Faith Through the Journey

Throughout the Bible, God encouraged His people to acknowledge His faithfulness and even commemorate significant milestones and events with altars, sacrifices and feasts. God did this because He wanted His people to be constantly reminded how much He loved them and how He cared for them, continually providing for their needs and leading them to places He had prepared for them.

Acknowledging and being thankful for God’s goodness and faithfulness is an essential part of our worship as children of a loving God today. If worship is our response to God, why would we not show Him our gratitude for all the favor He has shown us? Admittedly, there are times when we can’t see the goodness of what He is doing or giving us, but those are the moments when He begins to grow our faith and ask us to trust Him.

In June of 1974, I was diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease the day before I graduated from high school. Crohn’s Disease is an inflammatory bowel disease, meaning that my digestive system didn’t work correctly and I often needed to get to the bathroom in a hurry. For anyone, this is not a pretty illness, not one spoken of in polite conversation. For a teenage girl, having a bowel disorder was downright embarrassing. Fifty years ago, this disease was a medical mystery. Doctors didn’t know its cause–it was treated as a psychosomatic illness brought on by stress–and I was sent to the Mayo Clinic because they had seen more of it than my doctor in a small city in Wisconsin had. I was given steroids and sulfa drugs and sent on my way with little further instruction about managing this mysterious illness. Being a rather strong-willed person (i.e. stubborn), I was undeterred in my plans to go to college in northwest Arkansas, 700 miles from my home in Wisconsin. This Crohn’s nuisance wasn’t going to bother me–until the first fever spike and hospitalization and a doctor who had to go back to his medical books to find out what to do with me. This became the pattern of figuring out how to manage my life as a college student with an illness that few understood or knew how to treat. Add to that the premise that we were dealing with a stress-related illness and me being a person who always wanted perfection and it was not a recipe for success. My four years of college, in addition to earning a degree, were marked by a wonderful time of making lifelong friends and learning to walk more closely with Jesus. I had some wonderful Bible professors who constantly challenged me to grow in my faith. Crohn’s was in the background of my life most days, but there were times I was reminded of its presence and prayed through the hours of pain. Little did I know how much I would need to remember those important lessons I was learning in my walk with Jesus as I faced what was turning out to be a lifelong journey with Crohn’s Disease.

The strange thing about Crohn’s Disease is that it can all but disappear from your life for years at a time, until you think it’s gone and you never have to deal with it again. I was blessed to marry my wonderful husband and have two children before I was suddenly reacquainted with Crohn’s Disease in 1988. One memory I will always have was being home with my 16-month-old daughter, extremely sick and rewinding “Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree” and reading “Where’s Spot?” until my husband got home with our 4-year-old son. I went to the hospital that afternoon and didn’t come home for 12 days, having had my first bowel resection and entering the world of post-surgical Crohn’s Disease. I had to get reacquainted with my children when I came home and suddenly be careful about everything I did with them. Neither of our families lived anywhere near us and my mother had come to help take care of the children while I was hospitalized and when I came home to recover. We had an amazing church family who surrounded us and helped us navigate some of our “new” issues, many of which we were continuing to encounter as life unfolded. Surgery was a temporary fix for this particular incident, but since Crohn’s is an autoimmune disease it meant that we would have to figure out how to live with it going forward.

In 1990 we were blessed with our third child and the Crohn’s continued to be quiet. For a number of years, I underwent what became routine exams like GI x-rays and colonoscopies. The biggest problem came from post-surgical bowel obstructions, “kinks” that developed due to scar tissue. These were extremely painful and required hospitalization and IV pain medication until they resolved. Probably the hardest thing about these obstructions was the fact that they came on suddenly, unpredictably, and often in the middle of the night. When you have three small children, going to the hospital in the middle of the night is not ideal. It was a blessing to have our church friends we could call to stay with our children in those emergency situations. The one thing that bothered me most about that was that I would put them to bed at night but not be there in the morning, and I couldn’t explain why because they were asleep!

