The Faith Collective

A miracle. I wanted a miracle. And I believed God could give us one. It didn’t come in the way I expected or at the time I initially wanted, but it is unfolding in God’s perfect way. A great healing is occurring through small miracles. When my oldest child was a baby, she developed symptoms consistent with food allergies.

Suddenly my world, as I knew it, crashed in around me. Without warning, I was engulfed by an enormous wave swell. I found out I was pregnant. I was scared. I couldn’t breathe. I felt the pull of the water. I was sinking. I tried to swim my way to the surface to get some air. I judged myself really harshly and  wondered how I could be so reckless. I felt alone. Hopeless. Faithless.

My life is a mess. LITERALLY. So messy I can’t even describe it, and it really stresses me out. There are so many times when I look around and just see my failures. As I sit there on my couch completely overwhelmed and out of control, I hold on to that thought of a loving and concerned Father, and push just enough of my failures off my shoulder to find the strength to pray.

Many times in life, I’ve found myself in the midst of a metaphorical fog, desperately needing heavenly navigation. The diagnosis came in as choriocarcinoma (cancer of the placenta) and I started chemo immediately. However, as time went on we realized we weren’t dealing with a typical presentation of choriocarcinoma. It was an extremely rare presentation of an extremely rare form of cancer and though my doctors were doing their best, they didn’t know what was going on.

I married a wonderfully, golden soul of a man, one I had known since my childhood, and fell in love with him in the most unlikely of circumstances. My husband had a past of struggling with the disease of addiction and had been through a lot. I was not naive to the daily effort he would have to put forth in order to maintain his already 4 year sobriety. This decision was one of diligent study and prayer despite the concern and doubt from so many outside of our relationship. 

In April, 2016, we got a new doctor who sent Woody to UMC for his next hospitalization. He was diagnosed with advanced ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease). Now he had 2 diseases with no cure. God was the reason I could do everything and get through all the phases of Woody's growing illnesses. I had to include Him throughout because it wasn't me doing it alone. 

After my brother died, I grieved as best I could, but with my 3-month-old baby boy, any physical or emotional energy I had went to him. I would nurse my son in the middle of the night, tears streaming down my face, a surprising gift of hormones that releases emotional connectedness to my physical self. Keeping a small human well-loved and fed seemed to lengthen my intense grieving period because I was so focused on him, instead of the grief.

I have Lyme disease—a tick-born illness that wreaks havoc on the human body. The longer you have the disease without treating it, the harder it is to cure. (Which made it particularly unfortunate that it took me a year and a half to get diagnosed.) Today is day one of the latest treatment I’m testing out. After six years of debilitating illness and ineffective therapies, I’m more than a little anxious for it to work. I sit up off of the table, and say a prayer in my heart. It’s the same one I have been saying for years: 

I ask my God to heal me.

I have always thought my story is a little hard to write. It’s something that cannot be told with one event, but rather in a sequence of events. It may feel a little tragic at times-- there is a lot of hurt, but that hurt only leads to greater hope and healing and that sweet peaceful feeling of triumph and joy. 

My dad was right, it isn't black and white. There is a grey, and Christ lives there. He sweat great drops of grey, black, and white in the Garden of Gethsemane.