Matt Chandler - Gratitude and Gladness

If you have your Bibles, go ahead and grab those. I want to walk us through this passage almost phrase by phrase. If you don’t have a Bible, there’s a black hardback one in the seat underneath you. If you’d like a nicer one, maybe for the holidays, you can visit the lost and found on your way out, and you might even find yours there. While you’re turning there, this week has always been weighty for our family. It’s great; we play hard and laugh a lot, but there’s always some weight that kind of follows it. We never know who or when we might be ambushed by our history. On November 26, 2009, I think most of you will know this—though not all of you will—but Lauren let me sleep in, which lets you know I’m tired. I got up, and she was washing dishes in the kitchen. We were planning to have Thanksgiving with my in-laws, who lived about eight minutes from us, later that afternoon. I asked if I could help, and she said, «Would you feed Nora her bottle?» Nora was about six months old, and I was happy to do that. I fed Nora her bottle and burped her carefully; she had a habit of giving back what you put in her. I was pretty careful about the burp—I had the burp in my hand, not over my shoulder. Then, because I’m the husband, I put her in her Johnny Jump Up and had a cup of coffee back in the living room. Both Reed and Audrey—Audrey was six; Reed was four—were watching cartoons. If I can out myself, it was «SpongeBob SquarePants.» I know some of you think that «SpongeBob» is evil and that Christians shouldn’t watch it, but I found him to be completely optimistically eternal, and I kind of liked that about him. So the kids were watching «SpongeBob SquarePants,» and I put Nora in her Johnny Jump Up and turned to go back to my chair. Somewhere between the Johnny Jump Up and the chair, which was only about twelve feet away, I had a grandma seizure. I hit my face on the mantle, bit through my tongue, fell on the floor in front of my kids, and seized for about three or four minutes. While I was seizing, my leg was apparently kicking the fireplace pokers, and Lauren heard the fall in the kitchen. If you can pick up on my energy, it’s not abnormal for things to crash and clink and bang in the Chandler house. We all have a little frenetic energy, especially back then. Lauren was waiting to hear me say, «It’s okay,» but instead, she heard Audrey say, «Mom.» Lauren came into the room, turned me on my side, dialed 911, and the ambulance and fire department arrived—we lived about two minutes from there, so they were at our house in no time at all. Apparently, when I was coming out of the seizure, I was combative. I still think—I don’t have any memory of this—but people have made it legend and not true lore. Apparently, I punched one of the paramedics, and they injected me with something, which is why I don’t remember that little episode at our house. I woke up in the hospital. They had already run a scan or two on me, though I don’t remember that part. I remember the doctor at Medical City Lewisville. He pulled his stool up next to my bed and said, «We have found a mass in your right frontal lobe. We’re going to need you to see a surgeon.» To be honest, the floor did not fall out from under me. I was just like, «I don’t know why, but I just want to leave the hospital.» I had been there all day; there was no Thanksgiving for us that day. The whole family was in the waiting room. A pastor friend of mine tweeted it out, so the village found out because that jackhole didn’t let us and my family control the narrative; he controlled it. I’m fine; I’m over that. I don’t even know why I said that. I went to see the surgeon just a couple of days later, and they let me know, «No, this doesn’t look good at all. We need to do surgery on Friday.» A week later, we would need to do surgery. He tried to encourage me by telling me that he had a patient who had made it ten years, and I thought to myself, «I’m 38; what do you mean ten years?» It was not encouraging. I ended up having the craniotomy, which turned out to be a malignant brain tumor—anaplastic oligodendroglioma, grade three was the diagnosis. From there, I went to rehab after surgery and then endured 18 months of high-dose chemotherapy with a little radiation sprinkled in. They gave me two to three years to live.