June 16, 2011:
Everything is going more or less as planned from a treatment standpoint. My marrow is recovering nicely and I will soon be stable enough to head north (could be discharged by the weekend). I really have no indication of the timeline required to complete the transplant, how difficult it might be to find a donor, or how much sense it would make to try and work at all this year. But all of those things should get cleared up once I get to Rochester and have a chance to meet with my transplant physician, Dr. Litzow. For now, I'm watching a lot of History Channel and Netflix and enjoying the company of lots of special people.
Aside from being tired often and generally short on energy and ambition, I feel mostly well. I have managed to read about half of The Problem of Pain. To this point, the book has mostly focused on setting the stage for how pain and suffering can exist in the Creation of a good God, and less on how we should respond when we encounter it (that comes later).
Lewis is as insightful as always, but I especially like how he describes our world as a neutral "playing field" of sorts; one that has its own set of governing principles over which we have no control. Similar to how we might think of a video game "world" or "level," the point of the place is only to give the players a context in which to interact and do things that matter. The rules of the world are the same for everyone (fire is hot, gravity pulls down, etc); but not everyone plays the game the same. The necessity of this sort of set-up is beyond the scope of this note, but it's well-described in the book. Suffice is to say, there is no sensible way to allow free will and simultaneously maintain a world that is equally convenient to all souls at all times. It's an academic argument, admittedly, but it's sound.
Of course, the concept of disease itself does not seem intrinsically necessary in this model (especially disease that could not have been prevented by alternative individual choices). Lewis chalks this one up to the fall. He believes, or perhaps just surmises, that we were originally created with the ability to control our physical body and all processes therein through our spiritual self. When man Fell, he chose himself over God. It was then that God relinquished this unique control and turned the direction of our bodies over to the laws of nature. These laws include imperfections and inefficiencies that make us susceptible to disease, give us all a lifespan, and remind us of our mortality. Of course, this is just Lewis' best guess and one of many possibilities so it's hard to know whether or not this is actually how it played out.
The truly important thing to realize is that this existence is simply not the point. For centuries, a foundational component to the enlightenment of the Christian worldview has been a belief that we were made for something more and an awareness that this is not our ultimate home (in many ways, it really is little more than the first level of a video game). But we probably say this sort of thing without fully believing it more often than not and leukemia, if nothing else, is helping me to grow in my dependence of this truth.
Ultimately, reconciling the "problem" of pain with the character of God is probably not something that we will ever be capable of on intellectual grounds alone--we just aren't smart enough. And this is why faith is so necessary. After all, no amount of intelligent argument in God's defense will ever be more compelling to me than what I know in my heart to be true about Him--that He's real, that He's good, and that He loves me. But I realize not everyone has that knowledge and many have chosen to believe other things about God. And that's the tragedy. Not the fact that pain and suffering exist in the world, but the fact that there are so many people without the means to explain it, understand it, or cope with it.
Here's to hoping my next update is from somewhere other than a hospital bed...
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