Our Stories - Faithful Through Every Trial

My name is Carol, and this is the testimony of the faithfulness that Jesus Christ has shown to me throughout my life. This is NOT a story of how my life has been perfect and happy since He called me to be one of His own, but how He has always been there with love, peace, and comfort through bad times as well as good. Even when I turned away in rebellion, He was there.

Childhood of Rage

I am the 7th child in a family of 9 children. We lived in a mansion that many of my friends envied; life in our family looked good to outsiders, I suppose. We went to church every Sunday and seemed to be a happy family (I'm told). But we were hiding the "family matter."

My mother struggled with alcohol and drug addiction; home was at best an embarrassing place to which I could not bring friends; at worst, home was a violent, raging madhouse where my dad, my 8 siblings, and I protected ourselves from all kinds of abuse including attempts on our lives. Most of us left home as early as 14. I stayed home, convinced that if I didn't, my mother would kill herself, my younger sibs, and/or my Dad.

By the time I was 14, my rage and hatred were such that I did not call my mother "Mom" - she was "That Woman" to me. I hated her and despised my father for not leaving or divorcing her. At the same time, I loved her because she WAS my mother and I could see a good woman during her times in rehab; and I admired my father for not leaving or divorcing her because his explanation was that he had vowed before God "For better or worse" – and though this was a "worse" that he could not have imagined, still he would stay with his vow. Such conflicted emotions! Church teachings were absorbed enough that I felt horrible for hating my parents. And so I added hatred for myself and became self-destructive. No one knew, but I often bit myself ‘til I bled because I had so much anger and hate inside.

God's Protection

The first time I know God sent someone to protect me, I was 8. I was already suicidal and asked my best friend (also 8) if a person could go to heaven if they took their own life. She explained that in her view, this could not be possible, because if I committed suicide, then my last act in this life would have been the murder of myself – and I would not have time or opportunity to repent of that murder, therefore I could not go to heaven. This from an 8-year-old! Well, I'm not a theologian, and so I don't know if that is true, but I believed her then, and from that day every time I thought of suicide, those words came back to me. I believe to this day God gave her those words to protect me from my suicidal self.

God also protected me from myself during ages 13 – 15, when I discovered boys and dating. I dated some real bad guys, those that other girls told me was "all over them". None ever even tried to touch me while we dated, but as soon as we broke up and they were dating someone else, they went back to their old ways. Why? I don't know – but I consider it God's protection.

When I was 12 or 13, a new bridge was under construction near our home. The pedestrian overpass was accessible, but it was not open to cars yet. One day, I was walking over that bridge and stopped mid-span. Looking over the side at the river below, I thought how easy it would be to just "fall" off the bridge. Everything, all pain and misery and hate, would be over in just a minute or so. And no one truly loved me, I thought – so it wouldn't be so bad for my family. I was lost in all those people anyway; one less person to worry about would be a blessing to my siblings and dad (I never thought about my mom at that time of my life – not if I could help it, anyway). As I began to climb onto the railing, I heard a soft voice saying, "You're wrong. I love you." I turned, but no one was there, so I turned back to the railing and began again. This time, the voice was more insistent and called me by name. "Carol, I love you. You know that." I began to cry; I knew Who this was. All I could cry out was, "If You love me, Lord, why do you leave me in this life?! Why won't you fix it?" I didn't hear a response, but my mind was suddenly filled with a peace that I hadn't felt before. I turned away from the railing and walked off the bridge, never returning to that spot again.

Within just a month or so of that experience, one of my school friends told me about a weekly fun program for teenagers called Teen Time and invited me to come with her for a hayride that Saturday at a ranch. I went, and discovered that this program was a Christian outreach program. We didn't have to pay for the hayride, but at the end of the hayride when we went inside the ranch owner's home, he had something to say to us. He told us how he had once been a violent drunk, and how he had experienced the deliverance of God from that life. He told us that this deliverance could be ours; he knew that some of us were trying or being offered alcohol or drugs as an escape from a miserable life, and this would only make things worse. He told us that God wanted each of us to know Him personally and that if we gave our lives to Him, He would never leave us no matter what happened.

