Peter Witkowski Memos

Memo: April’s Summer Update – July 2021

April has improved over the last few weeks! She no longer counts nausea and pain pills as her close friends. For the first time since late April, she has been able to care for our three kiddos on her own. She and I praise God for the latest round of victories over her stage four breast cancer and for our friends and family that have rallied around us during these dark days.

What’s Going On?

But her journey to this point has proved difficult. The climb is not yet done. Like the mountain paths hidden in the depths of the Blue Ridge Mountains that fill the horizon outside our home, April’s chemotherapy path has been steep, narrow, and full of rocks and roots. As some of you know, she stumbled off the chemo path just days after beginning her new phase of treatment. The chemotherapy drug ambraxane depleted her white blood cell count, dooming her to a six-day hospital stay. Once recovered from her infection and being neutropenic, she began to climb again. She still felt the daily pains of nausea and exhaustion. But with each passing week, the intensity of those pains has lessened. The liver pain went from being an ever-present companion to being an occasional twinge that came and went with each chemo dose. Over the last two weeks, she has been able to catch glimpses of health’s glorious vistas.

Notwithstanding the good results, the climb still contains dangerous three week stretches associated with chemotherapy. After each dose, April experiences noticeable fatigue, loss of appetite, and some nausea for at least two to three days. After three doses of chemo, she takes a week off from her treatment bringing her monthly cycle to an end.

But even during this break, she can encounter rough terrain. A few weeks back while at Lake Michigan, April’s legs blistered after minimal sun exposure, revealing that she has developed photosensitivity, a complication of her medications. Now, she must avoid direct sunlight as she walks towards health.

Despite these challenges, April’s Doctors believe her treatment plan has been successful. Her blood work has revealed that her liver and bones contain fewer and fewer cancer cells. She will undergo a new set of scans in mid-August. The climb continues.

The climb’s challenges go beyond nausea and fatigue. As she attains health, April has endured the thunderstorms of hair loss, canceled plans, and changing family dynamics. These summer winds have snuck up on her soul and flooded it with the heavy rains of sorrow on multiple occasions. But through it all she has remained resilient ever committed to caring for me, her kiddos, and her church family.

How are We Doing?

Her doctors think April will be walking on the chemotherapy trail throughout 2021. What comes next, no one exactly knows. She and I will cross that bridge and decided upon the next treatment plan when we come to it.

After wrestling with Jesus’s words in his famed Sermon on the Mount, April and I have sought to focus t our gaze mostly upon the present. Matthew 6:34 states, “Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.” Though we like to think our plans and emotions can determine the future, we have come to the simple and yet profound realization that they do not. Our fears about death do not keep us alive. Our worries about trials do not make us more beautiful. And our what if scenarios with all their hypothetical contingencies don’t shape God’s plans for us.  As Jesus notes, “And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life?” When we live in the world of imaginary futures, we do harm to our souls.

When we live in the world of imaginary futures, we do harm to our souls.

This is not to say that we should not plan. April and I have delayed this blog in part for planning purposes. We wanted to determine our children’s destination for the 2021-2022 schoolyear (we decided to enroll them in Fresta Valley Christian School) before sitting down to the keyboard. Moreover, I think having health insurance is a good thing. But worrying about what happens if this treatment fails in five months is completely unprofitable. We could be hit by an asteroid tomorrow and never see five months from now. Though we tend to assume that the future is more tangible than the present, Jesus asserts the opposite. Today is our greatest reality. We will deal with tomorrow….well, tomorrow.

But we are not putting our heads in the sand. Rather by faith we trust in the goodness of God. He is the same today as he was yesterday and will be tomorrow exactly who he is today. In other words, the God that has seen April through her terrible, horrible, no good, very bad days will see her through tomorrow. He will be ever present with her and us regardless of whether she reaches new pinnacles of health or stumbles into another steep decline. He will see us through all our tomorrows and will be a present help even if tears rain down our faces. Since God will be there tomorrow, we allow him to deal with all those future worries. We cast our cares upon him for he cares for us!  

Admittedly, we are not great at holding our thoughts captive. Sometimes when life heats up, the thought vault in our heart cracks allowing thoughts to ooze past the door of wisdom and pool up in the valleys of despair, casting unnecessary shadows over otherwise good days. To be like Jesus, we must daily crucify our instinctive impulse to speculate about tomorrow, remembering that the God who clothes grass in glory also cares deeply about April and our family. We don’t always live in today; but when we do, joy and comfort abound. To be more like Jesus.

How to Pray

We ask you to pray for our hearts. Pray that we will focus upon today, keeping our thoughts away from unprofitable thoughts about tomorrow. Pray that God will give April the strength she needs to love others well when she has good days full of strength and bad days full of fatigue. Pray that God will extend April’s life. Lastly, please pray that God will save our three children.

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Peter Witkowski Memos

Summer Break/Quick Update

Though I love precision and planning, I do get things out of order more than my humble pride would like to admit. The management of this blog would be exhibit A. Sorry about that. In case you are wondering, the answer is yes. I took summer sabbatical from the blogosphere. And yes, it’s almost over!

