The central theme of this episode revolves around the profound inquiry posed by a listener, Jen, regarding the process of reconciling oneself with the reality of living a life that diverges from one’s original expectations. Dr. Ray Mitsch articulates his reflections on this notion of "coming to terms," emphasizing that it is not merely a static acceptance but a dynamic and ongoing engagement with one’s circumstances, particularly in the context of his experience with cancer. He elucidates that the essence of living authentically often necessitates a re-examination of one's narrative, suggesting that the act of co-authoring one's life story involves both acknowledging the current reality and resisting the urge to succumb to despair. Throughout the discussion, Dr. Mitsch underscores the significance of presence and gratitude in the face of adversity, positing that true fulfillment is found in the richness of the present moment rather than in the comparison of one's life to an idealized narrative. This episode invites listeners to reflect deeply on their own journeys and the narratives they construct, encouraging an exploration of the complexities inherent in the human experience.

Links referenced in this episode:

• drraymitsch.substack.com
• bit.ly/mondayswithmitsch26
• sgi-net.org

Welcome to Mondays with Mitch where you bring the questions and I do my best to find an answer without taking an hour to get there.

We'll talk about life, faith, relationships, suffering and what it means to be human.

I don't promise to have all the answers, but after 40 plus years of listening to people and making plenty of mistakes on my own, I may have a little perspective and some measure of wisdom.

So bring your questions, your curiosity and your sense of humor.

I'm Mitch.

Let's get started.

Well, welcome everybody.

I'm glad that you are joining me for the episode number two of Mondays with Mitch.

And yes, it is a little late.

I would admit that I was afflicted with, as you could probably tell from my voice, I was afflicted with some disease.

I am immune suppressed because of all the cancer drugs I was on.

So I was debating whether or not I would have the energy to pull this off for Monday evening and still release it on a Monday so that I can be true to the title of the podcast.

And I, I think, I think we're going to be okay.

I think I'm going to be okay.

So thanks so much for joining me.

This is the first opportunity we have to tackle a question or I have, it's not a we.

And so I, I intended to do that.

And that will give you a little bit of an idea of what I had in mind for doing a podcast like this.

I have mentioned before that so many times when I've been in class.

Questions are what really brings things out of me and observations and other things like that.

So we hit on or I hit on this from somebody planting this idea in my head and I thought, yeah, why not?

I certainly am the last to say that I belong in the same category as, as a 25 year old edition of Tuesdays with Maury.

But for what it's worth, that's what we're really going to be about.

And so I've got a question and the way we're going to do this is at the end of the podcast.

I'll give you a link and if you want to submit a question for me to tackle and, and do some free associating about in terms of life and living and suffering and different stories and things like that, then have at it.

I have two presently there may be more to come because of my answer to this one tonight, but this will give you a little bit of an idea of how I want to try to do this.

And then when I have an answer or an answer, let's hope I find an answer.

But when I get a question or two, then I will launch the podcast again.

So it could be in two weeks, it could be in a month.

Some of that is predicated on what my energy levels are given, the changing state of my medication.

But until that time, let's dive in, shall we?

So I got a question from Jen in Georgia and the question goes this way.

I'm wondering how you've come to terms, not saying you have, with this not being the story you thought you'd be living or that you deserve.

And that is indeed a really good question.

I think probably all the questions I get are great.

Jen gets the distinction of being the first one.

But the thing I would point out whenever I get questions like this is there are a variety of presuppositions or assumptions that are being made in any question.

And that's not picking on her or anyone else.

And something that occurs to me when I say that is that if anyone is interested and has a question and they want to hear my thoughts on it, and you notice what I do with this question and you think, I'm not sure I want him to tear it apart quite that specifically, try to avoid that.

I, I am.

I have come to realize as I've sat and talked to people for as long as I have that words really do matter.

We don't use words accidentally.

Now, we might think we do, but we really don't.

I, we use them pretty intentionally and they typically reveal assumptions we're making.

And this kind of question is really no different.

So one of the things that catches my attention in a question like this is Jen asks, I'm wondering how you've come to terms, not that you have, not saying you have.

