cancer

today i read the prayer requests from my old home church...i wonder why i continue to do that.... i think because i have become a betwixt and between christian searching for a home uncomfortable in the past wistful in the present and hopeful for the future looking around the corner for a place to set my faith and my body down but still pondering those i left behind knowing their faces, their need, the strength or weakess of their faith....even as i walk out the door i take with me their images and so when i read of the progress of leanne's cancer i remember her face doing her daughter's wedding flowers, cutting ivy and chatting... now i wonder how has cancer made its home in her... i pause for a moment and pray for her life... for the life of her family remembering how she prayed for me though we were not terribly close... so is this the church/ the body so to speak... the compilation of encounters, of relationships which coax Jesus out of us? do these encounters lead us to a deeper understanding of who Jesus might be? so then i think of ellen and the loss of someone so dear someone who shared with me a time of cancer and made it a time with jesus as well some of her last words to me were i don't know how to do this dying thing very well and then she was gone i have had a hard time really believing our time to gether as fellow cancer people was a time of Jesus [to say it that way seems so christianese-y and not authentic...was there even cancer when he lived here?] but then i think of all the images of our friendship and i see that however we see jesus now it has to be through and with these people we love and as i weep for her and so many others i have watched as they suffer i remember jesus wept as well lest these thoughts seem too insipid the struggle to feel the truth of those words is immense the mystery of my faith that jesus also wept is only part of the mystery of why i really believe that Jesus was here there is that funny word anthropomorphic...do i assign qualities to Jesus he may never have had? the definition states that anthropomorphic is derived from 2 greek words anthropos meaning human and morphe meaning shape or form and then there's that spot in phillipians 2 where paul says Jesus took on human likeness and so when i look at the face of ellen and of leanne and of all those who suffer am i seeing the human shape and form of jesus again?