Chock full of surprises: learning to embrace the grace of living out of control.

Boy did I ever get a surprise!" exclaimed Linda as she opened the door of our little travel trailer. "That can't be good since you were out to the backhouse," I said. I was thinking large spiders or mice down the hole or a squirrel under the floor boards; all regular occurrences on trips to the outhouse at the remote mountain lake in the Chilcotin where we spend at least a couple of weeks each summer. One look at Linda's face however told me it was more than an arachnid or rodent encounter. Her Norwegian blue eyes were like saucers and flashing in pure delight.

"No silly, none of the regular stuff. On the way up to the backhouse this time, just as I got to the door I looked over my shoulder and standing at the log fence not 10 feet away was a 4-point mule deer buck. He must have been focused on feeding on the lush rosebushes while I was preoccupied with the purpose of my journey. At any rate, we both stood there with surprised looks on our faces before he batted his large brown eyes at me and proudly walked away. Wow! What a special surprise and gift for the day."

Over morning dishes, the deer story was retold in more detail and it inspired the retelling of other stories of past outhouse trips with Linda, Chelsea and myself all contributing. All of us had delightful stories to tell. What made them so enticing, both in the experience and in the retelling, was the surprise element. Either going to or coming back from the outhouse, one's mind is totally filled with the urgency of what one is about to do or the satisfaction of what one has just done. And it always seems, in our experience at least, that when nature calls nature provides. We have had more wildlife surprises going to, sitting in or returning from the outhouse than on any other occasion. So much so that at one time I seriously considered adding outhouse safaris to my repertoire of hunting techniques but that would have ruined both the outhousing and hunting.

After breakfast dishes, I found a quiet place to ruminate and write. The element of surprise in life intrigues me. Why is it that as our 21st-century Western civilization advances, that we seem so preoccupied with wringing every last element of surprise out of life? Everything we do seems to be ultimately aimed at turning life and every element in it into a controlled experience. We have computers that enable us to plan each day and forecast every outcome from each decision we make. We have communication devices that help us keep control of everyone and everything in our lives no matter the time or place. We have health planning regimens to take the physical elements of surprise out of life, living under the hope that we can somehow control every last ounce of life. We have living wills so that we can control not only how we live but also how we die and prearranged funerals so that we can control what happens after we die (heaven forbid that our families would surprise us after we are dead). We have insurance for everything we own, including the lives of our loved ones and ourselves, to provide for the unexpected: really to control the unexpected. We have birth control pills, and morning after pills for when we slip up; just so we don't have any little surprises show up in our families. We are such control freaks that when we do desire a tiny little element of surprise in our lives we choose a little gambling experience or extreme sporting encounter knowing full well that we can end the element of surprise by walking away from the game. But you know what, after all is said and done, after all the attempts to sanitize surprise out of life and control everything in life, life is still like a trip to the outhouse. Try as hard as you can, you can't control everything, and when you least expect it, SURPRISE!

This used to drive me nuts, literally. My first career was in forestry. Forestry is all about planning and controlling, both the forest and those who work in it. Being a control freak, it was right up my alley. By the time I was 25 years old I was a Woods Manager for a large Alberta forest company. I had thousands of hectares of forestland and a crew of 60 poor souls under my management. I had arrived at this job at least 10 years ahead of my time, mainly because I was willing to work 25 hours a day and eight days a week to control of all the forestry stuff and all the people stuff'. As to control I was a driven perfectionist. It was my undoing. I burned out at 27, spending several weeks in hospital trying to figure out how to cope with the reality that no matter what I did, life is still like a trip to the outhouse; when you least expect it, Surprise!

That was pushing three decades ago now and before faith in Christ. In fact, that experience was a large part of what made me seek faith in Christ. And I have to admit that when I came to faith in Christ, at first it was all about trying to cope with, no I have to be bone honest here, it was all about trying to control life's surprises. I kind of figured if Christ was Lord of all life and if I was Christ's, well that ought to render the surprise element of life at least benign. Benign surprises are "almost as good as control. Two months after I was baptized into Christ, SURPRISE! I was diagnosed with a malignancy.

The cancer I was diagnosed with for my 29th birthday was a particularly virulent fourth stage of Lymphoma. The treatment was still in its infancy in the '70s and the prognosis for one as advanced as mine was not encouraging. My doctors told me that if I took a full year of very harsh chemotherapy and two full months of massive radiation treatments over the whole upper half of my body, I would have about a 50-50 chance of survival for two years. I looked at my two dear infant boys and my beloved young wife and vowed two things: I would take every last ounce of treatment regardless of how tough it got (and it got real tough) and I would learn a different way to live.

The story of my healing from cancer is a topic for another time (a book is currently in progress titled Miracles That Have Changed Me) but the point is that for me, learning a different way to live was all about finding a way to embrace life's surprises rather than trying to purge them or control them or render them inert. Learning a different way to live was all about discovering the grace of living out of control. And here is where Christ met me in a deep and personal way. Faith in Christ became something other than just another coping mechanism for life, whether it was life's sin, guilt or fear or surprises. It was Karl Marx who held that Christianity was the opiate of the masses, and faith that is just a coping mechanism is a lot like that. The problem with opiates (and I should know for I took lots of them during my cancer experience) is they just wear off and when they do you are right back to where you started from, except worse. What I discovered was that when faith met me through Christ in a personal way, it was a companion. Perhaps the most profound name used for Christ in Scripture is the Hebrew name Immanuel, which literally means, God is your companion. This is God who gave Joshua the courage to move ahead into the immense unknown across the river. Immanuel is a name for Joshua/ Jesus that puts flesh on the divine guarantee given to Jacob, Moses, Joshua, Gideon, David, Solomon and Jeremiah: "I will be with you." The reality of the Risen Immanuel is that he is here with me, my companion through all of life. And when life is like a trip to the outhouse, filled with the unexpected ... Surprise! I am not alone.

This makes all the difference. God as my companion in Christ goes way beyond the much-touted fundamentalist formula of personal Lord and Savior that seems to me is bordering on personal fire insurance. God as my companion in Christ is about the immediacy of God. It is about intimacy with God. It is about journeying with God. It is about the experience of discovering God with me in the midst of every surprise life pitches me and finding out that in His presence, with Him as companion, I really can embrace each and every part of life, even those bombshell, shocking, bolt from the blue, astonishing revelations. One of the great learnings for me was that with the companionship of God in the midst of my cancer experience, I was able to embrace the cancer experience as part of my life while I was going through it, and with no terms, no qualifiers. It seemed to give me the capacity to speed shift through all five of Dr. Kubler-Ross's stages of dying. This confused my doctor and others in the health team who were caring for me and convinced that I was stuck at the denial stage. But it allowed me to get on with out-living cancer, living one day at a time, excited to find what God and me were going to do next in living with it. And surprise! God healed me. And so far I have logged 26 cancer free years.

Really, life is like a trip to the outhouse, chock full of surprises. The Lord is with you! Embrace each one.

Rev. David Webber is a contributing editor to the Record. He is a minister of the Cariboo, B.C. house church ministry and the author of From Under a Blazing Aspen, And the Aspens Whisper and the recently published Like a Winter's Aspen: Embracing the Creator's Fire.