Jackson Lavender Hair

21 Devotions for Women with Breast Cancer
1. Auflage 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4245-5563-5
Verlag: BroadStreet Publishing Group, LLC
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 208 Seiten

A happy heart is good medicine On October 8, 2015, Victoria Jackson was getting ready for a 45-minute stand-up routine. But instead of enjoying the pre-show excitement, she was laying on the couch in the green room coughing nonstop. Victoria had many scary moments growing up: doing a back handspring on the four-inch balance beam; performing stand-up comedy; auditioning for Saturday Night Live; and getting held at gunpoint in downtown Los Angeles. But being told she had cancer was her scariest moment. Join Victoria for twenty-one days as she: - wonders 'why me?' and if her lollipop addiction caused the cancer - writes a ukulele song in the MRI waiting room - undergoes a double mastectomy with secret messages written in permanent marker to her doctor - goes through chemotherapy, radiation, baldness, wigs, wigs, and more wigs - discovers that Jesus is enough - performs at Zanie's to a standing ovation nearly one year after her diagnosis If you are one of the one-in-eight women who have been diagnosed with breast cancer, or if you know someone who has been, this 21-day devotional is full of humor, insight, and comfort as you walk with God through this dark valley.

VICTORIA JACKSON is best known for her six seasons on Saturday Night Live and has appeared in many films. Victoria was raised in a Bible-believing, piano-playing home with no TV. While at college on a gymnastics scholarship, Victoria discovered drama. Johnny Carson's talent scout saw her six-minute stand-up comedy act and put her on the Tonight Show where she appeared over twenty times. In 1992 Victoria was reunited with her high school sweetheart and left show business to raise a family in the suburbs of Miami. Victoria still performs stand-up comedy and appears in an occasional film. She and her husband now reside in Nashville, Tennessee, to be near their daughters and grandchildren.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Jackson, Victoria

Leseproben

5

MAUREEN AND JULIA

“Blessed is the man who trusts in the LORD,
and whose hope is the LORD. For he shall be like a tree
planted by the waters, which spreads out its roots by the river,
and will not fear when heat comes; but its leaf will be green,
and will not be anxious in the year of drought,
nor will cease from yielding fruit.”

JEREMIAH 17:7–8 NKJV

It’s interesting to watch people’s reaction to my diagnosis. One lady responded, “Does it run in your family?”

“No!”

“Oh no!” she said. “I could get it too!”

Twenty years ago, when I found out that Maureen was dying of cancer, my first thought was, My second thought was, Maureen was a fellow gymnast who died at age thirty-six from breast cancer.

I don’t know if she drank or smoked. My parents always told me not to drink or smoke. Drinking and smoking—they go together—always made me feel guilty because (1) I am a Christian, and they are considered worldly habits that carnal, immoral people do, and (2) they can cause cancer and our bodies are the temple of God and should be treated that way.

The health guru Kris Carr said in an interview that when she was diagnosed at age thirty-one with inoperable lung and liver cancer, she immediately changed her lifestyle, diet, and thoughts. So did I. I watched her interviews to see if she drank or smoked or did drugs. She said she wouldn’t consider herself a “smoker” because she never bought a pack, but there was often one in her hand, and that she wasn’t a full-blown “alcoholic” but there were unhealthy substances in her body weekly and her diet was not based on nutrition but on limiting calories. Me too! Many of us spend our youth trying to be skinny, not trying to be healthy.

From her interviews, it sounds like Kris Carr is trusting in herself for her healing and her eternal destiny. I pray she sees Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. Self as God is a false teaching based on the lie that began in the garden of Eden. “‘You won’t die!’ the serpent replied to the woman. ‘God knows that your eyes will be opened as soon as you eat it, and you will be like God’” (Genesis 3:4–5 NLT).

The Bible says to treat my body as the temple of God. I did, until my puberty problems kicked in, and the eating disorders disassembled all sanity and reason and replaced my righteous thinking with lies from the enemy. Lies like “Being skinny is more important than being healthy,” “You’ll never find a husband or have a show biz career if you aren’t thin,” and “Eating less and exercising more isn’t enough—you need shortcuts, tricks.”

