe deep as you look at it and say a pray for Chuck and Sue, and any other heroes you have in your life.