Crohn’s Disease flared, and we continued to try different medications. By now, we had a cause and classification of what we were dealing with–Crohn’s is now known to be an autoimmune disease, so a new world of treatment was being tried. Our children were growing up, and school and activities were starting for them. Of course I wanted to be there for them and make sure their life was as normal as possible regardless of the fact that I had this crummy disease. I rested during the day as much as I could so that when they were out of school I was ready to get the kids to after school activities and sports. My husband traveled for work so there were times I was solo parenting, as many parents do! We had a wonderful Christian school family as our children grew up, and they were a great support and help through the years we shared school projects, sports, carpools, everything you do as parents sharing life.

With more years of Crohn’s came more surgeries – 1996, 1998, 2003, 2006 and 2012. Each one required a hospitalization of at least 10 days, a week of a torturous instrument called a nasal-gastric tube down my nose and throat, walking the halls of the hospital pushing an IV pole getting my digestive system to work, and in the earlier years having others helping take care of my family and making sure my children didn’t miss out on their activities. Truth be told, there were years I hated Crohn’s and I know my family probably felt the same way. I felt terrible that my children and my husband had to deal with this disease and I wanted so much to be better so that they wouldn’t have to think about whether or not Mom would be OK. There were plenty of days I felt sorry for myself and my family was tolerant of my pity parties, bless them! Crohn’s was a digestive disease, but also a very painful one and dealing with pain management doctors was another dimension of treatment for which we were not prepared. There were days we knew discouragement and our faith was tested. The very practical annoyances of having to know where a bathroom was wherever I went was always a part of whatever we did, and needles were another awful nuisance. My veins roll and disappear, and when I had to have frequent IV insertions this was an ongoing trial. My arms often bore black and blue marks that looked like I had been through combat. My GI doctor even facilitated getting me a handicapped parking permit when I shared with her that walking across parking lots in the South Texas summer heat was taxing during the seasons of chronic fatigue that often accompanied Crohn’s flareups.

My parents had to learn to trust God when I moved across the country as an 18-year-old college student with an unknown illness. My husband has stood by me through countless procedures and encouraged me when I was ready to give up. I remember one summer when I was going through a particularly rough time and I heard the Steven Curtis Chapman song “I Will Be Here” for the first time. It expressed so perfectly how much my husband has gone through in walking beside me and holding me up (sometimes literally!) over the nearly 43 years of our marriage. My children have grown up to be successful, compassionate adults who learned to trust God and have their own relationships with Him. My brother, who became a doctor, became our amazing medical consultant and navigated many situations with us-he is home in heaven and we miss him every day. Our families have been a part of our story because of their support, their love and their prayers and faith. We are not perfect and we’ve definitely had our moments of questioning God and asking why we’ve had to go through these years of health challenges, but He has never been offended by our questions or even our anger. He is a big God, after all!

We had an even bigger curve ball added in 2017 when I was diagnosed with cancer caused by the medication I had been taking to keep Crohn’s from returning after my 2012 surgery. One more time I would have surgery, this time on my tongue, altering my speech forever and maybe affecting my ability to speak and sing. Once again, God was faithful (should I have doubted?) and six months after my cancer surgery I was able to rejoin the worship team in singing praise to God. Because of a certain component of many biologic drugs used to treat Crohn’s Disease, the very thing that allowed the cancerous tumor to grow under my tongue, I can no longer take any of that class of drugs. Currently I’m not on any type of immunosuppressant medication, which definitely puts me at a high risk for a Crohn’s flare. I don’t dwell on this, but I am aware that my current remission is somewhat miraculous considering my very long history.

Many years ago the verse that continued to come to me was 2 Corinthians 12:9: “But He said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me.” For 50 years, God’s grace, strength and endurance have been sufficient to see me and my family through the multitude of challenges that Crohn’s Disease has brought to us. There’s a verse in Joel that talks about God restoring the years that locusts have eaten, and in many ways I feel that we have been given the gift of these recent good years. While this is not a journey we would have chosen, neither would we trade it for the lessons of faith we have learned. My mother loved the Psalms and turned to them often during her lifetime. Psalm 91 has these words: “”He will cover you with His feathers, and under His wings you will find refuge; His faithfulness will be your shield and rampart. Because he loves me, says the Lord, I will rescue him; I will protect him, for he acknowledges My name. He will call upon Me, and I will answer him; I will be with him in trouble, I will deliver him and honor him.”

“All my life You have been faithful; all my life You have been so, so good. With every breath that I am able, Oh I will sing of the goodness of God.”