Weekly Article

Right now, our lives are filled with hope! Hope is something that we both know a lot about.

Many of you know that in 2009 Jim was diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis, a disease that we never heard of and we bet many of you probably never heard of, and in September of 2013 Jim received a single lung transplant.

During this period of time, we have done our share of hoping. Hoping that the doctors were wrong with his diagnosis, hoping there was a cure or some magic pill he could take to get this disease in remission, hoping that his time on the lung transplant list would not be long and hoping that the transplant would be successful. These were just a few of the things we were hoping for.

Our hoping did not stop when Jim had his transplant on September 22, 2013.  We hoped that our post-transplant journey would be without problems, and for the most part they were, until 2019. 

In August 2019 Jim’s body had finally figured out he has an organ in his body that did not come with the original package, and now is trying to reject that organ. He is going through chronic rejection and again we are hoping the doctors are wrong… they aren’t; hoping there is a cure or some magic pill available… there isn’t.  Our hopes now, have reverted back to another successful lung transplant. 

We hope that by sharing our story about our transplant journey we can help others deal with their own transplant journey and make others aware of what this disease really is. We continue to hope for a cure for this disease so others will not have a similar journey.  

We have been fortunate, not only to be able to share our stories locally, but also have been able to travel to other states with the hope that sharing our stories may have helped others.

There are many other things that we have hopes for, not just from the medical/health areas. We have hopes for our country, hopes for our families, hopes for teachers and students as they strive to keep their students safe. We have hopes that we may be able to travel again. We even had hopes that the Phillies would have a good season.

We have hopes that we are all able to remain safe and healthy. We even have hopes about church.

It has been almost eight months since we walked through the doors at Derry. None of us had envisioned that this pandemic would have or could have lasted this long and that our new normal had been drastically changed.

We have hopes that we will soon be able to meet in person as a congregation to hear God’s word. Watching a service via live stream is not quite the same as sitting in the pew. We hope that we as a church are able to uphold our commitments to our mission partners during this Covid-19 pandemic.

Although we are not able to be together, we hope and pray Derry will continue to find innovative ways to continue to grow as a church until such time that we can all be safely together again.

Next Sunday is National Donor Sabbath and we hope that as a congregation we all might be organ donors! If not, we hope that you might consider becoming one.

We hope that we as a congregation will be able to continue our financial commitments to Derry so that these many programs and more will be able to continue.

Although we shared many of our hopes without using the word wish, we don’t want you to worry. Closer to the time, we will … WISH YOU A MERRY CHRISTMAS!