That sounded wonderful, and I gave my heart to the Lord, praying that He would be with me from then on.

Introduction to "The Message"

When I was about to graduate high school, I was scared of the future. I knew that I would be expected to go to university (at my own expense), but at the same time, I wasn't getting any counseling on what type of career I could have. My Dad's thoughts seemed to be that a woman could either be a teacher or a nurse. But… that really was just my own opinion, as we never actually talked about what I could choose after high school. My school had no counseling center. So I was really not guided in any way, and I was scared. I was trying to live a Christian life, and I'd seen 6 siblings enter university and have their Christian belief system turned upside-down. Several had bought into the "free love" stuff that was going on (late 60's, early 70's), none were going to church any more, one was openly living with a man she had no intention of marrying and another was having an affair with a married man…. Not good. I was somehow convinced that it was the university that had done that to them. So I decided not to go. However, I knew my Dad was going to be super mad (not just disappointed), so I told him that I was just going to take a year away from school after grad and check out my options, rather than telling him I didn't want to go, ever. He wasn't happy, but he tolerated that decision.

In the meantime, my Mom was in the hospital. She'd shattered a hip during one of her drunk times. A man that had once dated my older sister had just returned to Canada after living in the UK for several years. He had a "testimony" to share and wanted to share it with my sister. She had no use for God-talk and sent him to my mother in the hospital. And he began to tell my mother of a man that had been sent as a prophet to our generation. In turn, she began telling me about it. I was horrified. I promised her I would attend a "meeting" with these people, and that I would come back and tell her where they were wrong.

But when I went, I found a small group of people (maybe 12) that were meeting in someone's basement. They called their little group "Edmonton Bible Way" because their group had been born from the preachings of men from "Cloverdale Bible Way" in Surrey, BC. They were on fire for God! And I was vulnerable. They preached that education was "of the devil", and backed it up with Bible verses. And to be honest, I got an instant and huge 17-year old's crush on one of the guys that attended. The crush lasted long enough to suck me into the sinkhole that is "The Message of the Hour". They believed that a man from Indiana, whose name was William Branham, had been the one prophet sent to the End Times. He died in 1965, but his "Message" lived on. Once I was truly indoctrinated, everything changed. Branham preached that girls shouldn't wear pants, and that dresses/skirts had to be between the knee and ankle to be godly. Girls/women were not to wear jewelry like earrings, and absolutely no makeup, which was also of the devil. He preached that because Jezebel wore makeup, God had her killed and thrown to the dogs. And so he called all makeup-wearing women "Miss Dogmeat" and encouraged his followers to do the same. Men should keep their hair short and not wear shorts, women/girls should never cut their hair. There were many other rules to being a godly Message Believer, but those were the most visible to outsiders.

My Mom, released from the hospital, had managed to stay sober for a while. The day I put on my first "Message skirt", she started drinking again. I don't know if there was some significance to that, but I sure thought there was back then. It was confirmation to me that the devil was fighting me being "In the Message". And that feeling of confirmation was amplified when I told my Dad that I would never go to university because education was of the devil. He wasn't happy with my new church – it wasn't Lutheran. But I was in too deep now, and left home for a while at age 18, returning only because he begged me to come back and help with the younger kids. After that, we co-existed in the same house, but it was an uneasy truce.

In 1976, Dad got a transfer to (gasp!!) San Jose, in Southern California. I told him I wouldn't be going with them, as I expected that area would soon be beneath the ocean. My prophet (Branham) had said so. It was supposed to happen by the end of 1977, and this was midway through 1976. I begged him not to go. But they went, and I moved to BC, Canada, and began attending Cloverdale Bible Way.

