Our HUGE and CRAZY Project: Blog Installment #2

DUN-dun-DAAAA

Welcome back folks! Last time we were with our theatre apprentice heroes, a thin ray of hope had pierced the dreary confusion that had stubbornly been plaguing their ethnographic project. What was this mysterious ray of creative light? Read on to find out...

So there we were it was mid-fall and we were still without a suitable story for our big project. Our brains were churning, churning, churning hoping to find the gem that would somehow be a perfect amalgam of social relevance, compelling story, and something we were passionate about. We wanted something great but everything we were coming up with was either boring ("Hey I know, let's interview slew of white collar accountants about their day to day struggles with the decimal! YES!) or inaccessible ("I've got it Triple Axel of Pain: Tonya Harding, 10 years later."). When suddenly we realized that there were two amazing stories happening right in front of us.

Mike, my brother in law has a best friend. We'll call him Joe. Joe is 27 and since he was 15 he has struggled with chronic arthritis in his hips. When it was bad he couldn't walk at all. For years he thought God was going to heal him and take this pain away. He prayed, and waited and prayed and waited.

It got worse and worse and finally it just got to be too much. He was in pain all the time and it was affecting him as a dad. He has a two year old daughter and as she was learning to walk he was losing his ability to walk. She was going to start to run and he wasn't going to be able to chase after her. So at 27 he went in for a rare double hip replacement surgery.

Joe and Mike have another friend we'll call him David. David's wife, we'll call her Lee started to lose her hearing when she was 10 years old. By the time she was in college she was completely deaf. Interestingly she and her mother became Christians about the same as she started to lose her hearing. So, for her mother especially it was all tied together: Her deafness, God's healing and prayer.

Because of Lee's specific type of hearing loss the first thing she lost was speech, so communication with the world just sort of broke down. She could still speak and lip-read but it took 100% of her concentration so it became really draining. After marriage it just got harder and harder to live her life like she was used to. With the possibility of a family now she was faced with the reality that she might never hear her kids. She was discouraged, exhausted and had a lot of questions about the future.

Around this time, crazily enough she met woman at her work who like her had lost her hearing at a young age but who had recently gotten cochlear implants, a relatively new technology, which had restored her hearing. Prompted by this woman's story and the circumstances of her own life Lee got more information and eventually scheduled surgery of her own.

In the fall of 2005 these two surgeries for these two friends took place less than 10 days apart.

These stories and others like them became the focus of our project.

After brainstorming more we decided that, using Joe and Lee's surgeries and as a focus, our project would deal with among other things healing, God, medical science and prayer. In a notebook we scribbled some brainstormed questions:

What is a miracle?
What is God's relationship to medical science?
What happens when healing never comes?

So there we were. We had some amazing stories, something we felt passionate about and connected to and some questions that we hoped would get people talking and asking questions of their own.

Whew! We were excited...but we had no idea the struggles and challenges that would face us as we attempted to put this thing together.

(cue even louder and longer dramatic music)

DUN-dun-DAAAAA,DUNNNN-DUNDAAA-DAAAA-DAAAAA-dun-DAAA!!!!!

(cue a different, even more charming announcer)

Join us next time to hear about these vague struggles and currently ambiguous challenges! Will our heroes be able to press forward and do ethnographic justice to these amazing stories? Will they collapse under the weight of their project? Will their marriage withstand the strain of creating artistically together? What is a healthy tasty treat that the whole family will love? Find out the answers to these new questions and more on the next chapter of Our Huge Crazy Project: Blog installment #3!