And my first question would be back is, so what does it mean to come to terms with something?

What kind of terms are we talking about here?

Because the terms can be a variety of things.

Does it mean acceptance?

I did, my last podcast was about acceptance.

It doesn't mean that I've resigned myself to the outcome, whatever that is.

It really is not very clear at all.

We get this weird notion about acceptance that somehow it's saying it's okay, what's going on, and is that coming to terms or condoning or providing approval for something that is repulsive to the person and to me specifically.

So coming to terms is actually a dynamic thing.

If we're talking about coming to terms with and living with the reality of what I am in and what I experience, then that's a day to day, sometimes Even hour to hour answer certainly has been for me today I'm looking down the gun, if you want to call it that.

It's not really a gun, but I'm looking down the gun at my first class since I retired and I have had a lot of questions and this is really all part of this coming to terms idea.

I've had a lot of questions come to mind as I've spent my time with God and with myself about how has cancer changed me?

How will it change how I teach?

How will it change the things that I talk about or I point out or I.

Whatever that would mean.

And I mean it has, there's no way it can't.

Right?

And that's, that's a coming to terms of what it is.

And so, so much of what I have written in my substack, which is Dr. Raymitch.substack.com in case you were wondering.

What I've written in there is actually me coming to terms on a day to day basis of what I live with.

And, and it, it's I, Every, every moment, every time I get up in the morning, there's a choice to be made about whether to get up or not, whether to stay in bed because I don't have really the energy to feel like I really want to get out of bed or any of those things.

And all of that actually is a part of coming to terms with what life is now.

Because my life now is completely different.

Different than what I anticipate.

I suspect some of the question is pointing to that end is I thought it was going to go one way.

I didn't really choose retirement.

I didn't really want to retire, but it was pretty clear in terms of the impact.

And since that time, since I even wrote that on my sub stack, since that time, it has become even more clear of the impact that living with cancer has specifically with the drugs I'm taking.

The drugs I'm taking have a direct and inevitable impact on my body.

Nobody's going to debate that point.

But then it also has an impact on my motivation to try to mitigate against the impact on my body.

So see all of these things in my mind when I hear a question like this is, is coming to terms with, is living with it,.

Is living.

With it required to come to terms with it?

Because really, I mean the phrase itself comes from coming to terms in terms of surrender.

And I have no intention of surrendering.

Some days I do, some days I don't have it to do it.

And is it a Surrender.

No, it's standing down for the next battle is really what it ends up being.

So coming to terms is a phrase we use a lot of.

Even when we're talking about grief, we.

We talk about having closure.

Well, I'm not sure we ever get closure when it comes to grief.

And I'm not sure I'm ever going to have closure with the fact that I live with cancer.

I.

And I don't.

There are some days, particularly when I'm.

I'm hanging out with my grandsons or I'm playing with, you know, I make a mean farm complex with Duplos.

And when I'm doing that, it's like I quietly say to myself, I'm living in this moment, but at the same time, it's like, I don't have cancer.

This just can't really be happening.

And that's terms, right?

That is the term.

So that's the first part of the question.

The other thing that she mentions is with this not being the story you thought you'd be living, and what story has been written or is being written is really the question.

And the reality is I'm co author.

God's writing my story.

My Abba is writing my story, but I'm also an author.

I am the character in the play, if you will, or in the story.

And this isn't how I had it written.

I'm not sure that I had it written.

I have a tendency, from my own background and my own history of holding on pretty loosely to a lot of things, including the future, and trying my best to live in the present when I have it, rather than living in a future that I hope for.

Because in a lot of cases, if we're writing the story and we say, yeah, God's part of it, yes, of course, he's the ultimate author.

But in reality, we're living like we are writing the story.

I'm not revolting at the story I'm in.

I.

The story I'm in is one that I didn't know had a chapter in cancer and that it would be that would this way.

But I don't find myself.

Feeling a whole lot of grief about what my future might be, because I am doing.

I'm learning something new.

