Suffering well with Matt Chandler
(AP Photo/LM Otero)
I met Matt Chandler in the “green room” backstage at The Village Church in Flower Mound, Texas. He was one month removed from brain surgery. It was the first Sunday he would be back on stage - although not preaching. He wasn’t sure whether he was strong enough, so that day he was just doing the introductions.
“I’m just now to where I don’t feel my brain move,” he said.
We talked for a few minutes, introductory stuff.
Then Chandler walked out on stage to a standing ovation.
“Everybody have a seat,” he said. “Let’s chat.”
The Village Church is a Southern Baptist church in prim and proper Dallas, but you couldn’t tell it. The staff has an easy time picking out visitors - they’re the ones who are dressed too nicely. Jeans are the norm, and the congregation’s average age is in the mid 30s. The church has three campuses, but the main one is here, in a newly renovated former grocery store in a suburban shopping center.
“God, you are good and glorious and gracious,” Chandler tells the church. “Help us. Church can get routine. We’re in the Bible Belt. Dallas, Texas. It’s get up in the morning, get dressed, get the kids fed, get to church. Save us from that. Save us from that monotony.”
I didn’t know much about Chandler when word started spreading online that he’d suffered a seizure on Thanksgiving, leading to the discovery of a mass on his right frontal lobe. I learned about that on Twitter. I was following Chandler, along with other pastors who belong to Acts 29, a network of evangelical pastors who are Reformed, or Calvinist, in their theology.
I contacted the church about a possible story after Chandler had undergone brain surgery but before his prognosis was clear. The story was sad and powerful. Here was a guy who was so young, just 35, with a wife and young children - someone who by his own admission had lived a charmed life. He was a rising star in evangelical Christianity, someone to watch. How would he handle this trial? If Chandler truly believed what he believed - that God is good and ultimately in control - than he should be comforted. But it’s one thing to talk about that as a concept, and another to live it facing a fatal disease - and do it in front of a large audience.
After Chandler gave that introduction in his return to church, he gave me an hour of his time back in the green room. Then he let me hang out with him the rest of the day, and all of the next day. The result is “Suffering Well,” which moved on the AP wire Sunday.
Some things I saw that didn’t make the piece: Chandler chews sugar-free gum because radiation dries out the mouth, a tip he picked up from other cancer patients. On the way out of Baylor University Medical Center after radiation, Chandler walks past a gift shop that sells wigs and hats. Before Chandler lost his hair to radiation, he had a missing patch on the back of his head the size of a postage stamp where he was burned by a coil during the surgery.
The Chandlers could have retreated, but chose to suffer publicly.
“A phrase Matt has used a couple of times is not ‘wasting’ the opportunity,” said Brian Miller, chairman of the church’s board of elders “… I think that’s kind of a unique way to look at something we normally look at as very unsettling. There isn’t fear, there isn’t any sense that God has turned his back on Matt.”
There have been moments of levity, of brightness, too. One of Chandler’s best friends, worship pastor Michael Bleecker, was sitting at dinner when he got a text from Chandler: “I lobe you.” The guy with terminal brain cancer was joking about his frontal lobe. “Those kinds of things, they encourage my heart,” Bleecker said. “Because he’s not internally going, ‘Oh, what’s going to happen.’ He is attacking this thing. He is advancing. He is not shrinking back.”
While we drove one of the endless ribbons of highway around Dallas, past the water towers and church steeples and Chuck E Cheese restaurants, Chandler talked about Thanksgiving as the day God saved his life. Think about it, he said. What if he didn’t have the seizure? What if the tumor had kept growing for a couple more years, into an inoperable part of the brain?
“Let’s say this goes really bad for me. Most people are not going to get what I am going to get - which is a year, two, five, 10, 12 … to fight. And to spend time with my children and to understand that each day really is a gift. What are the statistics? That 150,000 people in the United States are going to die today? And they’re going to die in car wrecks, of brain aneurysms. Most of them are going to die instantaneously. They don’t get to lay in bed with their wives, like I’ve gotten to for the last month and say what I want to say to her. To kiss my children. To drink it in really deeply, all of that. It’s carpe diem on steroids, all of a sudden. That really is a gift.”
Thanks to everyone who has written with good things to say about the story.
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