Faith To The Very End

The room was quiet—too quiet for a house whose doors were usually bulging with church members, and whose rafters should have been lifting with music sung and played by musicians who believed the words.

Pastor Jack was lying in his waterbed, the one his church members had given him two months before. The cancer had progressed up from his leg to his spine, and now even the smallest movement caused his bones to cry out in agony. The waterbed had been Doctor Pam’s idea. She had convinced the church board that it would help calm the pain in Pastor Jack’s bones.

She was right. But then Doctor Pam was right about so many things.

Both Pastor Jack and his wife, Deanna, had come to trust her judgment on more than just pain medicine. Her wisdom, expressed through a face filled with love, had become a calming place that inspired courage.

A Calling Interrupted

The cancer had shown up nine years earlier. Jack was 19 then, a theology student at La Sierra College in California, United States. Though he could have excelled at almost anything, he felt compelled to choose ministry.

“The Holy Spirit gave me no choice,” he laughed.

It began as a small lump behind his left knee, like a wasp sting that wouldn’t go away. He took it to the campus clinic where a nurse prescribed medication for the pain. When the bottle ran out before the pain subsided, she sent him to a doctor down the road. Three medical experts later Jack found himself on a long white bed in the hospital’s surgical suite.

“You have a very rare form of cancer,” the physician declared. “I’ve seen only a couple like this before, and I’ve learned there is only one way to beat it. The cancer, unfortunately, is in the muscle sheath, the tissue surrounding the muscles in your leg. To remove the cancer, we must remove all the muscles in your right leg.”

“Will I still be able to walk, and play golf and football?”

“Probably not football, but yes on the golf. I may be able to leave the muscle that lifts your foot, so you should be able to walk, but with a limp.”

Jack came home limping like a three-legged kangaroo.

“Walking—and living—is all about exercise,” he’d say. “Gotta lift the foot and put it down. Gotta play golf. Gotta run. It won’t be pretty, but it will keep me moving.”

We watched Jack run. He called it “hobbling,” but he still beat almost everyone else at golf.

Ministry With Joy

Deanna loved him, and after their wedding they spent a year pastoring in Escondido, California. Next they moved to Andrews University, where Jack attended the seminary. He was in constant demand as a speaker.

“Pastor Jack preaches differently,” people would chuckle. “When he asks people to choose to follow Jesus, they swarm to the front—smiling, laughing, and praising God.”

He was a leader people followed because it was fun to be with him, to work beside him, to study with him. Christian high schools invited him to conduct Weeks of Prayer and to announce varsity football games.

The cancer stayed away. “Forever dead,” they hoped.

After seminary Pastor Jack and Deanna were asked to pastor the Seventh-day Adventist congregation in Indio, California. Indio is a desert, similar to where they had both grown up near Phoenix, Arizona.

“Lots of cactus, dates, and heat.” Pastor Jack smiled. He and Deanna loved it—and they loved their church members even more.

The Happy Wanderers

One Sabbath a delegation from the Happy Wanderers church in nearby Desert Hot Springs came to the Sabbath worship service in Indio. After the service they asked to speak with Pastor Jack and Deanna.

“We’re not Seventh-day Adventists,” the head elder said, “but we need a pastor.”

The Happy Wanderers were an everything church. Most of their members lived up north during the summer because it was “too hot to live down here in the desert.” But when winter arrived in Minnesota, a whole herd of their members moved down to the welcome heat of Desert Hot Springs.

“This is our church,” the elder said. “We’re Happy Wanderers looking for heat and heaven. Would you be willing to become our pastor?”

Pastor Jack and Deanna checked with God and then added the Happy Wanderers to their ministry. For the next two years Pastor Jack preached the same sermon twice each weekend—first on Sabbath for the Adventists, and then on Sunday for the Happy Wanderers. Everyone loved God more because Pastor Jack and Deanna loved them.

And still, Jack traveled across America preaching Weeks of Prayer for Adventist academies and speaking at large youth gatherings.

“It’s Back”

In 1980 Pastor Jack and Deanna were planning to join their extended family for Christmas when Jack made a call home.

“It’s back,” he said. “And it’s nasty. The doctors tell me that I have a few months to live and that I’ll be in terrible pain until I die.”

Everyone prayed. You know the kind—those special prayer meetings during which dozens of people say the same words again and again, each time louder and with more strident pleading sounds. Elder Mostert, the president of Jack’s conference, came to Indio and ordained Pastor Jack.

“I’ve been ordained, anointed, prayed for, and cried over,” Pastor Jack said, “but I’m still dying.”

Their good friend, Doctor Pam, moved into the spare bedroom at their house. She, along with other medical experts, suggested and tried every possible cure. Nothing worked.

‘God loves you so much that He will do anything possible to get you into heaven.’

As the cancer conquered more of Pastor Jack’s body, he, Deanna, and Doctor Pam became regulars at the emergency room in nearby Palm Springs, spending many nights with Doctor James, a physician who knew little about God but much about caring.

The conference sent a young ministerial intern to help care for the church. Pastor Jack gave up the board meetings, but still preached every Sabbath and Sunday. Then, on this final Sabbath morning, he called the intern and gave him the bad news.

“I’m too sick to come in today. Please preach the sermon you have prepared and then bring the elders over to my house after the service. I want to talk with them. I want to share the sermon I have prepared for today.”

It was Pastor Jack’s last sermon.

“What I want you to hear and remember,” he said, “is that God loves you so much that He will do anything possible to get you into heaven. Trust Him. Listen to Him. Follow Him. Love Him in return. We will meet again there. Soon.”

One More Witness

“I want to die tonight, right here in my own waterbed,” he told Deanna and Doctor Pam after the elders left.

“No,” Deanna said a couple of hours later. “We need to go to the emergency room in Palm Springs.”

“No!” Pastor Jack said. “I want to die at home, right here, in my own bed.”

“No!” Doctor Pam said. “Remember Doctor James in the emergency room. He needs to hear you tell him about God once more.”

Jack lay quiet for a long time, then whispered, “OK. Let’s go.”

The ambulance came, and Dr. James was waiting at the emergency room. They took Pastor Jack to a private room and hooked him up to machines that beeped and blinked above him. Moments later Dr. James came in to do a procedure designed to give his patient a few more hours of life.

Deanna stood at the head of the bed, Doctor Pam at the foot. Dr. James stood beside his patient and looked deeply into Pastor Jack’s face. No one remembers how long they stood there, but finally Dr. James sighed deeply, put his instruments down, leaned over, and patted Pastor Jack’s hand.

“I’ve heard him speak often about his best friend Jesus,” the doctor whispered. “Tonight he even looks like Jesus. Tonight I believe.”

Then Dr. James—the wise, caring, newly committed-Christian physician—walked quietly out the door, sat heavily into a hallway chair, and cried.

A Planned Reunion

A small gravestone lies on the side of a hill in Loma Linda, California. Two names are etched into the granite. The top one, Jack Sherman Duerksen, identifies this as the place where my brother has chosen to meet the angels who are guarding his grave. The second name is Deanna’s.

A different brand of cancer caught her a few years later, and she asked me to be sure she would be placed in the same grave as her beloved Pastor Jack.

“We’ve planned a reunion,” she told me from her hospital bed. “Jack, me, and a band of angels. We’re going home together.”

If you visit the hillside grave, listen closely—the angels are singing joyful songs.