Forgiving God

In the Message churches I attended, it was generally understood and sometimes preached from the pulpit that when one becomes a true Child of God (translation: Message Believer), their lives are now protected from illness and pain. I claimed the promise that "no plague would enter my dwelling" from that time on. I had some very black-and-white ideas of how things were to be. In my mind, as long as I served and loved the Lord with all my heart, I would be blessed with health and prosperity. Conversely, if I turned away from Him, then bad things would happen. It is always dangerous spiritually to try to put God and His plan for your life into a box filled with your own opinions and perceptions. I had to go through a lot of pain, physically and emotionally, before I learned a great lesson. God's promises are true, BUT - God's idea of blessing one's life may not be at all what you think.

When I was 21, I married a good Message Believer Christian man, who'd also had an extremely rough early childhood (so bad that he was removed from his parents' home at age 10 and eventually adopted by his foster family). He worked hard and we prospered, owning and operating a thriving restaurant, and purchasing a home, car, and fishing boat over the next 2 years. In the meantime, our first child was born and I became pregnant with our second. All of our possessions were given over to the service of God – we fed people at no charge at our restaurant as God directed, and used our house, car and boat for mission work. Christians knew our home to be one where anyone was welcome to come for spiritual and physical rest. I played the piano for our church services right up until the night before I gave birth, and sang for the congregation as well. Everything was going just as it should according to my personal beliefs – we were serving God with all our hearts, and we were blessed. I guess I forgot about one of the songs I sang repeatedly. It was called "Job's song", and the chorus went something like, "Though God slay me, yet I'll trust Him. I will then come forth as gold." I suppose that in my arrogance, I never expected that I might be asked to live up to this claim.

The first thing that shook our confidence in the "we'll be protected forever" dogma that my husband and I had built for ourselves happened in my 5th month of pregnancy with my second child (our daughter was just 13 months old). I almost miscarried! I began to hemorrhage, and for several days, the doctors were convinced I would lose the baby. But we prayed and prayed, and the Lord provided healing. I was prescribed bed rest for the rest of the pregnancy, and not supposed to be up for more than 5 hours out of 24. We were shaken; my husband prayed that any "hidden sin" in our lives be exposed so that we could deal with it and go back to our healthy and prosperous lives.

Two months later, just 6 weeks before my due date, my husband went out ocean fishing with two friends. It was April and the waters were frigid from winter melt runoff. The boat overturned, dumping the three men in the water, where they were not discovered for over two hours and were almost dead from hypothermia. My husband, very lean, was the worst of the three, and for a while, he was not expected to survive. The church prayed and he pulled through. But people began to look at us a bit strangely, and we knew there was conjecture as to why two near-death experiences had happened to us in as many months.

I gave birth to a son just 3 weeks later, in May 1981. The birth itself was very quick, but again I hemorrhaged and almost died from the blood loss. Then I developed a kidney infection when the baby was only 4 weeks old, and ended up fighting for my life once again. Now people were really talking, some actually asking my husband whether we had anything to confess to the congregation.

We sold our house, with no subject-to clauses, for a good sum more than the purchase price we had paid. We also sold our little café and entered into a partnership with one of our best friends (who attended the same church we did) to open a nicer, larger restaurant. It seemed that God was blessing again. We borrowed money for the new restaurant and a new boat based on the house sale. Our new partner was to pay us half of what we had borrowed when the restaurant opened. That way, each partner would be bearing half of the restaurant's cost. All this happened in June 1981; the restaurant would open in July and the house sale be concluded in August. Then the world flew apart.

Two days before we opened the new restaurant, our partner backed out of the partnership. This left us with the entire loan and a restaurant that needed two people to run it, but now only had one. We had no paper contract; the agreement was that of two Christian brothers that trusted one another. My husband and I agreed that we would just pray about this, and trust God because we believed that the Bible instructed us not to go into litigation with a Christian brother or sister. We opened the restaurant as planned, I helped more than we had thought would be necessary, and my husband worked longer hours than he had originally thought he would. Our children were 19 months old and 2 months old at this point (July 1981).

