Unstoppable (25 page)

Despite her agony and suffering, Jessica chose that moment to put her faith into action through surrender. “It was during that time that my heart started focusing in the right direction,” she said. “When you are that close to eternity, it makes you really examine your life to make sure you are right with your Savior. I wanted to make sure that my heart was truly committed. I did not want to just rest on some profession of faith; I wanted to make sure my life was backing it up.”

I wrote earlier that God does not make us sick, but He does use illnesses and other major challenges to draw us closer to Him so that we put Him at the center of our lives. Sickness is part of the natural world; God’s love is of the spiritual realm. You can see God at work in Jessica’s life. Just as her serious health problems wracked her earthly body, He fortified her spiritual self.

“It seemed as if God were saying to me, ‘Now that everything you relied on is taken away, are you still going to love Me? Do you love Me for what I give you or for who I am?’ ” she said. “At that time I made a decision to follow the Lord for who He was. I realized He wanted me to focus on what really counted in life, which was getting to know Him better, leading souls to Him and living for heaven.”

The good news is that once she’d undergone her painful treatments, Jessica was cancer-free. Still, the cure took a toll that has hampered her speech and her ability to swallow food normally. Yet even with those lingering side effects, she surrendered all bitterness and self-pity and chose gratitude instead. “Glory be to God, I have my sight, most of my hearing, and—even though I have a harder time—I can still talk and sing,” she wrote in her e-mail. “That is the physical aspect of what went on with me,
but let me tell you the other side to my story, which is the message of hope I pray that I can pass on to other people who are in a similar situation as myself.”

Because of her foundation of faith, the first thing Jessica did when her doctor found the tumor and sent her for an emergency CT scan was to surrender the outcome to God. She did not give up at all. Instead, Jessica gave her fight to God by tapping into the highest source of power available. She called the pastor of her church, and he organized an emergency prayer meeting that same evening.

In surrendering, “I had a peace that I cannot describe,” she wrote. “Only God’s children can understand the peace that I had. My whole world could have fallen apart at that very moment, but it didn’t. The circumstances may have been out of my control, but Christ was still in control of my life. I knew He was going to be with me the whole way through. I knew that there was a chance that I could die. In fact, many times I went to sleep thinking it might be my last moment on this earth. I saw the reality of my circumstances, but I also knew the reality of my God. I knew that if I were to die, I would be entering heaven and I would be in the arms of the Savior who loved me.”

Take a deep breath. In … Out … Do you feel a sense of peace when you do that? We all long for that feeling of calm, don’t we?

Our lives on this earth are not about what
we
want. You and I were created and placed in the natural world because of what God wants for us. He sent His Son to die for our sins, and Jesus made the ultimate surrender to follow His Father’s plan to give us the gift of eternal life. As Jessica notes,
there is an incredible peace in surrendering our lives to Him just as Jesus did. The Bible tells us, “Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”

That peace can be yours only when you put your faith into action, surrendering your fears and any need to control your life, as well as any need to know the outcome of your actions. Instead, you put it all in God’s hands, committing to follow His will. When you are searching for God’s will in your life, whether it’s trying to make decisions or looking for opportunities, you can’t always expect a sign from God. Those are rare and wonderful occasions. What I’ve come to look for in trying to figure out what God wants is a
sense of peace
.

If serenity remains in my heart as I pray and move forward with a decision to act on an opportunity, I feel like I’m following His will. If I lose that sense of peace at any point, I stop, pray some more, and reconsider. I believe if I’m headed the wrong way, God will change my heart and guide me.

You may have many friends and advisors. Maybe you base your decisions on the alignment of the stars or a gut feeling. Everyone has a process. Mine is surrender. God understands us to the core because He created us. He feels what we feel, but His vision reaches those places we cannot see. There are many people I look to for advice and wisdom, but there is no one in God’s league when it comes to guidance. I’m grateful to have opportunities, and often it seems like I’m walking down the corridor of a giant hotel with hundreds of doors waiting to be opened. It’s difficult to know which doors are right for me, but through surrender, patience, and trust, God guides me.

Of course, God may say no to your plan one day, but the next day He
may say yes to something even better. You don’t know what God can do with your life until you give it to Him and feel the bliss in your relationship with Him. Whenever I become anxious about achieving
my
goals, I find peace knowing that I am here because God loves me and that He will be there when I let go.

Jessica has experienced similar results after putting her faith in action, which she says means “getting up and following Christ even when you do not see or understand His ultimate plan. It means finishing the race even when you feel like calling it quits. It means choosing to love even when it hurts. It means getting up and serving even at the times you feel the most weary.” She adds, “Faith in action means looking outside of yourself to the souls around you who need to know that there is hope. It means trusting Christ to fulfill your needs and then getting up and helping fulfill the needs of others.”

There is nothing quite as soothing as accepting that you don’t have to work it all out, because God will. You can surrender yourself to Him and then wait patiently. Through Him, everything is possible. When Jessica was feeling her worst, she told God to do with her whatever He desired. Letting go gave her great relief, she said, because “I knew if my life was spared, then Christ had a purpose for it.” There is tremendous peace, power, and freedom in that knowledge.

Jessica’s cancer went into remission when she wrote to me six years after her original diagnosis. There was no sign of it in her body. She told me she was filled with gratitude even though her life had been forever changed and the aftereffects presented big challenges.

With her doctor’s permission, Jessica returned to school and then to work. She became a medical assistant in a hospital’s oncology and neurology departments, where she helped patients face the same challenges she
had overcome. But after several years the work was too hard on her weakened body. She went on disability leave and now focuses on God’s work.

