The original Star
Trek came on the air when I was 10 years old. At that age I was not in charge of channel
selection in our home. Dad decided what
we would watch, or to be more accurate, what he wanted to watch. You
could say that he controlled the clicker, which in those day was, “Randy, get
up and see what’s on channel four.”
Thankfully, there were only three channels. Otherwise I might never have gotten to sit
down. Dad was never a fan of sci-fi, so
I didn’t see Star Trek until I stumbled
across it in reruns somewhere in my teen years.
By then we had fulfilled a small part of the American dream and had
become a two-TV family.
I was immediately hooked. Had it been possible to sign up for Star
Fleet Academy, I would have! I have followed
all the subsequent spin offs and the movies that still seem to come out with
regularity. I have a small collection of
Trek memorabilia, the crown of which is a poster autographed by William
Shatner, Captain James Tiberius Kirk himself!
You might think that would mean he was my favorite character, but you
would be wrong. For me, the star of the
show was the half-human, half-Vulcan science officer, Mr. Spock. The “mind meld,” “neck pinch,” and total
control of emotions thru the relentless use of logic were all, as Spock might
say, “fascinating.” But occasionally a
bit of Vulcan wisdom would drop into the dialogue. My favorite saying was, “The needs of the
many outweigh the needs of the few.”
Avid fans will recall that this phrase is a key to the end of the second
Star Trek movie, The Wrath of Khan, and
the sequel, The Search for Spock. I never thought I would apply that bit of
Vulcan wisdom to myself, but it was bouncing around in my brain in 2015.
2015 was a year I will never forget. I noticed that my left leg just wouldn’t
cooperate. I couldn’t go over a fast
walk. If I did, my left foot would just
“stomp down” as though I was trying to make a sudden stop. In the spring of that year, I went to have a
cardiac stress test done, and this “stomping” happened while I was on the
treadmill. The technicians assumed it
was some sort of cardiac event and practically lifted me off the treadmill and
planted me in a chair. My cardiologist
was mystified by all of this, but told me I had given them enough information
to say my heart was ok. Along with this
leg difficulty I seemed to spontaneously lose my balance. I think I fell down about once a month
through that year. Thankfully, I didn’t
hurt myself in this series of falls, but on one of those falls my wife tried to
catch me. Picture this: my 100-pound five-foot-three-inch wife trying
to catch all 250-pound six-foot-three inches of me. She did succeed in breaking my fall, but in
the process I kicked her, delivering what she called a “puncture wound” as well
as a significant bruise to her left shin.
That cut just wouldn’t heal, and our family doctor wanted to know how
she got such a wound. She told him the
story of my fall and that this was becoming a regular occurrence. Dr. Brown sent her home with a prescription
and a message, “Tell Pastor Corn he needs to come see me.” When I did, he quickly focused on my
reflexes. I could tell from his
reactions that I was not close to normal.
He referred me to a neurologist who had an MRI and a nerve conductivity
test done, which led him to a preliminary diagnosis: corticobasal
degeneration. He sent me for a second
opinion to Mayo Clinic, and they cautiously concluded like he did that I was
one of the 40 out of every million people who has CBD.
As I mentioned earlier, the Vulcan saying, “The
needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few,” kept coming to mind. I had been a pastor my entire adult
life. It wasn’t without its headaches,
but I can honestly say I loved being a pastor.
It was all I wanted to do, but now my ability to fulfill my
responsibilities was seriously compromised.
My voice was a constant problem.
I had difficulty controlling my emotions. I probably cried more in that year than in
the previous 20 combined. The
congregation was seeing my walking deteriorate before their eyes, and I am sure
I scared many of them by almost falling at church on more than one
occasion. I began to wonder at what
point my health problems would hurt my church.
In my pastoral life I had seen three churches, two of which I was
closely associated with, where the pastor developed life-altering health issues
but continued to hang on. Maybe these
men couldn’t afford to retire, or they thought they were not as sick as they
really were, but I knew their churches had been hurt, one crippled.
This scenario really is close to an impossible
situation for a church. They want to be
compassionate, they pray the Lord will intervene, and they certainly don’t want
to fire the pastor. I loved my
church. They had gone out of their way
to show that they loved me and were very concerned about my health. Could I have “hung on” for a few more months,
maybe a year? Possibly, but I was
getting to the point where, besides all of the other problems, I was dealing
with exhaustion. No matter how good a
night’s sleep I had, I would have to take a nap sometime during the day. It was with all of this going on that the
Vulcan aphorism haunted my thinking. The needs of the many (my church) outweigh the needs of the few (me).
Somewhere in this time frame I sat down to watch The Wrath of Khan for the umpteenth
time. The climax of that movie is where
Spock exposes himself to a lethal level of radiation to save the Enterprise. As he is dying he says to his friend, Captain
Kirk, “The needs of the many…” Kirk
responds, “outweigh the needs of the few.”
Spock then concludes, “or the one.”
I don’t want to be melodramatic, but I saw my resignation as my valuing
the church more than myself. The church
accepted all of this with tears and the pledge to help me in any way they
could. In scores of ways the church has
been a blessing to us. At our retirement
reception my wife explained our thinking to a young woman who had grown up
during our 21-year ministry at Bethlehem.
Her response was, “Do you know how noble a thing that is?” I don’t think it was noble. I think it was what I needed to do, and I was
confident the good Lord would live up to that adjective and be good to both me
and to the church I had pastored for 21 years.
He has done that in ways that are too numerous to list. The needs of the many really do outweigh the
needs of the few, or the one. A
Christian addition to Mr. Spock’s bit of wisdom might be, “The Lord cares about
the many, the few, and the one.”
