Deb is my age and about ten years Diana’s senior. They first
met when Diana was a troubled teen in a group home and Deb was one of the staff
there. They remained in touch as Diana matured and got married. When she was
pregnant with her third child, her husband left. Divorce followed. Diana
remarried in 2000, this time very happily.
Early in 2014 she was diagnosed with lung cancer. The
doctors pounded it into temporary submission with chemotherapy and radiation,
but now, late in the summer, it was back with a vengeance. Once again, an
aggressive regimen of treatment was begun, but soon the chemo took too great a
toll on Diana’s body. Blood clots formed in her right hand and arm, cutting off the circulation. Essentially her arm was dying. Doctors were forced to cease all treatment. At the point where
we went in to see her, they were scheduling her for an amputation, after which
she would be sent home to die.
What a pitiful sight she was that day. I had met her a
number of times over the years, but I could barely recognize her now: bald
head, puffy face and body, and her right arm discoloured purple and black. I
was so moved that I kept reaching out to touch that hand, which lay closest to
me, and she would wince in pain and ask me please not to touch her there. She
spoke about the upcoming amputation. “I can’t believe this is happening to me,”
she said.
As Diana had known Deb for thirty-five years, I had made the
assumption that she had become a believer somewhere along the way. There was a
scripture that had come to mind as I anticipated this visit. I was thinking of
how, when we as believers need to ask something really big of God, sometimes we
are inhibited by the remembrance of our weaknesses and failures, wrongly
assuming that these shortcomings disqualify us from God’s mercy and grace. So I
told Diana the scripture that was on my mind.
“If our hearts do not condemn us, we have confidence before
God. But even if our hearts do condemn us, God is greater than our hearts, and
He knows everything” (1 John 3:21, 20). But the conversation that followed soon
made it clear that I was several steps ahead of where Diana was; she had never
yet entered into that personal relationship with God.
“I could always come to you, Deb,” she said, “to hear from
God. You have always been like a
go-between for me.”
“But God wants to have a relationship with you directly,”
Deb answered. “He wants to speak directly to you and have you hear and respond.
He wants you to know Him.”
It wasn’t many minutes before Diana expressed that she did
indeed want this one-on-one relationship with God, and that she wanted to know
where she was heading when she passed on. Deb led her in a prayer, and it was
the most precious things to witness. Diana’s eyes were locked into Deb’s face,
tears rolling down her cheeks, as she repeated after Deb with earnest sincerity the
phrases that expressed her need of God and her desire to have Him take charge
of her life.
When that was over, Deb and I spent some time proclaiming
scriptures over Diana that reinforce the fact of Christ’s complete provision,
the healing that He established for us in His scourging and crucifixion. We
declared God’s desire to heal her. Then we left.
In the next few weeks, I heard that they had amputated Diana’s
arm just below the elbow, but that the damage had continued to move upward and
they’d had to do the procedure again, further up, above the elbow. Then they
sent her home, giving her no more than two months to live.
Six months later, she was still alive. She was booked for
tests at the Cross Cancer Clinic in Edmonton and, astoundingly, was declared
cancer-free. She phoned her sister and with characteristic wry humour said, “I
have some good news and some bad news.”
“What’s the good news?” her sister asked. “I can handle the
bad news if I hear the good news first.”
“I have no more cancer,” Diana said.
“And what’s the bad news?”
“You’re stuck with me for a while yet.”
All joking aside, this was a glorious miracle, such an
exciting turn of events. I was so amazed and grateful when I heard about it. As
the months went by, I began to think that I would like to write her story, so I
asked her permission, which she graciously gave. One day she came by the
Farmers’ Market to chat with me about it. She brought up something that hauled
me up short. She said that some time after Deb and I prayed for her, Deb had
contacted her, said that she had been hearing some amazing things about the use
of marijuana oil and that she felt Diana should give it a try.
“It’s really powerful stuff,” Diana told me.
“Oh,” I said, and then I had to sit there and think about it
for a while. “So what do you attribute your healing to,” I then asked, “God or
the marijuana oil?”
