Compensation

I love it when every day life teaches invaluable eternal lessons.

Such an opportunity was given to me in the past 24 hours.

Yesterday morning, on the way to work, I collided with another car and put a huge dent in my front wheel basin. I am currently working for AmeriCorps, which means I get a small living stipend. The stipend is intentionally set below the poverty level so that we can empathize and understand the community that we are serving.

Well, $750 insurance deductibles and poverty level living stipends do not go hand-in-hand. Add to this a drunk driver hit my car about a month ago and cracked up the other side of my car and due to his lack of car insurance, it will require an additional $750 insurance deductible for those repairs. Not to mention the repairs to the vehicle I collided with yesterday morning.

That's a lot of money.

Being in the situation that I am in, I prayed a lot yesterday about God providing funds for me to fix the damages on my car. I was tempted a time or two to curse my current living stipend and look back with longing to the Egypt of my former salary.

On the surface, it looks like my problem is an economic one. My current job, while it affords me the pleasure of serving the poor - a very Biblical thing to do -- it does not afford me the luxury of buying food and clothing or fixing my car. So surely, my solution is as simple as finding a nice paying job, right? After all, I'm college educated, this would not be a hard task in the least to accomplish.

But I guess if I could solve all my own problems that would eliminate my need to cry out to God. And eliminating the need to cry out to God means robbing myself of opportunities to see His grace in my life. I cannot be a recipient of his grace if I don't need it.

Rabbit Trail: Two weeks ago I was at the bank and was informed that I had over drafted my checking account. I was devastated. I had been hoarding a $100 check from my parents for over four months in hopes to spend it on my business trip in D.C. As I flew to D.C. with empty pockets, I was disappointed that all of my spending money was gone. I had hoped to buy some much needed clothes with that money.

Two days before I flew back home, I met a friend in D.C. for dinner while my boss went shopping at Macy's. We met up later at the hotel room and my boss came in beaming, three shopping bags chock full of clothes. To my utter shock and delight - the clothes were for me. (Apparently they had some great clearance racks). They were all designer labels - something I have never owned or afforded in my life. When I got home, I tallied up all of the original prices on each price tag and it came to $1200.

My point in all this? What would I have gotten with my hoarded $100? God took the last dime I had and compensated me TWELVE times what I could afford. But he couldn't compensate me until he first depleted me of all of my own resources. This way, HE gets the glory, not me. It's not my job or my parent's check - it's just sheer grace.

So jump back now to the car situation. Where am I going to get $1500 for my car repairs?

After I prayed this morning for the $1500, I went to my trusty "Streams in the Desert" devotional (Mrs. Charles Cowman). The verse for today's entry was an old favorite - the one given to my mom the day I was born --
2 Corinthians 4:17 in the Weymouth translation:

For this, our light and transitory burden of suffering is achieving for us a weight of glory.

I saw two amazing things in this, one of which was pointed out by the author of the devotional, another which came via my current study of the book of Numbers.

"Achieving" the author says, is the key word. That we are in essence being "compensated for our sufferings." We do not suffer in vain because according to Paul, these afflictions are achieving an end.

The word "compensation" reached off the page and smacked me. For, isn't my entire prayer this morning, "Lord, I need $1500?" Will God give me the $15o0? Yes, I have no doubt that he will. But what I learned this morning is that God has a compensation of eternal value -- value that makes $1500 American dollars look like the useless scraps of paper that they are.

Eternal compensation. We are EARNING WAGES for eternity. Currency that we are earning towards eternity when we suffer. The dent in my car isn't just an accident or even a trial....it is a paycheck. Eternal wages.

This shifts my thinking from, "Oh my, how in the world am I gonna scrape up $1500" to "$1500? What a joke. The God of heaven sees me worthy to dent my car, so that I will call upon him, so that he will provide, so that my needs will be met, so that I will praise him, so that I will trust him more, so that I and others will see his glory..." I'm getting paid for this dent - and like my recent shopping spree -- he is giving me twelve times the $1500 I need because in addition to fixing my car (which I know he will) I am getting eternal compensation for my trials.