And what I'm learning new right now, I said this to a friend of mine at lunch the other day, is that the one gift, if you want to put it that way, that cancer has given me is it has sharpened my attention to the present and relishing what I actually am in and experiencing Is that part of the story and how it's being written?

Yeah, it is.

Actually.

It doesn't predict anything.

What I write in my story or what part I play in co authoring my story, which is something that Dan Ellender talks about in his book, is not a prediction or is not a demand of how things should be because I'm, I'm an active character in it.

And so it really isn't.

It not being the story is not something that I really consider much because I accept the story as it is rather than trying to compare it to what it should be.

And I think that's usually where people, myself included, I actually recently, over the last few days, I have found myself being challenged at, with a certain level of discouragement because it was like, I, I thought that I would be better, to be really blunt, I would be better at managing these symptoms than I have been.

And that's discouraging.

I, I, it doesn't mean that I thought I was better than anybody else or anything like that, but I've tackled some pretty significant things over the course of my own life history, including falling off a roof and pain and significant interpersonal things and all that.

And I thought that was a resume for me to be able to handle this quote, unquote better.

But see, so many of our questions around this issue, and whether it's, it doesn't have to be cancer.

It can be whatever the challenge is that you're facing, or whatever crisis it is you're facing, because a lot of things, crisis has this way of challenging us with questions that we haven't had to answer before.

And so the challenge in all of that is always a comparison with how it should be.

And my next post in the series I've been doing in substack was I asked the question, where do you live?

And my first one was, and using the infinity loop is the past and what about the future?

And that's got a lot of should in it about how things should be.

The problem is should has a lot of shame connected to it because most of the time, because I can't hit that target, then there's something fundamentally wrong with me and that my students hear it.

The students that I'm going to start talking to tomorrow in shame and Grace are going to hear it, is that should is the ugly cousin of shame because it creates a target that can't be hit.

And then we blame ourselves for something inherently wrong with us because we don't hit it.

So, which takes me to the other part of this question.

And that is this not being the story you thought you'd be living or that you deserve and deserve has an element of entitlement to it.

What do I deserve?

Do I deserve happiness?

Do I deserve not having cancer?

Do I do what?

What do I deserve?

And that's not that.

Me saying that isn't to throw shade at anybody who uses that word, but it usually is a trigger word for me being a counselor that I hear, because I don't deserve this.

Well, who determines what you deserve or don't deserve?

Obviously I do.

And since I determine that I don't deserve it and then it happens, something fundamentally is wrong.

And yet what I have discovered during this relatively short journey of nine months confronting and living with cancer is what I deserve or don't deserve is fairly irrelevant.

What I have and what I live with is.

And I think that's an important aspect of that.

So I think we have to be careful when we start talking about deserve, because in, in a lot of cases, it carries with it a sense of how things should be, what I should be, what I am entitled to because of my standing.

Now, you say that to most any Christian and most people are going to say, well, I don't deserve anything.

Well, okay, but if you're a child of God and you have been loved by the Father and by Jesus, there's a certain level of freedom I have in exercising my approach and my relationship to God that looks like I think I deserve it versus I'm being gifted it.

And I think there's a part of that in there that I think we have to take into account.

So it's a great question.

Excuse me.

I love the question.

This is the kind of question that allows me to kind of wander with some of my thoughts about that.

So many, many thanks to Jen for her question.

I have another one coming.

I'd like to try to tackle two of them at a time.

But this one gives me the greatest opportunity to give you an idea of what this is going to look like and whether or not you would be interested in listening to this.

But.

So that's, that's kind of it for now.

Thanks so much for listening.

If you do have questions or if I've said something that triggers a question, here's where you can find the form on the website, the Stained Glass International website.

You can find a form here and type your form in, add some context if you'd like to do that for free, for me to tackle it and wander around talking about it.

But the, the website or the link And I'll put it in.

If you're watching this on video, I'll put it on the sidebar so you can see it.

But it is bitly bit dot ly mondayswithmitch 26.

So bitly bit dot L, E, L, Y, forward slash Mondays with Mitch.

And that way then you can, you got the form, you can fill it out, hit submit, and I will get it and I will tackle it and I'll do as many of the questions as I possibly can.