“Both,” she answered.
Hmm. Suddenly I was feeling that I didn’t want to write her
story after all, especially not on my Life
Lessons blog, which is intended to journal God’s marvellous workings in our
lives. How could I give all the glory to God when there had been a natural
remedy involved as well? And not just any remedy, but a derivative of marijuana, of all things! It took me back suddenly 38 years to the night that
God clearly showed me, a young hippie just beginning to enter into faith in Him,
that there was no place in His kingdom for using “recreational” drugs. And
despite the current press on medical marijuana, a stigma lingers for Christians
like me whose past includes a relationship with pot that had nothing to do with
its isolated medical qualities.
Of course, there would be some people who would read such a
story and give all the glory to God, but others would be very happy to ignore
the God factor and give glory to cannabis.
Oh dear, this was so confusing! I didn’t say anything to Diana;
I took it away with me to ponder and ask God about. When I finally did talk to
her again, I laid out my misgivings as frankly as I could.
“I understand,” she said. “That’s why I told you. I wanted
to be honest.”
So I just left the idea of the article on hold, simply
asking God about it whenever it came to mind.
Then one day I was reading through the story of Hezekiah in
2 Kings 20:1-7, NLT:
About
that time Hezekiah became
deathly ill, and the prophet Isaiah son of Amoz went to visit him. He gave the
king this message: “This is what the Lord says:
Set your affairs in order, for you are going to die. You will not recover from
this illness.”
When Hezekiah heard this, he turned
his face to the wall and prayed to the Lord
… and wept bitterly.
But before Isaiah had left the middle
courtyard, this message came to him from the Lord:
“Go
back to Hezekiah, the
leader of my people. Tell him, ‘This is what the Lord, the God of your ancestor David, says: I have heard
your prayer and seen your tears. I will heal you, and three days from now you
will get out of bed and go to the Temple of the Lord….
Then
Isaiah said, “Make an ointment from figs.” So Hezekiah’s servants spread the ointment over the boil, and Hezekiah recovered!
Here was the answer to my
dilemma! After declaring the Hezekiah was going to die, God considered his
prayer and announced through His prophet that He was going to heal the king
from his fatal illness. Then He told the prophet to mix up a natural remedy, a
poultice made from figs. There has never been any question that this was a
supernatural healing, and God certainly did not need the fig poultice to
accomplish it, but for whatever reason, He saw fit to make this a part of the
treatment. Jesus Christ, although He is the same yesterday, today, and forever
(Hebrews 13:8), rarely does anything the same way twice.
It was the prophet Isaiah whom God told of His
intention to heal Hezekiah and whom He also told to make the poultice. It was
Deb whom God told of His desire to heal Diana through prayer and the
proclamation of His Word; and it was Deb whom He told to suggest the marijuana
oil. Interestingly, when Deb passed this recommendation on to Diana, it turned
out that her husband had already begun her on a regimen with the oil,
just the tiniest drip placed in a gelatin capsule, swallowed once a day. The
rest is history: Diana has been free of cancer these past three and a half
years.
A year went by. Deb frequently mentioned Diana’s hunger to
know God more and to gain knowledge of the Bible. Unfortunately, said Deb, she
had no one to help her. She wasn’t attending church because her husband wasn’t
interested in going and she was not inclined to leave him alone at home to
pursue her faith—when she has little enough time with him as it is. She doesn’t
read very well, what with both vision and comprehension problems, and the
various medications she has been on have scrambled her brain.
One day Deb became more direct with me: “I would teach her
myself, Nancy, but with work I just don’t have time. Besides, it’s not really my
gift. Mine is prayer. But you—you’re a teacher.”
I went home and thought about it—for several months. I only
go to town when it’s necessary, and I value my time at home with my own
pursuits. But I finally determined that this was something God wanted me to do.
