Death isn't fair, but pastor puts himself in God's care

Ray Boyens is showing me around his neat little brick bungalow, pointing out the repairs he's made in between bouts with cancer and the huge renovations he has accomplished over the years.

He's smiling through it all until he gets to the little room he's rebuilding into a hospice center. He pauses and points to the family pictures on the wall of his wife, Janet, and his children.

That's where he gets choked up. It's hard for Ray to imagine not seeing their faces. He's been told he has about six months to live, and he's trying to adjust his life to that reality.

He is a pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. He graduated from Luther Seminary in St. Paul in 1968 and went hustling off to his first parish in Hawarden, Iowa. Six months later, he was diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease, and his world began to fall apart.

For the next 33 years, Ray kept wading into his troubles. They came like bombs: reoccurrences of his cancer, five hip replacements, a shoulder replacement, a devastating divorce and, finally, a diagnosis earlier this year that he now has terminal colon cancer.

As sure as the sun sets in the West, Ray is going to die soon. Now the question is, how does a dignified guy find the strength to die with integrity? Ray is determined to find out.

We went a few blocks from his home and sat down in a coffee shop, ate a blueberry muffin and drank a cup of the house special.

Looking back, it's all beauty for Ray. He remembers that first parish in Iowa, how the people rallied around him and every morning someone from the community would be waiting outside his home to drive him to a hospital for treatment. That went on for five months, every day a different car and driver, some from his church and some from other churches.

"How can you be anything but thankful for people like that?" Ray said.

Two things sustain Ray spiritually, these days: people and faith.

"I've reconciled myself to being gone," Ray said. "I'm getting my ducks in a row. I've been ready to die for a long time, but the Lord must not be ready for me. But I go to coffee with a lot of nice people. People are so nice."

As we sit in a corner in the coffee shop, Ray's eyes scan the crowd, looking for friends. He gets a handshake from one 80-year-old man and a hug from a younger woman.

"I'm wiped out by 10 p.m.," he said. "I tell Janet we have to get home, because you can't carry me up those stairs.

"I'm lucky to be surrounded by a loving family. You're not just a physical being. We're also spiritual creations. God has been good to me. I've had a good life."

But one has to wonder how that good life came about. Ray talked about the divorce that caused him deep anguish. He said in the midst of his cancer and all the fears he carried, he was thrown into "limbo" for three years after the split with his first wife. But his faith carried him through. He met Janet, and because of her strength and Ray's determination, they have arrived at this point in life, on a very real deathwatch.

"I've made my peace with God," Ray said. "I don't wear God on my sleeve. But I'm in the front row of my church (St. Mark Evangelical Lutheran Church, 550 W. Seventh St., St. Paul) every Sunday. I don't know, sometimes you can just feel it, feel God's presence."

Ray, 64, wonders what life will bring him in the next months. He's been told he'll have mouth sores, hand and foot sores, diarrhea, a serious drop in blood count and declining energy. His doctor has told him to do the traveling he wants to do and to complete his projects. But for Ray, the biggest project is simply loving his family and leaving himself open to God's care.

"I'm moving on to something beautiful that God has planned for me," Ray says. "God will take care of me.''

Does it startle you, as it does me, that life is so unfair that beautiful people such as Ray Boyens face death and so many of us are left alive? And yet, once in a while there comes a human being who makes us think about the beauty of life and death in the same moment. That's what Ray Boyens has done for me.

Clark D. Morphew