Given at NSCBC on Sunday, July 3, 2011

——————————————————————————————————

I was born in the summer of 1990 to a young couple eager to start a family with their new baby girl.  They soon found that the dream was not all they had hoped for.  I wasn’t gaining weight, and so the doctors started to do a battery of tests on my young self, and soon exhausted the possibilities they thought could be wrong with me.  One doctor finally decided to try one more test, as a last resort, thinking that it was very, very unlikely.  This test came back positive, indicating that I had a genetic disease called Cystic Fibrosis, or CF for short.  CF is a disease that mainly deals with a patient’s lungs, pancreas, stomach, and liver.  It makes it difficult to breathe, and in that way it’s a little bit like asthma but with lots more complications.  There is no cure, only treatments to help prolong life and increase the quality of life.

In the days and weeks following, my parents learned the difficult truth – I would always have trouble breathing and eating and probably wouldn’t be very strong, and that I had a life expectancy of around 28 years.  As medicine and technology have advanced in recent years, the life expectancy has risen to nearly 36 years.  That’s a tough pill to swallow at any age, and my parents took it well, I think.  They brought me up in the church, they loved me and took care of my medical needs as well as my social and spiritual needs to the best of their ability.   I am so grateful to them for raising me as they did, and for never letting my disease stand in my way.

At a very young age, around 5, I came down to my father sitting at the kitchen table, reading the Easter story from the gospel of Luke.   I asked him what he was reading, and he told me.  He also explained what it meant to have a relationship with Jesus, and I said, “Daddy, I want that too.”  And then and there I accepted Christ as my Savior and my God.  Since that day, I have grown and matured in my faith, and am extremely thankful to those who have helped me along the way and will help me in the future.

In early elementary school, my parents gave me charge of my medications (which are numerous and taken at different times during the day), and I took great care to do as the doctors directed and soon I knew more about my meds and my condition than my parents.  It was about then that I began wrestling with the life expectancy stamp that the doctors had given me.  It is, like I said before, a difficult thing to come to grips with regardless of your age.  I definitely didn’t solve all of my issues with this until, well, never.

Over the course of these years, I’ve spent countless hours in doctor’s offices, in hospitals, hooked up to medications on an IV, taking more oral medications than I count, and explaining countless times that no, I do not have something that you can catch, and no, I cannot take a cough drop to get rid of it.  I have spent countless sleepless nights trying to figure out the best way to tell my friend that I have an incurable disease, to tell my boss why I need an entire week off of work, to explain to my professors that I’m going to be out of classes for a week to get IV meds in the hospital, to explain to people why I feel so alone and helpless, worthless and unimportant.

I have been angry with God at times, even disappointed, if you will, with the way my life has turned out as compared to everyone else’s.  Every time that anger or disappointment with God has surfaced, God has used other people to show me the things that he can use me for.  It’s not that my life is more difficult because I did something wrong, or my parents sinned.  God has allowed this to happen in my life because he wants to use me for something greater than myself.  God has a plan for the difficulties I’ve faced in my life and the ones I’ll face in the future.

Sure, my life seems less than ideal.  I don’t enjoy spending seven weeks of my summer in and out of the hospital.  I don’t enjoy explaining to TSA personnel that I’m carrying medical equipment and that their sensors are going to go off and they will have to hand check my bag (they never take my advice.  They always just let the silly sensor go off).  I don’t know how to easily let my friends and professors know that the plans they’re making for 50 years in the future don’t necessarily apply to me.  I don’t like being turned down for jobs because of my condition.  I don’t like being told by people that I thought cared about me that I’m worthless because I’m going to die young.  I wish my life were different sometimes, yes.  But I know that God has it under control.  I know that he has it all in his plan, and that he will use my disease for his glory. He already has.  I shouldn’t be able to sing, or to swim.  But he has granted me the strength to do these things, and to excel at them.  He’s allowed me to use my story to change people’s lives.  He’s given me hope and grace, mercy and peace, more than I ever could have hoped for.

A particular instance in which I was able to really put my finger on God using me and my story was when I was on La Vida before my freshman year at Gordon.  I was able to transfer all of my meds that needed electricity to battery powered, or otherwise.  I wanted to do this, and I’m so glad I did.  There were definitely bumps along the way – I ran out of one medication and one of my machines quit working a few days in.  I was pushed to my limit, but God strengthened me.  I was sitting on solo, contemplating life, and God gave me peace about everything I was struggling with, with respect to my CF.  The next night, when we were back together with the entire group, although I did not want to, God compelled me to declare to my team and my peers, with God as my witness, that whenever I had said all he wanted me to say, done all he’d wanted me to do, and gone all the places he’d wanted me to go, then God, take me home.  It hit me, what I was saying and I broke down crying.  One of my friends on the trip came over to me and said, “It’s okay to be scared.  It’s alright.  We’re here with you, and we’ll support you.”  I realized then that I couldn’t do anything alone.  I’d tried to for so long, but I needed their help and their support.  I had many people come up to me that night and say that they were touched by my story and thanking me for sharing.  Since La vida, I’ve been more willing to put myself out there and to be willing to be hurt, to be willing to be rejected for my disease, and to ask for help.  I have been so blessed here at NSCBC to be a part of the choir.  They feel like a family to me and I am so grateful for their acceptance and their prayers, their love and their friendship.

One of my favorite songs is ‘In Christ Alone.’  I love the story that it tells, but I especially love the last verse – No guilt in life, no fear in death, this is the power of Christ in me.  From life’s first cry to final breath, Jesus commands my destiny.  No power of hell, no scheme of man, can ever pluck me from his hand, till he returns, or calls me home, here in the power of Christ, I’ll stand.  It’s in that power I want to serve; it’s in that power I want to love; it’s in that power I want to give, and it’s in that power that I can, so that in all things God may be praised through Jesus Christ.  I’m not going to stand here and say that I’m not afraid of death, but I have more to live for than that.  I’m not just a person with an early expiration date, I’m a powerful tool for God’s kingdom here on earth, and I’m willing to be used as such.  I want to be a servant of God all the days of my life, no matter how many of them I have left.

I thank you for letting me into your lives and for giving me this opportunity to share, and I challenge you to look at your own life, and to examine how God can use you, and how you can serve, even in the circumstances where you feel most useless.  I pray that you will continue to be used as his vessels and that you will daily bring glory to him through all that you say and do.

Praise be to God, who is amazing and powerful, and whose worth is not defined by our success on this earth, but by what he has already done for us.