A Faith Chipped Not Shattered

It is easy to have faith when life is easy. We can all say statements such as God is always good, I trust in God’s plan, and God moves mountains when all is calm and bright. The faith so trusting in a good God becomes much harder to proclaim when the bottom drops out. I know, because I have felt the feeling of falling more than once and in just a short time.

My relationship with God developed by sort of a leapfrog method, jumping from stone to stone, led by people along my path. I did not grow up attending a church. My parents had both grown up that way and instead of forcing God and Church, they allowed us to find our own way to Him. God has shown in the lives of myself and my siblings it is still possible to be drawn near to Him even when not raised as a child learning weekly about his good works and love. For me, the stones I jumped to were a best friend and her family bringing me along to church after a Saturday night sleepover. My girl scout leader, who was also a pastor of a church. My high school fellowship of Christian athletes group that met before school to pray and discuss God. My college roommates, who gave me as Christmas gifts devotionals and Christian music CDs. A friend I stayed with during one of Luke’s deployments giving me the confidence to pray out loud to God. This same friend showed up again this year and invited me into a distance learning book study focusing on the power of our God-given feelings.

God has shown up in my life. Over and over. Calling to me. Using other people to speak to me and teach me all about Him. I developed an easy faith at first, believing in God and his goodness. I loved the idea of having someone I could always talk to in prayer about anything. I loved that He was ever-present. I was a good person, looked out for other people, loved hard, always gave my all, and started to believe being a good person sort of insured you to have a good life. Like a payment system, I guess. If you do good work, good things come to you. The bible does not say this, and no one ever directly told me this. Yet, I think this is the way many Christians believe. They live a good and faithful life. They place their trust in God’s plan for good things in their life because they are worshiping and praising and doing all the right things. They fail to understand nothing is promised by being good.

For the last 3 years, I have spent a lot of time in doctors’ offices waiting. Waiting for the exams. Waiting for surgeries. Waiting for the results. The first round started in May 2018, as we sat in the neuromuscular clinic at the University of Minnesota waiting to hear if our 2-year-old son had Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. The bottom dropped again when just short of 2 years later this same little boy was diagnosed with a developmental delay and non-verbal autism. The next month I was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, a blood cancer. Really God? That was the question I kept asking. How can this be happening to my family when we are good people and believe you are a good God? All of this happening was definitely not good. My faith had been chipped. Disease has a way of cracking a strong faith, testing its strength and endurance through hardship and pain.

I have been learning so much about God while traveling these journeys of disease. We will never know in this life exactly why a good God allows bad things to happen to us, but I do have my own thoughts on it. My main conclusion allowing my faith to be strengthened instead of shattered is that the bad things are not God’s fault. He did not “choose me” to walk this hard walk. He did not give my son Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy or myself cancer. It is not a punishment for not being good enough or a test because He knows I can handle it. The bad things are just that, bad things. We live in a world where God allows it to not be paradise, where bad things happen to good people because bad things can happen to everyone equally.

Where God enters is not at the bad thing itself… but in the journey. He is walking along the hard road with us. He is intervening, holding our hand, helping us up when we stumble and fall, wiping our tears, bandaging our hurts. For me, looking back on my journey so far, there are so many moments where He has been there. He was there at the Parent Project Muscular Dystrophy conference a month after Uriah’s diagnosis, bringing us into a room with other families to connect with, hug, and learn from. These are friends I still have to travel this hard road with that lighten the heavy load. He was there in the pharmacy staff and customers who brought me tea, flowers, hugs, and prayers at work during the days I was forced to live in the unknown, waiting for a diagnosis. These same people helped me get back on my feet after treatment was over, cheering me on and giving me hope I could still be a great pharmacist. He was there in the friend who invited Luke into a men’s bible study during my treatment, giving him a community of believers. They supported him, brought us meals, and reminded us of God’s goodness during a really hard time. He was there in the radiation room when the nurse sensing my fears held my hand and prayed with me, reminding me even in the darkest times God can shine a bright beacon of light and hope.

Disease chipped my faith. Caused me to question all I believed about God. Made me stumble and lose some of my trust. I had many days of tearful, angry, confused prayer to God. Trying to grasp onto His love, but feeling so afraid of the unknown. I realize now, able to reflect with some hindsight of the journey behind me, what I never lost was hope. Hope is the rope we cling to at the bottom and use to climb back up. Hope brings our eyes to the light, helping us find our way in the darkness. Hope is the fight within us to get back up again when we fall.

During my treatment, Uriah ended up getting his little destructive hands on one of my favorite coffee mugs. The one that says faith. I expected it to be busted into many pieces… but it survived with only a couple of chips missing. It was broken, but not destroyed. I saved it and keep it on the window sill in my kitchen. A daily reminder we can be banged around by life, fall and get hurt, have bad things happen while keeping our faith intact. It is possible for faith to not only survive the hardship but be strengthened by it.