August 1989 was a warm month to hear chilling news. The morning Richard Strauss and his wife, Mary, strode into the doctor’s office, they were braced for bad news but not for the grim journey on which they were about to embark.
Just six months earlier, while tussling with his grandkids, Richard felt one of his ribs pop. The pain was a nuisance but tolerable, and he mentioned it to Mary but pushed the pain aside. A few months later, while squeezing a metal trash can to cram the lid back on, Richard felt the same pop and pain. He dismissed the incident as he had earlier.
Summer soon arrived, and Richard, pastor of Emmanuel Faith Community Church in Escondido, California, was speaking at Camp of the Woods in New York. When he visibly struggled to lift a suitcase into the car trunk, Mary urged him to see a doctor. Only weeks later, while reaching for his Bible to preach at a conference in Oregon, he felt another rib pop. He saw a doctor right away and immediately was marched through a battery of tests.
“We’re fairly certain,” the doctor said that August morning, “you have a disease called multiple myeloma.”
“Is that cancer?” Richard asked.
“Cancer of the bone marrow.”
“What’s the prognosis?”
“It’s treatable, but as far as we know, it’s not curable.”
The disease, he learned, softens the bones, causing them to decompose and become vulnerable to breaking. The bones heal very slowly. The popping Richard felt in his ribs was like the breaking of a soft chicken bone.
One physician warned: “You could break a bone by unscrewing a lid off a jar.” Or by sneezing. Or by getting out of bed. Or by stepping off a curb. Or by slamming a car door. Death inexorably approaches, either by kidney failure (because the kidneys cannot carry off all the calcium of the decomposing bones) or by infection (because the body’s immune system is being destroyed).
When first diagnosed, Richard, affectionately called “Doc” by his staff and friends, read everything he could on the disease. His daughter-in-law, Lois, a nurse, showed him an article in one of her nurse’s manuals. Richard sat at the kitchen table, reading about his new foe. When he finished, he said to his wife, “Mary, come help me to bed. I don’t think I want to move until I die.”
He was kidding but not laughing. Doc admitted to his wife, “It scares me to death to think of what kind of pain could be in my future.”
For thirty-one years of ministry, Doc had lived what he preached–no small feat in itself. But he now would face a more formidable challenge. The doctors promised him only two to four years to live.
DOC AND GOLIATH
The disease played dirty from the start. Thirteen years prior to discovering the myeloma, a spot on Doc’s forehead was diagnosed as skin cancer. It wasn’t life threatening but needed attention. After the surgery, while the stitches were being taken out, the doctor pressed lightly the spot where the skin cancer had been. Doc yelled in pain, startling the doctor.
The doctor thought the pain strange, but since that was the exact spot of the skin cancer he brushed off Doc’s concerns: “You’ll be okay.”
The pain didn’t go away. Whenever Doc would bump his head near the spot of his skin cancer, he would writhe in pain. He finally saw another dermatologist who requested another biopsy, but the results were, again, negative. No trace of skin cancer was found.
Yet after the multiple myeloma was discovered and Doc was x-rayed to pinpoint where the myeloma had spread, the oncologist said, “The myeloma is in your legs, your arms, and your ribs. There’s also a small spot in your skull.”
“Really?” Doc said. “Where?”
The physician pointed to the exact spot on his forehead where he had skin cancer thirteen years earlier. When he returned to the dermatologist, Doc relayed the bad news and confessed, “I was a little mad at you. I thought you should have known what was wrong with me. But then I realized you had no way of knowing.”
That was just like Doc–forthright but gentle, preferring to be at peace with all men. He didn’t exude confidence and considered himself an unlikely candidate to preach.
“To this day,” he said, four months prior to his death, “it blows my mind that I stand up in front of all these people on Sunday morning and speak God’s Word. When I was in college, I couldn’t speak to a speech class of sixteen people. I stuttered and stammered, and my palms got sweaty.”
While at Wheaton College, Doc was a bookworm. Friends remember him on the back of his roommate’s motorcycle, hugging his briefcase, zooming through campus. Several years before Doc’s bout with cancer, a former college classmate visited Emmanuel Faith Community Church with a group of musicians. When she saw the size of the church (4,000 attenders on a Sunday), she exclaimed, “Do you mean Richard is the pastor of this church?”
Even in his golf game, Doc was modest. He played regularly with a group of church men on Saturday mornings. To get back in his study by 10:30 A.M. to polish his sermon, he would be in the first foursome to tee off. But Doc didn’t relish teeing off first, especially with the whole group looking on. The hazard off the first tee was a lake.
Because of his nervousness and the fact that he usually wasn’t warmed up yet, invariably he’d put his drive into the lake. His buddies eventually named it “Strauss Lake” because he had sliced so many golf balls in there.