The second thing I found in this verse (that linked to something I just learned in Numbers) is the word "weight." A weight of glory. What an unusual phrase. Metaphorically speaking, "weight" often implies a burden. This word juxtaposes the phrases of the verse beautifully: your weight of trial will turn into a weight of glory.

But there's something hovering below the surface that perhaps makes the devotional author's "compensation" theory even stronger. In the Old Testament, the Israelites paid temple taxes. This was paid by shekels. I have always thought that shekels were coins that equate to our nickels and quarters. However, in reading an article in my archeological study Bible, I discovered that an ancient shekel was not a coin, it was actually a weight. The shekel value was not determined by price, but by the weight represented by different sized pieces of metal. So, in Old Testament culture, "weight" was equal to currency!

In light of this, ponder anew the phrase, "an eternal weight of glory." Could this at all be like us saying, "An eternal gold mine of glory" or "An eternal million dollar winning lottery ticket of glory"?

So, how does all of this relate to a blog about physical deformities and disabilities? I think the link is obvious. When we suffer, we look for meaning and understanding behind how or why a loving God would inflict us with such weighty sorrow. I just want to encourage the broken in heart today by saying, you are earning an eternal compensation for your perceived losses. Drop to your knees and praise and worship our heavenly banker - for his generosity is unfathomable.

Deformed Face Myths

I haven't posted in a while. I just moved 2200 miles away, am sort of in the boonies (beautiful boonies), and it took me a while to get set up with an internet connection, etc.

So what has lured me out of my silence? Strange thing happened to me a couple weeks ago. I was talking to a woman on the phone and she was telling me about her experiences as a youth group leader and how twenty years later, one girl came back, all grown up, and admitted that the night this woman drove her home, she was on her way to commit suicide. She went on to say that the woman's interest and involvement in her life made her feel loved and thus spared her life. Very touching story.

But what was strange was the woman I was speaking to said she was so alarmed to learn about this because, "the girl was so pretty." And then went on to say, "I saw nothing in her life worthy of suicide. It's not like she had a deformed face or anything."

This theme was reiterated just yesterday when I was online doing a web search and stumbled across an apologetics site where a man very hostile to the gospel found the golden argument that has silenced all of those irritating "witnesses" in his life. The argument was, "If God is a loving God, how come people like Julianna Whetmore are born?"

What's even more puzzling than his question is the fact that many born again Christians piped up in Christ's defense to leave comments on this man's blog -- and yet even the Christians handed it to the skeptic that they also had no idea why a loving God would allow such "tragedies."

Folks, I don't know how to express my surprise. Since when is a deformed face the worse possible scenario a person can conjure up in their heads? And why is it that we assume all such unfortunates do nothing but sit around all day thinking of ways to end their own lives?

It is a myth. A lie.

The old adage is, "Don't judge a man until you've walked a mile in his shoes." If you walked a mile in my shoes, you'd realize that a deformed face isn't so bad. It's no worse than anything else anyone has to deal with. Life has ups and downs. Do I have days when I wish there was more surgery and more to do to fix my face? Sure, but to tell you the truth, my insecure moments are not any more intense or frequent than any other woman or girl I have ever talked to who don't have deformities.

If my face was perfect, I'd wish I was thinner, or I wouldn't like something about the way I looked. I have yet to meet a woman who says she is 100% content with her physical appearance.

Folks, a deformed face ain't so bad. Compared to some of the horrible trials my friends are going through right now, I often think I am the luckiest person in the world, because I really have a pretty nice life. No complaints. Life is good.

If God is loving, why did he deform my face? I don't know -- maybe because with a normal face I would have been robbed of the thousands and thousands of blessings that I have received BECAUSE of my deformities. It seems odd, but usually our greatest trial is what most molds and shapes us. It gives us character, backbone, courage, wisdom, discernment, and friendships that are not shallow.

I often like to imagine that the crown of thorns probably did a number on Christ's forhead. I'm sure his face was a lot more deformed at that point than mine will ever be - and it was because of the "joy set before him" that he endured it. So.....so can I.

