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More Frightening Than Cancer
Between bites of burrito and Saturday Night Live jokes, Mark was energized by guiding students to healing from the driven lifestyles that had gotten them into Stanford University in Stanford, California. Yet the same hunger for achievement in his own heart proved to be the spiritual snag in his plans.
In the core of his being, Mark lived under the law that effectiveness was next to godliness. His definition of a vacation was a weeklong retreat to strategize for the ministry. Weekly Sabbaths were a method of storing up energy to work harder and faster the other six days.
But on July 9, 1995, his body mutinied the utilitarian life when mononucleosis and a rare testicular infection took him out of the running. His muscles and joints throbbed as if he had the flu.
His bedroom became a sickeningly familiar cave as he slept 12 hours a night and three hours a day. After months of pain and exhaustion, his wife, Gayll, came home to find her husband crying on the bed saying he wanted to die.
Mark finally received his sentence from the doctor in May 1996. He had chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), a diagnosis that offered no cures and no time line for recovery. Stripped of his keen mental faculties and energy to minister to students, the campus minister was angry, confused and shipwrecked in his spiritual life.
But the very illness that robbed Mark of vitality would become the cure for a deeper sickness in his soul. It was in this forced slowness for 4-1/2 years that Mark began to discover stunning new vistas in his communion with Jesus.
The son of a man who worked full time while earning a Ph.D., Mark soaked in the importance of achievements. Anything but an "A" was defeat.
Mark dreamed of landing a job in academic medicine, but his plans were interrupted in 1980, when he met Jesus through InterVarsity Christian Fellowship at University of California, Santa Cruz. Drawn to the mission of influencing students, he changed course and after graduation dove into full-time campus ministry with his new wife, Gayll.
In 1990, after five years of ministering together at San Jose State University and University of California, Berkeley, from age 23 to 27, the duo stepped onto the Stanford campus. The fellowship doubled in size each year during their first three years. But the work was all consuming. The ministry monopolized Mark's interactions with Jesus, and he hardly noticed when his work began whirling at a rate of 80 hours a week.
"I was achievement-oriented," Mark said. "Prayer was a means to an end. It was a way to get in touch with God so I could go and reach out to students."
After five years of ministry at Stanford, the couple finally tore themselves away for a six-month sabbatical to take seminary classes. They packed up their car and headed for Southern California, but three hours into the trip, Mark started vomiting and registered a temperature of 103 degrees.
Then came the testicular infection, then outbreaks of boils and bizarre rashes. When he was finally diagnosed with CFS in May of 1996, the once-energized minister was devastated.
"It was a life of total weakness and total uselessness," he said. "You sleep all the time, hurt all the time and there's no guarantee of a cure. It was more frightening to me than cancer."
Mark and Gayll returned to Stanford in January 1996 after their six-month sabbatical, and Mark scaled down to 10 hours of work per week. While Mark slept, Gayll trudged through the loneliest days of her marriage.
"A lot of what I was doing was fighting to not become depressed," Gayll said. "I couldn't talk to him about what was going on with me because he was in too much pain to listen."
Even the God they used to share became a stranger to Mark. The illness seemed like a cruel punishment for his sins. He turned to the Epistles, desperate for a companion in suffering and loneliness.
But the Scriptures only deepened his isolation. Paul was persevering in ministry in spite of his pain. The stories of the apostle preaching to the jailers left Mark even more ashamed of his retreat from the campus fellowship.
In 1997, Mark--now 25 pounds heavier than he used to be--was spiraling into another cycle of despair when he began rereading journal entries. He flipped to a page with a card stapled to it. A friend had sent the card, and she suggested that Mark's pain connected him to the suffering Jesus on the cross.
He began poring over the Passion verses in the Gospels that described the palpable, almost gross descriptions of Jesus being beaten and then hung up to bleed and thirst.
As Mark's frantic isolation started melting, he discovered another haunting connection to Christ's story. After the resurrection, Jesus' ministry had changed.
He wasn't preaching to hundreds and healing at every turn anymore. He only visited a few close friends. Mark couldn't ignore God's message to him: He, too, needed to let God resurrect a new Mark, but first his driven, ambitious approach to life must die.
His wife and fellow staff workers had been clamoring for the strong, charismatic leader to return, but even this dream needed to be released. The revelation didn't bring exhilaration or relief from his pain, but instead a profound sense of permission to stop striving.
To remind himself daily of this call to death and resurrection, Mark started taking communion by himself in the backyard. He also culled biography sections of bookstores for new mentors.
He latched onto St. Teresa of Avila, a nun from the 1500s who suffered from a debilitating illness. The nun's reflections prompted Mark to experiment with new forms of prayer. The former action addict found himself soaking in the tub with the lights out for an hour at a time as he enjoyed a sense of God's love.
But his new revelations began straining his marriage. Mark wanted Gayll to join him in a more reflective way of life, yet for the last two years she had been shouldering both of their jobs as area directors for InterVarsity.
When Mark asked her what God was doing in her soul, she answered: "I don't have time to think about my soul. That's convenient for you when you are laying in bed so much."
The relationship was fraying under the stress of their vastly different paces of life. Mark longed to live alone with Gayll, away from the demands of friendships, ministry and housemates, and eventually she acquiesced.
"I finally accepted that it doesn't work for one person to go 60 miles per hour and the other to go 20 miles per hour," Gayll said. "But it was like a death, moving away from all the people who helped me care for him."
In March 1999, the couple moved to the small beach community of Morro Bay, California. At first, Gayll went through withdrawal when deprived of the buzz she got from being busy with staff work. Before long, though, she warmed to the quiet streets and one-channel TV reception.
Mark had been sick for four years and accepted the idea of lifelong illness when he heard about groundbreaking research on a procedure that could improve his health. The doctor explained that Mark's CFS was likely caused by compression of his spinal column near the base of the neck. Since the operation, Mark's energy has jumped from 40 to 75 percent of what he enjoyed before the CFS began.
Mark finished a two-year course at a Benedictine monastery where he learned how to help others find Christ amid the unexpected struggles of life. He isn't delivering talks to droves of students anymore, but he's convinced that his shift from a driven ministry superstar to a peaceful contemplative shouts the most powerful message of all: God saves people from their subtle, yet deadly, soul sicknesses.
"The change in me has been a wonderful gift from God," he said. "I used to be an impatient person, expecting the immediate manifestation of the kingdom and unsatisfied with anything less than total revival at Stanford. Now I have gratitude for each moment.
"I am able to appreciate God's miracles in the mundane as well as the sensational. There is great freedom for me in that."
By Heather Stringer, a free-lance writer and a regular contributor to New Man magazine. |
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