On August 7, 1981, only 2 days after our 3rd anniversary, I was driving the children home from a grocery shopping trip when an overloaded semi drifted into my (slow) lane, hitting my car just above the driver side rear wheel. The impact sent us spinning into the fast lane; unfortunately, by this time the semi driver had realized his error and gone back into this lane, and he hit us again, broadside, at about 60 MPH. The car rolled about 4 times, right over top of the concrete freeway median, and ending up straddling the lanes of oncoming traffic from the opposite side of the highway. Our 3-month-old son was thrown from the car and crushed beneath it as the car rolled onto him.

We were devastated by our son's death; we closed the restaurant to plan and hold a funeral service. Before we had even finished planning the memorial, we received a phone call. Our house buyers were backing out of the house sale – it was the housing crash of 1981. The car insurance company informed us that the amount they would pay for the car did not completely cover our car loan. There would be no compensation offered for the death of our son, as he was a minor and therefore there were no "future lost wages" to be considered. Many of the people of our church did not attend the funeral; my best friends didn't show up. They explained that it was "all too sad" for them.

Over the next 2 months, we lost our restaurant, our house, and the boat, giving them all back to the bank. Our congregation and pastor held meetings and asked us to leave because they were convinced that God's wrath was upon us for hidden sin and that He would soon punish the whole congregation if they didn't put us out. We discovered that our daughter had medical problems (unrelated to the car accident) requiring surgery and she underwent 3 eye surgeries that year, the first one only 10 days after our son's death.

We returned to Cloverdale Bible Way. I became pregnant again, the one bright spot in all our tragedies. However, my husband could not cope with all of the events, particularly being accused of hidden sin and asked to leave our church, and he began drinking. Then he started disappearing for days at a time. I gave birth to a second son, but that didn't change things for my husband. If anything, it made things worse, because he now realized that a new baby was not a substitute for one lost. A year later, my husband disappeared for good. I was changing the baby when my 3 year old daughter ran up to me asking, "Mommy, why is Daddy going out the patio door with a suitcase?" And that was that. He chose the patio door because it would slide shut without making noise…

I'd been having increasingly worse back trouble since I was 13 and since the birth of our second son had been in extreme pain; three weeks after my husband disappeared, I was diagnosed with an uncommon form of spinal / systemic arthritis (Ankylosing Spondylitis) that, in the extreme form I had, usually had a life expectancy of about 45. Our children were 3 and 1, and I was 27. All I could think of at that time was, "Well… I'll just have to bring these children up to be independent at a young age." I was again ostracized within the congregation I attended – good Christian women's husbands weren't supposed to leave them, and you weren't supposed to get ill and not be healed unless you were hiding sin. I must have done something very wrong to deserve all that had "come upon me".

I rebelled against God, blaming Him for all that had happened. I never once considered that God did not exist, or that He was limited in His power. On the contrary, I knew that He had to have allowed all these things to have happened. I paralleled Job without knowing it; at first, in the numbness of all our losses, it seemed easy to say, "The Lord gives and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord." But as time went on and the pain didn't diminish, and the losses just seemed to grow and grow and grow – I grew angry with Him and complained heartily and bitterly to Him and about Him to anyone within hearing distance. I went back to university to get a degree so that I could support my children on my own. I left all church attendance and married an atheist (a truly good man who has been a good dad to my kids) as a kind of "in your face" to God.

But He wouldn't let me go. I am so glad of that. I was providing for myself and my kids, and I loved my new husband truly and completely. I climbed the career ladder, moving quickly into management and consulting, and making a good amount of money. We began to prosper financially again, and the kids had a stable and loving home. But I was angry, with an unpredictable temper that lashed out from time to time. I was unhappy, ignoring the emptiness that my separation from God was causing. I made sure that I was busy all the time, taking the kids to different lessons and activities, running my own IT (Information Technology) consulting business as well as working full-time, and staying on top of the always-changing information in the IT field. I took oodles of painkillers and anti-inflammatories and muscle relaxants to keep the arthritis in check as much as possible, but still there were many times that I could not move or bend enough to tie my own shoes. A friend or my husband or even my 6-year-old daughter would help me get up, put on and tie my shoes for me and help ease me behind the wheel of the car so that I could get myself to work. I had a big quilt in my office and often did my paperwork lying down on my stomach because that was the only position that didn't have agonizing pain in it. I herniated 3 discs in my back and was partially paralyzed on my left side for 2 years (I still have only limited feeling in the left foot). My employees jokingly called me Quasimoto, because I dragged one leg and walked kind of sideways. Eventually, that part of the spine fused itself as part of its healing process (and part of the "expected outcome" of the arthritis that I have). I went to physiotherapy, where 3 times weekly they would break the bone spurs that my spine was developing in its attempt to fuse all the way up. I remain fused only in the sacroiliac bones and the first 5 vertebrae at this time, which is a miracle.

