5

MAUREEN AND JULIA

“Blessed is the man who trusts in the LORD,
and whose hope is the LORD. For he shall be like a tree
planted by the waters, which spreads out its roots by the river,
and will not fear when heat comes; but its leaf will be green,
and will not be anxious in the year of drought,
nor will cease from yielding fruit.”

JEREMIAH 17:7–8 NKJV

It’s interesting to watch people’s reaction to my diagnosis. One lady responded, “Does it run in your family?”

“No!”

“Oh no!” she said. “I could get it too!”

Twenty years ago, when I found out that Maureen was dying of cancer, my first thought was, Oh no! I love her! My second thought was, Oh no! I could get it! Is God warning me? Is this a foreshadowing of my demise? Maureen was a fellow gymnast who died at age thirty-six from breast cancer.

I don’t know if she drank or smoked. My parents always told me not to drink or smoke. Drinking and smoking—they go together—always made me feel guilty because (1) I am a Christian, and they are considered worldly habits that carnal, immoral people do, and (2) they can cause cancer and our bodies are the temple of God and should be treated that way.

The Crazy, Sexy Cancer health guru Kris Carr said in an interview that when she was diagnosed at age thirty-one with inoperable lung and liver cancer, she immediately changed her lifestyle, diet, and thoughts. So did I. I watched her interviews to see if she drank or smoked or did drugs. She said she wouldn’t consider herself a “smoker” because she never bought a pack, but there was often one in her hand, and that she wasn’t a full-blown “alcoholic” but there were unhealthy substances in her body weekly and her diet was not based on nutrition but on limiting calories. Me too! Many of us spend our youth trying to be skinny, not trying to be healthy.

From her interviews, it sounds like Kris Carr is trusting in herself for her healing and her eternal destiny. I pray she sees Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. Self as God is a false teaching based on the lie that began in the garden of Eden. “‘You won’t die!’ the serpent replied to the woman. ‘God knows that your eyes will be opened as soon as you eat it, and you will be like God’” (Genesis 3:4–5 NLT).

The Bible says to treat my body as the temple of God. I did, until my puberty problems kicked in, and the eating disorders disassembled all sanity and reason and replaced my righteous thinking with lies from the enemy. Lies like “Being skinny is more important than being healthy,” “You’ll never find a husband or have a show biz career if you aren’t thin,” and “Eating less and exercising more isn’t enough—you need shortcuts, tricks.”

Maureen was one of the girls on my dad’s team, Jim Jackson’s Jumping Jacks Gymnastic Team. Dad, the ex-vaudevillian, trampolinist, juggler, Baptist deacon, PE teacher, and gym coach, took Jesus out of the church and gymnastics out of the gym.

Dad did handstands on the top of his car.

And talked about Jesus while leaning on a gymnastic apparatus.

One day, Dad called me over to the balance beam and asked me to recite John 3:16 to Maureen. I did. I felt a little embarrassed to be reciting the Bible in public but also felt filled with the power of the Holy Spirit. Like we three were on a higher plane, a spiritual plane, as the shallow, insignificant physical world tumbled about us. I think Dad’s motives were twofold: he was teaching me how to witness, but he also had a bad memory. We were sweaty and wearing leotards. Maureen was Catholic. She said she’d never heard that Bible verse before. I was proud of my dad for caring about Maureen’s soul.

Twenty years later, Maureen appeared at a comedy club where I was doing stand-up. She had a wig and a hat on. She took me in a back room, removed her wig and hat, showed me her bald head, and said, “I have cancer” as if she was still in shock. She wanted my dad’s phone number to tell him he was the first person who ever told her about Jesus and that she had just asked Jesus into her heart. The breast cancer went to her brain. She died a year later.

During that year, I sent her letters with encouraging Bible verses:

•“The Lord Jesus will transform our lowly body that it may be conformed to His glorious body” (Philippians 3:20–21 NKJV).

•“Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2 KJV).

•“Jesus said to her, ‘I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in Me, though he may die, he shall live’” (John 11:25 NKJV).

Going through my piles that I shift from one side of my garage to the other, I stumbled upon this e-mail from Maureen’s loving brother Bill. I guess my memory was right.

3/10/01

Hey Vicki,

Maureen (and I) thank you for your letter. She hung on every word, especially when it came to talking about your father and the Scripture readings. She really appreciated it (and needless to say, so did I).

Funny thing. She’s not always coherent when she’s awake, but she muttered something to me about three days ago. She was pointing out that you and your dad were the first signs to her that Jesus was real. She said she could just tell from being around your family and that the impression never left her.

A good friend of mine died from brain cancer about a year ago. He kept seeing an angel up in the corner of the room for several days. Maureen had pointed up in the corner of her bedroom and turned to me with a huge smile last week. She was motioning to say that someone was there. Hadn’t seen a smile like that on anyone since my friend’s encounter last year.

If you want to send her more encouraging Scriptures, etc., please feel free. You can e-mail them to me, and I will go read them to her. …

Bill

Mom recently dug up a copy of the letter my dad sent Maureen during this time:

Dear Maureen,

Thank you for working so hard as a gymnast, which brought me happiness, and for being an inspiration to the other girls. You are a great friend. I became a Christian when I was 30 years old and have never feared death since then, even though I have been close several times. The death of the body is not the end for us. I’ll see you again.

Julia Sweeney was on SNL with me. She did the androgynous character Pat. When she left the show, she got cancer. She wrote a play about it: God Said, Ha! Then, she wrote a play called Letting Go of God about her journey into atheism. I attended the play. She’s a great writer. We hugged. We seemed to be the only two SNL alum interested in God and life after death, albeit with exact opposite opinions. But, to me, Julia’s passion to not believe is maybe really a desperate hunger to believe. We debated God’s existence through e-mails, and I sent her my favorite study Bible.

I attempted to write a responding play, Holding on to God. My title didn’t have the punch that hers did. It didn’t have the shock value. So far all I’ve come up with as an artistic response to her artistic public dismissal of God is a song called “The Atheist.” It seems that atheists always act intellectually superior, a bit arrogant. So, I sort of played off of that.

“The Atheist”

She brags about her lack of faith

That’s how she puts it

She sticks her nose up in the air

And says there is no God up there

She does not fear the Lord because

There is no God to fear

And she talks about it all day long!

She’s telling everyone she sees

She’s got the cure to our disease

Of ignorance, she shouts with zeal,

“There is no God, He isn’t real!”

And she is now the master of her immortality

And she talks about it all day long!

There is no moral wrong or right

There is no black there is no white

She found this freedom, she has said

When she discovered God is dead,

As Nietzsche1 said, “God is a lie,”

She likes to quote that German guy

And she’s consumed with bashing

Every inch of Christianity,

She seems obsessed with Jesus

And His lack of deity,

And she talks about it all day long!

I say, “If He doesn’t exist, why do you keep talking about Him?”2

Although it’s not the reason I believe, many great thinkers believed in God: Copernicus, Bacon, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Mendel, C. S. Lewis, and Pascal. I do my apologetics in song, the only way I know how. I sang “The Atheist” on TBN in an interview with Paul Crouch Jr. around 2007.

The God debate between Julia and I became a public airwaves debate. We sparred a bit on Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher. I was on his show twelve times, always outnumbered by atheists. One time I brought my big Bible and plopped it on the coffee table in the middle of the room.

Another time Michael Shermer of Skeptic...