Marsha's Blog

This afternoon, as I’m writing this, we just returned from a 3-day conference of Japanese Christians.  Only a few people remember that we actually started this annual gathering back nearly 20 years ago and it’s rocked along, hit and miss since then.  Then, about 3 years ago, it really got to moving and this was the third “new and revised” event, attracting about 150 Japanese and associates from all over Australia, New Zealand and beyond.  We stayed in a Christian camp which was nostalgic of our younger days but reminding us again we’re not that young.    To say “Mune ga ippai” (our hearts are full) would be an understatement.  Quite by accident we’ve become the elder statesmen of the group, and we heard “Tony and Marsha” so many times in so many situations, from those first memories, to continuing excitement about Tony’s doctoral Bible study called “Anagaion”. And of course there was plenty of shock and concern to go around in light of his recent diagnos...

When I was a little girl, maybe 10 or 12, I think even then I was a little, shall we say, PLAN oriented? I do remember plotting out my life and putting it to paper.  About this time I was coming to grips with the Second Coming of Christ, and so I had to include that in my plan. I was going to finish school, possibly becoming a doctor.  Then I was going to marry a real hunk of a man, like in the movies.  We would live in perfect harmony and have two beautiful children, first a boy and then a little girl. And then when the kids were about 8, Christ would return in a bolt of lightning and take us all away.  I chose 8 as the perfect age to end the parenting responsibility because, well, I’d helped the teacher in Sunday School and I figured after 8 these little guys just weren’t worth saving.   As fate would have it, some of those dreams actually came true, and some not so much. At 17, I committed my life to Christian service, whatever th...

If you’ve been following us for awhile, you’ll remember that right before all this heath drama snuck in, we went to Fiji for a few weeks.   Tony always has folks looking to do his   Anagaion   course and we were delighted to hit the road again, meet with church leaders there and being able to preach and teach all over the place. You may remember too, that because our daughter is a flight attendant for Qantas, we can fly ‘stand by’ for about half price.  Most of the time it works smoothly.  But not on this particular day.  We had to fly first down to Sydney to catch the 4-hour flight to Fiji. So, watching the internet bookings carefully, we were confident that we’d sail right thru.  There were people waiting to pick us up in Fiji, so we really wanted to make it on time as per schedule.  The Gold Coast check in agent felt the same way, so much so that he took our luggage and checked it right on through; straight to Fiji so we wouldn’t have to...

Today I promised you some news, and also that then we’d quit talking incessantly about health issues.   If you haven’t already heard being shouted from the housetops or on Facebook and various church prayer chains, it has been determined (as it was before) that Tony’s cancer is aggressive, but that it’s mostly contained with the only exception being a couple of lymph nodes that lit up under the radioactive camera. The doctor took that as fairly good news, so we will too.   Surgery is scheduled for December 2nd which seems a long time to wait for something like this, but apparently all the butchery that’s been done already in order to ‘find’ the cancer has to settle down so that they can see what they’re doing.  In the meantime, we were told to get in as great shape as possible, since that will help with both the surgery and the recovery. We took that to heart, and Tony says that I’m now in “warrior mode”. Anything that cancer likes, such as sugar, meat and dairy prod...