As some of you know, these last few weeks have been a whirlwind of doctor’s appointments, church meetings, and PhD study sessions. When the scattered storms that had disrupted our April plans threatened to bleed through May into June, I decided to pause my blog for the summer to care for April and my ABC family. As the days grew longer, I came dangerously close to publishing my blogs within hours of creating them. Typically, I prefer to hold my blogs in the queue for a week or two. This window of reflection blesses both my readers and my soul as it keeps my most egregious grammar mistakes and my most idiotic ideas far from public view. Time refines like nothing else. Thus, I paused the posting of new post.

I still love to write. As April can attest to, I have been sneaking off to my home office to create posts here and there for the creative process enriches my soul and develops my mind. On August 1 (for better or worse), I will start posting some these well aged blogs.

Before I return to my theological posts in August, April and I will also update you on her battle with breast cancer sometime in July. For now, please know things have taken a turn for the better! Stay tuned.

I appreciate your patience with me and April. I thank you for praying for her and our family! Until August….

Peter Witkowski

Peter Witkowski Discipleship

The Sermon on the Mount: A Kingdom Ethic for A Kingdom People

The Sermon on the Mount remains one of the most unique texts in the Bible. Though Jesus’s sermon simmers with deep theological truth that militates against the secular conscience, those living well outside the confines of the established church still find the treatise to be a wonderful source of inspiration and insight. After all, most souls who have languished under bad bosses, corrupt political systems, and cruel neighbors long for a world defined by love, peace, and justice. For example, both those who pray for hours in a state of heightened spirituality and those who stumble about the streets for hours in a state of inebriation can resonate with the golden rule found in Matthew 12:7: “whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them.”

The fact that both atheists such as Richard Dawkins and that pastors such as John Stott can find much to praise in the Sermon on the Mount raises an important question: “Who is the Sermon on the Mount for?” In other words, can atheist live out Jesus’s message or is it a unique message for Jesus’s followers?

A Kingdom Ethic For A Kingdom People

According to Jesus and to the New Testament authors, the Sermon on the Mount is a Kingdom ethic for a Kingdom people.  Both Matthew 5 and its sister passage in Luke 6 affirm that the Sermon was delivered to by Jesus to his disciples. Jesus’s message is not for the crowds of this world. It is for those who are willing to sit at the feet of Jesus to hear his words. To achieve the ethic of the kingdom, men and women must willingly submit to the full teaching of Jesus which stretches across all 66 books of the Bible. Jesus came to fulfill the law.

Listen to the Law

The Law, the spoken words of God, prove essential to our understanding of the kingdom of God. Humanity’s failure to heed God’s teaching necessitated Jesus’s famed sermon. He preaches it and seeks to reconstitute the kingdom of God because Adam and Eve had destroyed the kingdom of God thousands of years ago. In Genesis 3:1-7, the first royal couple eats the fruit of the tree “that is in the midst of the garden (3).” The first expression of pride comes about because Adam ceased to listen to the words of God, preferring the insights of his bride Eve to the wisdom from above. The failure to heed the voice of God led to humanities expulsion from the kingdom of God. To regain the kingdom of God, men and women must once again heed the voice of God. Jesus explicitly states this idea in Matthew 5:19: “Whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.” Kingdom power resides in the words of God.

Jesus Says, “You Can’t Do It Alone”

Those who reject Jesus’s words cannot hope to live out the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus does not applaud us for maintaining the generic level of goodness that society can attain at times. For example, in Matthew 7:27-30, Jesus does not pat husbands on the back because they had the self-control not to sleep with their secretary or a prostitute. The Son of God looks past external goodness. He says the law must control the hidden depths of the heart. “But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” Instead of applauding the man for keeping his pants on, Jesus takes issues with all the times the man has looked at a woman other than his wife and thought about bedding her. As a coworker once noted, this standard of goodness is “impossible.” The liberal theologian Richard Niebuhr concurs writing that Jesus, “does not direct attention away from this world to another but from all worlds…to the one who creates all worlds, who is the other of all worlds (29).”  No man or women in his or her own strength can live out the Sermon on the Mount. No one can reach the ethic of the kingdom apart for the ruler of that God for it is other worldly.  The kingdom ethic is for a kingdom people.

The Hope

Though humanity’s inability to live out the kingdom ethic should cast a shadow of despair over those who have refused to sit down with Jesus’s disciples atop the mountain, hope has not been vanquished. The path to hope runs through that despair. When men and women give up their aspirations of bringing the kingdom of heaven to earth through human effort, then and only then will they be able to finally see the beauty of the cross and the empty tomb. They can finally realize that Jesus has done for them what they could never do for themselves. This poverty of spirit and mourning over sin leads the soul into the kingdom of heaven and to everlasting comfort. The kingdom ethic is for a kingdom people, a people who value the words of God. Stop working. Come sit at the feet of Jesus.