But the myelema would slow Doc’s golf game. The first year after being diagnosed, Doc’s body was bombarded with chemotherapy, and by the third year of his illness, his hair fell out. When it returned, his hair was curly. Mary began giving him a shot three times a week: Interferon, a drug to buttress his immune system. This caused him to sleep more, but Doc still got up each morning and went to work.
Doc’s body began to deteriorate significantly. Originally five foot eight inches tall, he would lose three inches of height due to compressed fractures in his spine, the source of much of his pain. Its pounding presence wore down his perseverance.
Doc admitted that throughout his life he’d been susceptible to discouragement and that having cancer only made things worse. “It doesn’t take a lot for me to say, ‘Oh boy. Do I have to put up with this again?’ ” Doc said to a group of missionary candidates. “Every time something new happens–like the pain in my ribs this week–I have to work through it again. I’ll think I’m making progress, but then I realize, ‘No I’m not. I’m deteriorating.’ “
But Doc could still joke. A year before his death, a man in the church gave Doc and Mary a new car, a burgundy Nissan Infiniti. But Doc, because of the high doses of morphine taken for pain, wasn’t able legally to drive. Shortly before he died, Doc would at last drive the Infiniti, having weaned himself off the morphine to fifteen milligrams a day. He and Mary would banter back and forth that soon one of them would be in eternity and the other in the Infiniti.
HARVESTING HOPE
His situation worsening, Doc was encouraged to pursue a stem-cell transplant, a recent development in medical science that would extend his life. The transplant involves harvesting the patient’s stem cells, which, like a factory, manufacture baby bone marrow for the body. Baby bone marrow is not poisoned with myeloma like the adult bone marrow. Once the stem cells are harvested, the baby bone marrow is frozen and then reintroduced into the patient’s system a few months later.
The transplant promised to extend Doc’s life a few more years, so he contacted a research hospital in Tucson, Arizona, but was rejected. He was over 55, and, they said, too old. He was finally accepted into the transplant program at the Arkansas Cancer Research Center in Little Rock, Arkansas, an internationally known myeloma treatment center.
In October 1992, Doc and Mary prepared for the first part of the treatment–the harvesting of his stem cells. It was just like Doc to plan his life–even his dying–around his preaching, so, along with some friends, he and Mary first drove to Phoenix, Arizona, where Doc planned to speak to a convention of Christian businessmen. After he preached, they would fly to Little Rock for the first phase of his treatment.
Shortly before he died, Doc recalled that time as the most painful of his ordeal: “The worst pain I’ve had was shortly before the harvest of the stem cells. There were times in the hotel room in Phoenix when I wanted to scream.”
The October harvest of Doc’s stem cells was successful, so he was scheduled three months later for a return visit to Little Rock for the transplant, a dangerous procedure from which one of ten don’t survive. During the transplant, the body is bombarded with chemotherapy to kill off as much of the myeloma as possible. In effect, the large doses of chemotherapy bring the patient near death; the white blood cell count is brought so low the body has no defense against infection. At this critical point, the harvested stem cells are reintroduced to the body. Then the body is resuscitated with medication.
Doc sailed through the first transplant in January of 1993. The doctors held out hope that with the second transplant, Doc would gain a two-year lease on life. The second transplant would be in September.
Doc preached the Sunday before he and Mary left for the second transplant. Everyone looked forward to his return, expecting Doc to breeze through as he had before. When Doc said to Mary, “We should pick out a burial plot before we leave,” she replied, “We’ll have time when we come back.”
When they arrived in Little Rock, Doc’s scheduled treatment was delayed. “I want you to have full body radiation,” the head of the transplant program said to Doc, “and I want it done by a different person than I had previously planned. We’re going to put this whole thing off a week.”
This frustrated Doc. His body was throbbing, each new day more painful than the last. “Why wasn’t the doctor more on the ball?” he would ask Mary. They retreated to a Little Rock hotel and, for a week, waited. When his treatment finally commenced, his body being bombarded this time with radiation, Doc began to slip. He was struggling to breathe, so the doctors put him on a ventilator and transferred him to the ICU. The medication wasn’t reviving him.
Mary called their four sons, urging them to fly to Little Rock. Even the two missionaries in Africa–one a theology professor and the other a pilot–were in the States and able to stand by their dying father’s bedside. By the time all four sons arrived, however, Doc could only squeeze their hands in recognition, his life ebbing quickly away.
Only hours later, Doc passed from earth to glory, his shrunken shell no longer racked with pain, freed at last from his torment.
PREACHING IN THE DARK
Throughout Doc’s illness, he continued to preach until the end, speaking four times each weekend. He delegated many of his pastoral responsibilities, but he stayed at the helm to preach.
As his body weakened, Doc, wearing a wig to cover his baldness caused by the chemotherapy, was forced to use a stool when he preached, something he hated. “I would like to stand up to preach, but I physically can’t do that,” he said publicly. “My back hurts after I stand for about ten or fifteen minutes … But the Lord seems to use me in spite of it.”