Maureen was one of the girls on my dad’s team, Jim Jackson’s Jumping Jacks Gymnastic Team. Dad, the ex-vaudevillian, trampolinist, juggler, Baptist deacon, PE teacher, and gym coach, took Jesus out of the church and gymnastics out of the gym.

Dad did handstands on the top of his car.

And talked about Jesus while leaning on a gymnastic apparatus.

One day, Dad called me over to the balance beam and asked me to recite John 3:16 to Maureen. I did. I felt a little embarrassed to be reciting the Bible in public but also felt filled with the power of the Holy Spirit. Like we three were on a higher plane, a spiritual plane, as the shallow, insignificant physical world tumbled about us. I think Dad’s motives were twofold: he was teaching me how to witness, but he also had a bad memory. We were sweaty and wearing leotards. Maureen was Catholic. She said she’d never heard that Bible verse before. I was proud of my dad for caring about Maureen’s soul.

Twenty years later, Maureen appeared at a comedy club where I was doing stand-up. She had a wig and a hat on. She took me in a back room, removed her wig and hat, showed me her bald head, and said, “I have cancer” as if she was still in shock. She wanted my dad’s phone number to tell him he was the first person who ever told her about Jesus and that she had just asked Jesus into her heart. The breast cancer went to her brain. She died a year later.

During that year, I sent her letters with encouraging Bible verses:

•“The Lord Jesus will transform our lowly body that it may be conformed to His glorious body” (Philippians 3:20–21 NKJV).

•“Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2 KJV).

•“Jesus said to her, ‘I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in Me, though he may die, he shall live’” (John 11:25 NKJV).

Going through my piles that I shift from one side of my garage to the other, I stumbled upon this e-mail from Maureen’s loving brother Bill. I guess my memory was right.

Mom recently dug up a copy of the letter my dad sent Maureen during this time:

Julia Sweeney was on with me. She did the androgynous character Pat. When she left the show, she got cancer. She wrote a play about it: Then, she wrote a play called about her journey into atheism. I attended the play. She’s a great writer. We hugged. We seemed to be the only two alum interested in God and life after death, albeit with exact opposite opinions. But, to me, Julia’s passion to not believe is maybe really a desperate hunger to believe. We debated God’s existence through e-mails, and I sent her my favorite study Bible.

I attempted to write a responding play, My title didn’t have the punch that hers did. It didn’t have the shock value. So far all I’ve come up with as an artistic response to her artistic public dismissal of God is a song called “The Atheist.” It seems that atheists always act intellectually superior, a bit arrogant. So, I sort of played off of that.

She brags about her lack of faith

That’s how she puts it

She sticks her nose up in the air

And says there is no God up there

She does not fear the Lord because

There is no God to fear

And she talks about it all day long!

She’s telling everyone she sees

She’s got the cure to our disease

Of ignorance, she shouts with zeal,

“There is no God, He isn’t real!”

And she is now the master of her immortality

And she talks about it all day long!

There is no moral wrong or right

There is no black there is no white

She found this freedom, she has said

When she discovered God is dead,

As Nietzsche1 said, “God is a lie,”

She likes to quote that German guy

And she’s consumed with bashing

Every inch of Christianity,

She seems obsessed with Jesus

And His lack of deity,

And she talks about it all day long!

I say, “If He doesn’t exist, why do you keep talking about Him?”2

Although it’s not the reason I believe, many great thinkers believed in God: Copernicus, Bacon, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Mendel, C. S. Lewis, and Pascal. I do my apologetics in song, the only way I know how. I sang “The Atheist” on TBN in an interview with Paul Crouch Jr. around 2007.

The God debate between Julia and I became a public airwaves debate. We sparred a bit on with Bill Maher. I was on his show twelve times, always outnumbered by atheists. One time I brought my big Bible and plopped it on the coffee table in the middle of the room.

Another time Michael Shermer of ...