Faith in the Shadows

I was twenty years old when a doctor told my mother I had six months to live.

I wish I could tell you that faith immediately rose inside me.

That I heard those words and thought of Scripture.

That I declared God's promises.

That I refused fear.

That I looked death in the face and confidently said, My God is greater.

But that isn't what happened.

I was twenty.

I was sick.

I could not walk.

Most days, I barely left the bed.

And someone I believed understood what was happening inside my body had just placed a number on what remained of my life.

Six months.

There are sentences that enter a room and rearrange everything inside it.

That was one of them.

Six months suddenly became bigger than every other fact.

Bigger than twenty years of life.

Bigger than whatever dreams I had carried.

Bigger than tomorrow.

Bigger, for a while, than what I believed about God.

That is difficult to admit.

But this is a book about faith, and if we are going to talk honestly about faith, then we have to begin somewhere Christians sometimes don't like to begin.

Faith can be present while fear is still very loud.

WHEN A HUMAN VOICE SOUNDS FINAL

Doctors carry a kind of authority when you are sick.

They know words you don't know.

They understand numbers on reports.

They interpret scans.

They recognize patterns.

They have studied bodies and diseases and treatments.

When your own body becomes unfamiliar, you naturally look toward someone who might understand it.

There is nothing wrong with that.

Medicine is a gift.

Knowledge is a gift.

Wise medical care can save lives.

But when you are frightened, there is a subtle line that can become blurred.

The person giving you information can begin sounding like the person determining your future.

I crossed that line without realizing it.

The doctor had not created me.

He had not breathed life into me.

He did not know the number of my days.

But he had knowledge I did not possess, and because I was afraid, his prediction began sounding like authority over my life itself.

Six months.

I did not know yet that the diagnosis itself was wrong.

I did not know how many more times medicine would misunderstand what was happening inside my body.

I did not know how many more years I would live.

I knew only what had been said.

And I believed it.

I STARTED DYING BEFORE I WAS DEAD

That may sound dramatic.

It wasn't.

It was quiet.

I stayed in bed.

I was already there most of the time because physically I was extremely limited. I could not walk. My body had become weak and unreliable.

But something else began happening.

The bed stopped being merely where my sick body rested.

It became where my hope rested too.

Why think about the future if there wasn't one?

Why imagine anything beyond six months?

Why fight mentally when the ending had already been announced?

That is one of the cruelest things fear can do.

Fear can make us surrender things that have not actually been taken from us yet.

I still had breath.

Fear told me to live as though I didn't.

I still had today.

Fear buried it underneath tomorrow.

I still had God.

But fear had made the doctor's voice louder.

MY MOTHER CRIED

I need you to know that before I tell you what she did next.

Because otherwise it would be easy to turn my mother into some impossible picture of faith.

She wasn't.

She was a mother who had just been told her daughter was going to die.

She cried.

Of course she cried.

That matters because tears are not the opposite of faith.

Fear is not automatically the absence of faith.

Grief does not mean someone has forgotten God.

Sometimes faith begins after the tears.

Sometimes it begins while they are still falling.

My mother heard the same six months I heard.

She felt the weight of them.

But somewhere between hearing those words and looking at me at home, something changed.

She had cried over what the doctor said.

She was not going to let me worship it.

SHE KICKED ME OUT OF BED

Literally.

I was lying there.

My mother came into the room.

She looked at me, the daughter she had just been told she might lose, and instead of helping me become more comfortable in the place where I had begun surrendering, she put her feet against my side.

And pushed me out of the bed.

I ended up on the floor.

Then she told me:

"You're still alive."

Those words were almost offensive.

Of course I was alive.

Barely, I thought.

For six months, apparently.

But she wasn't finished.

She told me to stop acting as though the doctors were the ones who had given me life and therefore had the authority to declare that my life was already over.

Then came the part that pierced through everything:

"Either live what you have left, or get out of my house, because I'm not going to watch you give up."

And then:

"God never told you life would be easy. He told you He would be with you through it."

There I was.

Twenty years old.

Unable to walk.

Terrified.

Recently told I was dying.

Lying on the floor because my mother had physically pushed me out of bed.

And God was beginning to teach me the first lesson that would follow me through nearly every shadow of my life…