It seemed to me kind of a waste to drive all the way in and
spend that hour and a half with just one person, so I decided to invite several
other women. And now and then Diana and I did have another one or two join us,
but it was when it was just the two of us that the Holy Spirit came so richly
and so sweetly. I would share a grand old story from the Old Testament or a
spiritual principle, and her eyes would lock on mine the way I’d seen them
rivet on Deb’s that day in the hospital. Her eyes would fill with tears as the
understanding and power of God’s word came through to her, and I would cry, too,
with the beauty of what we were experiencing.
I had felt led to begin our study with the genealogy at the
very beginning of the New Testament—of all the unlikely things, because it gave
us a framework from which to view the entire history of God’s story with
mankind and a timeline on which to orient all these wonderful characters and
their experiences. Each week we looked at a story or two from the Old Testament
and then did some reading directly out of the New, beginning in Matthew.
Stories and principles were not enough for Diana, she wanted to also be reading
the Bible itself.
The day came, inevitably, when, taking turns reading verses
by verse, we arrived at Matthew 5:30. In her halting, floundering way, Diana
read aloud: “And if your right hand
causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to
lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell.”
It was kind of brutal. We were quiet for a moment. Then I
said, “Not that your right hand was causing you to sin like in this context,
Diana, but look at it this way: all that has happened to you, the cancer, the
amputation, has brought you to the place of finding a relationship with God. He
has promised that He is continually working everything together for your good,
and although this may sound insensitive, I believe the day will come when you
will honestly be grateful to God for the loss of your arm, because of where it
has brought you.”
She looked steadily at me through her tears. “I’m already
there,” she said. “Because now I have—” she deliberated for a split second, “I
have life.” She went on to say that
she is now much more content, not as anxious. She has an inner peace that she
didn’t have before. She finds that she no longer picks fights with her husband,
and that they really talk now.
There have been big
adjustments since her arm was cut off. She has had to go through a grieving
process, very much like when a loved one dies. Simple things become impossible.
I remember one day watching her struggle with her jacket. I felt awkward; I didn’t
know if I was supposed to help her or let her alone. She saw my dilemma and
rescued me: “The rule is, let me do it myself unless I ask for help.” Another
day I stopped by Deb’s business, and she mentioned that she had to go by
Diana’s place after work. “I’m going to glue a nail brush into her sink,” she
said. “She hates dirty nails, and she hasn’t been able to keep her left hand
clean.” How ingenious; how kind!
As difficult as her loss has been, there is another loss
that has cut her much more deeply. When her ex-husband remarried, he came
looking for the three children. He and his new wife trumped up some charges of
sexual abuse and were able to secure custody and to bar her from seeing them.
While she admits that she had shortcomings as a mother (don’t we all!), she
maintains that the allegations of sexual abuse were a complete fabrication. But
as of this writing, Diana has been cut off from her children for 18 years.
However, along with the physical healing that she
experienced, there has come a steady faith and hope that the God Who healed her
body can and will also heal the relationship with her kids. Perhaps those who
read this story will be moved to add their prayers to hers, that the God of all
reconciliation will have His way in this situation.
In the meantime, Diana has raised her husband’s daughter.
Deb has the highest commendation for Diana as a mother. It was she who told me
that this girl, who was two years old when she came into Diana’s life, has
fetal alcohol syndrome, which brings with it many challenges. Diana found just
the right balance of being very loving and very strict to give this daughter
the boundaries and security she has needed. Deb feels that the girl, now a
young woman, has been given the very best foundation for life that she could
have.
Diana continues to wait and hope for God to expose the lies
that have been told and to restore her own children’s hearts to hers. Meanwhile,
one unshakeable thing remains: Diana is reconciled to God. She has found right-standing
with Him through faith in Christ; and from the foundation of His life within
her, she is living out a whole new kind of existence. And this is God’s promise
to her, and to all who live in obedience and faith toward Him (Isaiah
56:5, NKJV):
“Even to (her) I will give, in My
house and within My walls, a place and a name better than that of sons and
daughters; I will give (her) an everlasting name that shall not be cut off.”