Busy as I was, I was still empty, bereft… and I knew it was loneliness for the relationship I had had with my Saviour, but I was so angry with Him. You see, I couldn't deny that He existed. I had seen Him perform too many miracles for that. I couldn't deny His Almighty power, either. Satan knew that he couldn't get me to deny Christ in this manner, so instead, he twisted my very belief. He convinced me that Christ obviously didn't love me the way the Bible said because He had not delivered me from any of the bad things that had happened when He could have and indeed according to the Word had delivered others from the same types of afflictions and calamities. So… I was actually in a position where I thought God had done me wrong, and I was angry.

I had to "forgive God", as it were. One day in 1993, I was cleaning my home. I had been in rebellion against the Lord for about 3 years, but still, He called to me continually. As I walked to the garbage can in my room with some papers in my hand, I was struggling with His call, and I wanted it to stop. So on impulse, I did the one thing that I thought would certainly make Him angry enough to leave me alone. I stopped in the middle of the room, looked up with fists raised, and shouted out loud, "Oh, Jesus – go to Hell!!" And like a bolt of lightning into my brain came His voice, saying softly and gently, "I already did – and I did it for you." And I remembered that in order to take ALL of our punishment for sin, Christ would have had to experience Hell for us, too (Eph 4:8-10). That was it for me – I never made it to the garbage can with my papers. Instead, all of my internal garbage poured out of me as I shook and wept my way back into His Presence.

I found a new home church, one where what I call "the prosperity gospel" is not preached. I have discovered that the Lord does indeed allow bad things to happen to Christians at times, to bring us closer to Him. I have found a deeper, more lasting love than I ever had for Him before, and become a more mature individual and a more mature and empathetic Christian. I do not judge others harshly or quickly based on their financial or health situations. I listen a lot more and "preach" a lot less. I have discovered that all of those awful losses and events were in fact a blessing because they have combined to make me a better person overall and bring me closer to the Lord.  

EPILOGUE:

Moving On In Maturity Of Faith Since My Return To Christ Without the Message

I had begun gaining weight and feeling tired and achy, beyond the problems of my AS, in 1991. I went to my doctor, who dismissed the weight gain as something that was "bound to happen" now that I was in my 30s and had a desk job. But the fatigue and achiness continued, and in 1993 I was sent to a rheumatologist, who told me that I had fibromyalgia. This explained both weight gain and the extra pain, and from that time no matter what other problem I had, I was told "Fibromyalgia can do that." So I lived with it from day to day as I raised my children through their teens, and even went back to university one more time to get my MA in Distributed Learning in 2003. But the added stress took its toll, and shortly after graduation with my MA, I left work for what I thought would be a 3 month rest period. This stretched to 6 months, and by then I was told that I needed a total knee replacement and that I would have to wait 9 months to get it. The TKR did not have what the medical community calls "the expected outcome", and I was left in terrible pain. I couldn't return to work. Three years later, I found another surgeon and had the knee surgery redone. The result this time was better, but the damage was done and I have walked with cane and/or walker ever since. Still I did not heal as they expected. My health continued to degrade; I had continual infections, and developed high blood pressure, high cholesterol (despite a very healthy diet), gained many more pounds – until I was over 100 pounds above my normal weight – and watched my skin become thin and fragile. At the same time, my face grew rounder and rounder, my neck all but disappeared and I developed a butterfly-shaped "redness" on my nose and cheeks. Then my facial blood vessels began to pop, leaving purple veins all over the cheeks. I looked like a person that drank an awful lot. And I was told, "Fibromyalgia can do that."