Even throughout his illness, Doc wrote out his sermons six to seven weeks in advance, an ingrained habit from his many years of digging into God’s Word. For thirty-five years, he had relentlessly preached the Scripture he so dearly loved. One person remarked that Doc’s particular preaching gift was his ability to take the truths of Scripture and “put the cookies on the lower shelf.”
The last sermon he wrote but never got the chance to preach was titled “Following God in the Dark”:
“We believers sometimes find ourselves in situations marked by danger, difficulty, and uncertainty. We don’t really know what’s happening. It would be a comfort for us to be assured that Somebody who knows more than we know is looking out for us and directing us. If we knew that, we might be willing to trust him and follow him even in the dark places when we have no idea where he’s taking us.
“Maybe you’re facing a time of uncertainty, indecision, and apprehension right now, or a time of trial and difficulty. You don’t understand what’s happening, and you’re wondering where God is in all of it. You’re tempted to compromise your biblical convictions and work it out any way you can, regardless of what God’s Word says about it. Don’t do it. Keep on doing what God wants you to do. That’s when he makes his presence felt like at no other time with new, effective power, and with fresh, exciting promises.”
LEADING WHILE DYING
Doc instinctively knew the pressure his imminent death had on the church as an organization. Four years had passed since his diagnosis had promised death. Throughout his illness, the church and its staff were overwhelmingly supportive. Yet near the end, he sensed an awkward restlessness: When would their pastor die? Who would take over the reins? What’s next? No one ever voiced these questions, of course, but the church was obviously waiting for his passing.
In an article he sent to LEADERSHIP four months before his death, Doc wrote, “How long I should continue to minister is a question that creeps into my mind occasionally. One of my fears is that I will try to hang on too long-beyond my effectiveness. … I don’t want to hang on just for the sake of hanging on. I pray that God will clearly show me when to relinquish my position of leadership in the church.
“And periodically I remind the people around me of their obligation to hold me accountable and tell me honestly when they think it is time for me to back off.”
Along with several others, he created a transition team that planned for the church’s life beyond his. DeLisle Calac, a member of that team, recalls Doc’s last days, “At the end, Doc realized more than anybody else how sick he really was. In those last transition team meetings, we sensed an urgency that he wanted to get in motion the mechanics of the change.
“Many times Doc said to us, ‘I want you to tell me when I should quit. I don’t want to hurt the church, and I’d like for you to be the ones to tell me.’ But we never had to tell Doc that.”
Nor did anyone have to tell Doc to continue to shepherd. The dying don’t have much time, yet Doc still made time for others. He was never what you might call a people person; he preferred the realm of ideas, especially the great truths of the Bible, to mingling with people. His ministry orbited around his study. Yet even while suffering with the knowledge of his mortality, Doc was sensitive to the people around him.
“There are moments,” Doc wrote to LEADERSHIP, “when, quite candidly, I think, Leave me alone; I don’t want to be bothered. I have enough problems of my own.”
Yet he still was considerate of others. The last conversation Doc had with his aging father was a phone call only a few weeks before Doc’s final trip to Arkansas. He had called to tell his father that he had been praying for him.
“Thanks,” his father replied, “but things are going well.”
“I’ve been praying extra for you,” Doc said. “I’ve got four married sons myself, and I’ve recently thought, How would I feel as a father if one of my sons were suffering and dying. Then I thought, That’s how my dad must feel. So I’ve got you on my prayer list, Dad.”
THE FRAGRANCE OF FAITHFULNESS
A year and a half prior to his death, Doc recorded a song in honor of his wife’s birthday in the studio of Rodger Strader, a Christian musician who attends the church. His music often buoyed Doc’s spirits. “When I get blue,” he said, “I sit in my favorite blue recliner and put on a tape of Rodger Strader.”
While at Rodger’s studio, Doc was encouraged to sing and record another song, one of his favorites: “If We Could See Beyond Today.” It was played at his memorial service, attended by more than 4,000. Stanza three is the testimony of a servant who finished the race well:
If we could see, if we could know, we often say.
But God in love a veil doth throw across our way.
We cannot see what lies before.
And so we cling to Him the more.
He leads us till this life is o’er.
Trust and obey.
Doc’s life verse was 2 Corinthians 2:14: “But thanks be to God who always leads us in His triumph in Christ, and manifests through us the sweet aroma of the knowledge of Him in every place” (NASB).
That fragrance surrounded Doc’s life–and death. As a dying preacher, he did what all preachers should do: he preached, he led, he cared. He fulfilled his calling.
Copyright (c) 1995 Christianity Today, Inc./LEADERSHIP Journal
lewin94mrw4L11265818
Copyright © 1994 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