And if you send them in, then I'll, I'll be sure to do that.

Also, I would mention to be sure to check out the Courage To Be Known podcast.

I'm calling it C2BK, and it is another of the podcasts.

And, and you're probably wondering, good grief, this person has stage four cancer and he's doing two podcasts.

Well, I'm not dead yet.

And so I, yeah, why not?

But I, it, it really goes to a fundamental belief of mine that in order to be known, that I have to find the courage to allow people to know me.

And this is just stories of people that have walked this journey and what it's like for them and what do they experience and what are the highs and what are the lows.

And any suggestions or encouragement that they have to offer will be that.

And I have a new guest coming up in a week or so, so stay tuned.

You can find it on itunes, on Spotify, on I I Heart Radio, or the podcast there, I think, but you can find it there wherever you listen to podcasts.

The other thing, just to reiterate, I said this at the beginning.

I am still very much afflicted by the side effects of my cancer.

Treatment is going to take a while.

If you've been following me at all on the sub stack, I have decided to stop treatment.

So if you followed that at all, you will realize that I stopped treatment.

But that doesn't mean it stops impacting me.

And I probably have another good six to eight months of effects from the medications I've been taking.

They are extremely powerful.

They shut down the testosterone in my body and all the factors that come out of that you can, you can see or you can understand at some level, I suppose.

So the regularity of me releasing these podcasts will roughly be monthly for C2BK.

And when I have at least a couple of questions, I'll answer those for the Mondays with Mitch.

And the more questions you put up there, the more I'll be motivated to do something.

The last couple of things I'LL mention to you.

One is if you want to watch the video, you can.

It will be on YouTube under the Stained Glass International banner.

But we need your engagement and involvement in what I'm trying to build here at Stained Glass International.

So I need two things from you, my listeners.

I'll review on Apple Podcasts or anywhere you listen to.

It will move us up in the rankings for people to find us and find what I'm talking about and the kinds of guests I might have.

Secondly, if you feel like these podcasts or substack is is worth supporting financially, please consider partnering with us to build a future for the next generation of young people living authentically with themselves, engaged intentionally with others, and actually encountering Jesus in the context he provided, which was relationship with others and him.

So one of the visions for SDI is to build outposts for the heart that are led by intentional leaders that provide the context for not only the propositional truth that we find in Scripture, but also the embodied truth in our relationships with each other.

And that's the vision for SGI to take apart the stained glass so we can actually be seen.

So if, if you're so inclined, we would be ever so I would be ever so grateful to support this we I I have a scholarship fund for people that want to get involved in the silent retreats.

I'm not really sure where the future is going to take us in doing the silent retreats and what the frequency is.

The only way you can keep up to date is visit the website, join our community, and you will hear plenty of what's going on there and other things I would I have wanted for quite some time to do training for leaders to lead groups.

Well, and that's all of these things ultimately, whether we like it or not, involve finances and money to be able to provide it.

And so that's a big part of this.

And then finally, if you're interested in how I'm processing or thinking about any of this stuff or feeling about my journey through cancer that I'm living through, feel free.

Please check the substack subscribe.

You can you can be a paid subscriber.

5 Bucks is less than a cost of a latte, but you can, you can be a paid subscriber and that would support my writing in that regard too.

You can find it at Dr. Ray Mitchell, all lowercase, all one word.substack.com that's where you can find it.

So again, if you want to send questions in, send it to Bit Ly bitly is what it spells forward slash mondayswithmitch26.

And you can do it there.

Or if you want to, just go to the website sgi-net.org and look under Resources.

You'll see Mondays with Mitch, and you'll see the the form to fill out along the way.

And so I, I think I think that's it for for tonight, still Monday.

So and I'm, as far as I can tell, I'm still Mitch.

So thanks so much for joining me.

I look forward to answering questions and engaging the dialogue.

And if this takes off and people are interested, we might even consider doing a live one through substack where I can answer live questions.

And we can do that as well.

But we're going to do it asynchronously now for the time being.

So that's it.

Thanks so much for joining me.

And as always, love you.

Later.

Bye.