In 2009, I went on a vacation to Orlando's Disney World with my sister and daughter. On our 3rd day there, I sustained an injury to my "good" leg – a deep wound in the calf that went to the bone. I went to the hospital for medical attention. To their surprise, they were unable to get stitches to stay in my skin. It kept tearing and breaking as they attempted to suture, and it took almost an hour for them to get 12 stitches to stay put. The doctor looked at me and said, "This is not normal. You need to see your doctor when you get home." So I did. I talked with my doctor, and she looked me over with a new eye and decided to get some specialized testing for cortisol production. The tests came back a resounding positive for an illness that I'd never heard of before – Cushing's disease.

Cushing's syndrome is the name used for a plethora of symptoms headed up by hypercortisolism – where the body produces way too much of a hormone that is necessary to our survival. I was producing 10 times the cortisol that I should have been, and this was making me very ill and indeed threatening my life. We spent more than 6 months finding the source of my hypercortisolism (sometimes it can be produced by diet, sometimes by excess drinking, sometimes by steroidal medications, sometimes by tumour). My hypercortisolism was coming from a tiny tumour called an "ACTH-producing microadenoma", which they could not find in spite of numerous tests. This is why my hypercortisolism was called Cushing's Disease, and not just Cushing's syndrome. The original theory was that the microadenoma was in my pituitary gland, so surgery to perform a resection of the pituitary was performed in early 2010.

This surgery was not a smashing success either. During their first attempt, I had a massive brain bleed and they had to abort. During the second surgery, I experienced an orbital (skull) fracture, the brain dura (the covering on the brain) tore and I had a cerebral spinal fluid drain put into my back because of a Cerebral Spinal Fluid (CFS) leak. I should have died, but God was with me, and I went home 9 days later with a glued-together skull and dura.

However, instead of recovering, I got progressively sicker for 3 weeks. I went back to the hospital ER, and they discovered that I had developed blood clotting in my left leg that went from ankle to groin, and that chunks of this clotting had begun breaking free and were landing in my lungs. Both lungs were filled with pulmonary emboli. I should have died (again), but God performed another miracle and I recovered. I went home 12 days later.

My story fighting disease was not over. After all that, the pituitary surgery had no effect on the Cushing's disease. I was told now that the only option to save my life was to remove both adrenal glands (these are the glands that produce cortisol, along with other life-essential hormones). This would push me into a new disease called Addison's, where the body produces too little cortisol. In my case, my body would be producing none at all. But the advantage of this new disease would be that it is (supposedly) easily controlled by the administration of oral medications. So the surgeries were performed, one at a time. To their utter surprise, instead of removing healthy glands (as all imaging had indicated), the right adrenal glands were heavily damaged by an infarct, and the left one held a different type of adenoma (mass/tumor) than we'd been looking for. This adenoma produced cortisol. And this was why the pituitary surgery had not fixed the problem. And I have the dubious distinction of being one of VERY few people that have had both an ACTH producing tumour AND a cortisol-producing tumour.

My last adrenal gland was removed in September of 2011. I have been considered a "surgical Addison's patient" ever since. It has not been entirely without its bumps. I have had many Addisonian crises (where the cortisol level in my system suddenly drops to near-nothing) since the surgery, each time bringing me near death. I can go into a crisis from a simple skin infection, so I have to be careful.

God keeps pulling me through. I believe that it is because I continue to be a witness for him, and that is what I intend to keep doing. I still have progressively worse arthritic problems. But I want everyone in the world to know that no matter how bleak it looks or is, God IS STILL THERE, AND HE IS STILL ON HIS THRONE. More importantly, I know He loves me without measure, and I matter to Him. His purposes for keeping me from what we would call complete healing are His own. I believe that He is making true gold of my character and faith. I will never again rebel or turn away. This is my witness and my act of worship to Him.