I have always found it interesting when people get mad at God and/ or their situation because it did not go as planned. You would think we would all know that no matter what we have planned God is going to find a way to change everything. At least I thought I knew that.
After my rejection in 2015, there was only one way that God was going to end my journey. He was going to send someone to my church to pray for me and I would have a miraculous healing. After all since the kidney rejected He obviously didn’t want me to have a transplanted kidney so healing was going to be the next best thing.
When a preacher would visit I would play it nonchalant. Everyone knows if you act like you don’t want them to pray for you then they will come pray for you. Except that didn’t work. So after six months of playing hard to get I got desperate. I switched from my sneaky side spot to smack dab in the middle of the altar. Now they had to see me.
Not only did the visiting preachers not pray for me but almost no one did. I was put in a bubble of seclusion. I had a laundry list of things that I had to work out between me, God and myself before the idea of a kidney, healing or transplant was going to come. I started letting Him work on me and I put my healing agenda to the side for the moment.
More time passes and a new possibility comes to light. I might have a hopeful for a friend to donate me a kidney. This is it. God is going to change their DNA and it will all be over. Three months later they were rejected as a candidate and I was back at square 3. I wasn’t at square one because I had made some progress in my relationship with God but I also wasn’t very far from the beginning. There were still many more squares to go.
More time passes and around half way through year two I had a “revelation”. God wasn’t going to let me be healed in a public setting because that would give someone else the glory. I had Him now. I got really serious about daily prayer after all that was going to be how He healed me. Six months later I had nada. I was once again scrambling for a plan of how this was supposed to happen.
It has now been three years since my rejection. In that time I had heard close to nothing from the transplant list team, had been let down by various failed attempts to get healed, and had several times where things got way to close for comfort. But some good things had happened too. I learned what God’s Grace and mercy actually were, I experienced His strength and love on a level I didn’t know possible, and I had a much much closer relationship with Him than when I started. I could honestly fill an entire blog with all that I have and am continuing to learn.
It was not a sprint but rather it had been a crawl. A crawl through depression, frustration, anger, and apathy. As year three began apathy had set in, strong. I didn’t care about getting healed or about a transplant because dialysis was my life now. I wasn’t angry or frustrated about it. I had accepted it. God just wants my life to suck and I had fully come to terms with that. Even with me being added to a new program that was projected to have a me a new kidney in a maximum of 6 months, I assumed it wouldn’t happen.
I no longer prayed for healing in my semi- regular prayers. I no longer requested healing down front or otherwise. If anything my prayers were to just get though. I had barely survived the past three years after having two very close calls and after being continually beaten by dialysis. Just get me through the next dialysis was pretty much my only prayer. Again not angry or bitter about it, I had just accepted that this was my life.
Then as spring time rolled around something shifted. I had started coming out of that apathetic mindset and I had decided that this was the year. It wouldn’t matter what I would have to do because I was getting a kidney in 2019. I had accepted that I had no clue how it was going to happen, just that it had to happen.
The ONLY thing I knew for sure was I wouldn’t be getting a transplant from a deceased donor. With my very special circumstances that would mean a minimum of two more years of waiting on the list. Then when I would finally get the kidney it would require an insane amount of work to get my body to accept the kidney, which if they did manage to get it to accept the kidney would probably only last 15 years max. But I was open to every other option, just short of rubbing crystals on my deceased kidneys.
I still wasn’t praying for my healing, not because I was apathetic, but because I had truly accepted that it was in his hands. There was no doubt that after the million prayers that had gone up about me and my kidneys, He knew I needed one. So He didn’t need me reminding Him every five seconds with another prayer. Instead I decided to remind Him another way. Through my faith and trust.
Every day I would wake up and actively walking in faith, believing and trusting that He was going to do something very soon. No clue what was going to happen, I just had peace that there was an end in sight. It didn’t really make the dialysis any easier or the side effects less severe. But there was a weight that was lifted when I had officially stopped trying to come up with a solution to a problem I had zero control over.
I had wasted so much of this journey trying to solve it or trying to get it over with that I had almost missed the whole point of this entire thing. That at the end of the day all He wanted was me. Yes I learned so so much more than just that, but he brought my world to a halt not once but twice, and now three times, just for me to grasp the concept that all He wants is all of me. It doesn’t matter how many blogs I post, or how many chapters I write in a book or how many youth lessons I teach or how many Sunday’s I got there early and left late to help set up.
None of that matters as long as I am still holding back parts of myself. As long as I was putting constraints on who He was in my life and which parts of my life He could have control of I was completely missing the whole point of the entire journey.
To close out my story, I got the call on August 13th for my kidney transplant from a deceased donor. He ultimately used the only way I was sure He wasn’t going to use. I still got my miracle though. The kidney He gave me is so perfect that my body sees it as my own tissue. The transplant surgeon said it was a one in a million kidney’s and that it truly was a gift. Another doctor said it was the needle in the haystack. I was released from the hospital after only 6 days, that included getting the transplant.
Sufficed to say, things did not go as I had planned, but looking back now I wouldn’t change a thing. I went from just wanting to live to living with a purpose, His purpose. There is always a purpose in the pain. Sometimes it just requires us to take a step back and take a look at who is actually in control and who we are letting be in control. I know that I wasn’t a big fan of the answers to either of those questions. But I am glad to say I know now.
For those of you wondering, this is not the end of the blog. I may be posting less because I am also working on another project related to my kidney journey, but if I wasn’t the one who decided to start this then why would I get to say that just because I have a kidney now it’s all going to end.
Purpose in the Pain 