Krista on the Radio!

You may remember my friend Krista from a story that I posted on this blog back on January 23, 2005. (If you haven't read it, click here).

I just received an e-mail informing me that Krista has been interviewed. Here is information on where to go to hear that program! (Way to go, Krista!)

Krista was interviewed as a part of the radiothon described below. She will be on the radio sometime during this coming weekend. We don't know when, but you can hear the interview on the KS95 website starting Friday morning, by following the instructions below.

Tune in to the 8th annual KS95 for Kids® Radiothon, broadcast live March 3-5 from Ridgedale Center in Minnetonka. During the past seven years, this premier fundraising event has generated more than $7.7 million for Gillette Children's Specialty Healthcare and Children's Cancer Research Fund. To hear the courageous stories of kids battling cancer and living with disabilities, tune in to 94.5 KS95 FM or log on to www.ks95.com

Krista's story and photo is also featured under "Meet the Kids" at :http://www.ks95.com/ex.html

Go to KS95.com

Click on KS95 for Kids

Click on Meet the Kids

Click on Krista Horning

Click on the link to listen at the top of their story

Vicki's Story, Part Eight

Click here to read Part One
Click here to read Part Two
Click here to read Part Three
Click here to read Part Four
Click here to read Part Five
Click here to read Part Six
Click here to read Part Seven

Part Eight

At this point, I was half way through sixth grade and I already felt like I was forty years old. I sat at my desk, surrounded by eleven-year olds, feeling like I’d been here before many times already…decades ago…reliving my youth over and over again like some desperate character in some ironic Greek myth. I didn’t feel wise beyond my years by any means…just tired.

One afternoon, the teacher passed out our Weekly Readers and we took turns reading aloud, one paragraph at a time – voices winding up and down the rows of desks like a rattlesnake about to strike. This was a situation of complete safety. While some of my classmates struggled to read well aloud, I loved to read. I counted ahead and figured out which paragraph I was to read and scoured it for the bigger words. I practiced it in my head several time. However, when it came to my turn, instead of asking me to read, the teacher asked me to answer some poignant questions about the material we had just read.

I, of course, couldn’t answer any of them because I had been too busy practicing my paragraph to be paying attention to what anyone else had been reading. I admitted defeat which resulted in the all-too-familiar gales of laughter from my merciless classmates, who just seconds before my reproof had themselves been sweating their way through the exercise, mispronouncing words as simplex as “cereal.”

Angela, the smartest girl in the class, was sitting behind me. Stripped of my reading privileges, my thoughts retreated deep into another world as Angela flawlessly read through my paragraph.

I relived the moment of humiliation over and over again in my head as Angela droned on, citing boring, useless facts about the rock badger. Only one word came to comfort me as their laughter echoed in my head, “reality…” This life of mine, it was just reality. Face it.

I wrote “REALITY” vertically down the side margin of my weekly reader in big, block letters. I had never written a poem in my life, unless you counted that Haiku incident in second grade, but that was all done under duress, so it hardly counted.

From out of the “R” I penciled in, “Roses are not always read.” I was intrigued by my own cleverness to pun the word red, which is probably the only reason I bothered to go on. Almost without any thought, I scribbled out phrases after each of the remaining letters until I had a poem scrawled all over the back of my Weekly Reader.

R Roses are not always read
E Even beauty has thorns in its bed
A Always look at every side
L Look in deeper, see the pride
I In your heart you’ll find the key
T Try to change it, you will see
Y You cannot change reality

Okay, so it was dripping with irony and self-pity, but it wasn’t too bad for an eleven year old. What I realized then and there wasn’t necessarily that I had the ability to write poetry, but that poetry had the ability to break the spell of self-pity. Because I was able to articulate my hurt, the hurt went away. I know all of life isn’t this simple. But at eleven years old, I felt empowered. If I could write a poem about how I was feeling, then I must be feeling something very normal. If it wasn’t normal, it wouldn’t have words. As long as it had words, it meant that it was real, and if it was real, then I was real and all the lies about my not belonging on the planet and not fitting in and no one loving me couldn’t really be true.