“Going through the experience made me so grateful for what I have. It made me more patient and very determined. I am now on a mission, and I understand my purpose,” she wrote. “My mission is to make sure people with serious health problems are able to experience the peace that I still have to this very day. This is the peace of knowing Jesus Christ as Savior. This is the peace that passes all understanding. The peace of knowing where you are going after you die. The peace of knowing that your life is in the hand of the Creator of the Universe. There is no safer place to be.”

I heard from Jessica again just recently. It has now been more than eleven years since her tumor was found. She is still cancer-free, still grateful, and incredibly wise. Jessica has a much different perspective on her illness now. When she was first diagnosed, she thought God was punishing her for some reason. “I was looking at God only as a righteous judge, which He is, but I was forgetting that He is also a loving Father who only wanted the best for my life,” she said. “I was only seeing His rod of discipline, and I was not looking at His hand of mercy and compassion. I saw it more as giving me what I justly deserved. The fact of the matter is that God was dealing with me with great loving kindness. He was taking the ‘me’ out of me and putting more of Himself in.”

When you place your life in God’s hands, you take the first step to becoming the person He intends you to be. There is great peace in that, and there is freedom and power too, because God works His miracles through those who give themselves up to His will. Jesus said, “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me.”

Denying selfish interests—that is, shelving our own wants and desires
and putting God first—is not an easy or natural thing for most people. Our earthbound bodies have powerful survival instincts that make self-preservation a priority. Even when we have a strong faith, the concept of surrendering all can be difficult to put into action and live every day.

Although she said the prayer of salvation with great sincerity at the age of fourteen, “I really did not know what it meant to live the life of faith,” Jessica said. “I was still a very self-centered person. I thought the Lord was going to do things my way and fulfill all my dreams. At the time I had dreams of graduating college. I wanted to get married and have children—you know, the little ‘white picket fence’ life. I was very selfish, and I wanted everything that was going to make me happy.”

Jessica believes that God used the illness of her body to strengthen her soul. She feels that being so sick forced her to focus on what being a Christian and giving her life to God really meant. Through her terrible pain and the loss of the life she’d known, Jessica found a path to wisdom and understanding beyond anything she’d ever experienced before. “God wanted me to realize that life was not given to me just for my own satisfaction,” she said. “In fact, that is not the purpose at all. He wanted me to realize that life was given to me so that I could bring Him glory and be an encouragement for others. He wants the best for me, but He realizes the meaning of that more than I do.”

Jessica found that meaning through surrender. “The way I view it, to surrender means giving to the Lord the things that you hold most dear. It means not holding on tightly to your idea of what will bring you happiness but trusting that He knows even better than you know the desires of your
heart—and that He will give you a fulfilled life even if it is not in the way that you envisioned,” she said.

I don’t know about you, but I am in awe of this young woman’s wisdom as well as her faith. The Bible tells us, “Delight yourself also in the L
ORD
, and He shall give you the desires of your heart.” Note the psalm doesn’t advise us to take delight in ourselves and give ourselves the desires of our hearts. Yet we often get caught up in trying to create our own happiness instead of giving our lives to God and delighting in His love and the life He created for us. Most of the time, when we try to make ourselves happy, we are just distracting ourselves for a while. You realize this is true when your happiness doesn’t last or run very deep. A new car, a new dress, or a diamond ring doesn’t bring you anything like the sort of joy that God can create if you delight in Him.

Jessica says she found the way to do this through “a life of daily surrender” even as she deals with the aftereffects of her battle with cancer. The intense pain of her cancer is gone. It is in remission, but now she has to live with the disabilities that have resulted from her disease and its treatment. Her speech is still distorted because her tongue and vocal cords are mostly paralyzed. She has difficulty eating and swallowing normally, and she is prone to pneumonia.

Her lingering physical problems could make for a difficult life—if Jessica chose to wallow in her misery. Instead, she chooses each day “to remember that Christ is in control.” She told me, “I have to remind myself that the plans He has for me are plans to ‘prosper me and not to harm me, to give me a future and a hope.’ I have to surrender to the fact that even though I may not have the life I always dreamed of, I do have the life that Christ chose for me from before the world began. He has not made a mistake.”

Like Jessica, I do not have the life I dreamed of as a child. I prayed for
arms and legs because I thought they would make me happy. I thought that if I had arms and legs, I could take that deep breath and experience true peace. I believed that there could be no happiness for me without limbs. I didn’t think I could ever create a happy life for myself, and I was right. My happiness came only when I put my faith into action and surrendered my life to God. He showed me that I am perfectly imperfect, just as He designed me. And He has provided me with more desires of my heart than I ever could have provided on my own.

Jessica is discovering the same in her own life. “The Lord has not brought me a husband yet, but He is daily showing me that He needs to be the love of my life,” she said. “I do not have children of my own, but the Lord has allowed me to mentor several teenage girls, and I consider them my spiritual children. I hope that I can live my life as a testimony to them that God is alive and still works miracles.”

As Jessica notes, you don’t surrender your life to God and then expect each and every day to be all sunshine, flowers, and laughter. We live in the natural world, at least for now, and while sunshine, flowers, and laughter are part of that world, so too are blizzards, mosquito bites, and five-car pileups on the turnpike.

Surrender is a minute-to-minute, hour-to-hour, day-to-day process. You give it up to God every step of the way. In my younger years, I spent a great deal of time questioning God and His plan for me. Now, I am more patient, and instead of asking, I wait for Him to reveal His answers in His own time.