I was so pleased over my new discovery, and a poem to read to my mom on the drive home from school that I didn’t even fight back when Brian, my arch-nemesis, tripped me on my way out the door. I picked myself up, dusted myself off, and just kept walking towards the door, the Weekly Reader proudly tucked under my arm.

“Icky Vicki! Icky Vicki!” He called down the hall after me.

“Icky Vicki….that’s really original!” I yelled back, suddenly realizing how uncreative the taunt really was.

Then, it was that very moment, the poet in me rose up and took the baton. The frightened, insecure girl that had once been holding onto it so tightly, relinquished her burden. It was the poet’s turn now. Self-confidence spread all over my body as I sat in the parking lot in mom’s car reading my poem to her, her face beaming with a blinding smile.

It was a whole new ball game now. Poor Brian…he never stood a chance after that. Yes, Brian, as he was very soon to find out, would have to watch his step from now on….especially if his shoelaces happened to be untied. Ah yes, Brian’s shoelaces…but that’s another story entirely…

Vicki's Story, Part Seven

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Click here to read Part Two
Click here to read Part Three
Click here to read Part Four
Click here to read Part Five
Click here to read Part Six

Part Seven

There I was again, sitting on that uncomfortable wooden chair in the surgeon’s downtown office. He was kneading my face like he was about to make a pie crust out of it. His left hand bracing my forehead, his eyes squinted, his tongue to his nose…pushing, prodding, poking, pulling.

My heart was beating. Surely, those scars were bound to be hard as rocks, as unfaithful as I was at rubbing the steroid cream into it over the past month.

His eyebrow raised.

My heart skipped a beat. It was coming – the lecture. He’s going to know…I’m dead meat! He’s going to know I didn’t use the cream. Oh why, why, why didn’t I just take five minutes a night and use the cream?! Now I was going to get a lecture from the stern doctor and a couple of needles in my nose.

His hand dropped from my forehead and he just glared at me – his eyes squinting. He just looked at me, his eyes boring more holes into my head than his scalpel had. I gulped and looked shyly at my lap. He breathed deeply through his nose and looked sternly at my mother. She smiled sweetly, not at all betraying the tearful confession she had heard from me on the car ride over to the office.

“Mrs. Anderson…” the doctor said sternly, “What exactly have you done here?”

“I…well…” mom was perplexed.

I felt bad…why should mom be blamed for my disobedience?

“I have never seen anything like this in all my years of medical practice!” he grunted.

Wow, as if I didn’t feel lousy enough! Now he’s gotta rub it in by making me the worst patient in medical history. Why didn’t I just use that blasted cream like I was supposed to!

The doctor got up without another word and left the office.

I looked at mom with wide eyes. Neither said a word, we both knew what was coming. I tried not to let the mental picture solidify – the stern doctor returning to the office with a Western gunslinger’s holster strapped around his white lab coat – two shiny hypodermic needles the size of shotguns hanging from each holster.

I could hear the doctor’s footsteps coming back towards the door. My heart nearly stopped. I took a deep breath and looked down at my lap. The knob twisted, “Oh God please…help me…help me…” I prayed – my mind screaming.

The doctor entered the room, with his nurse in tow. I looked all over, trying to see where he’d hid the shots.

“Look at this, Sally!” He said, pointing towards me as if I was standing in a fugitive lineup.

I was humiliated – not content to chew me out privately, he needed an audience to witness my fear and humiliation.

The nurse touched my nose, and then again. “Oh my…” she gasped, looking to the doctor.

“Mrs. Anderson,” the doctor continued, “I have never felt scars this soft in all my years of medical practice. What exactly did you do?”

My mind went blank. It was a surreal moment. I had experienced miracles before – God being merciful to me in impossible situations, but this time was a time I deserved no mercy. I had not done what I was told. I should have faced the consequences of neglecting the steroid cream. I blatantly didn’t use it, and God, for some unknown reason to me, still chose to flood me with mercy and rescue me from the needles.

I never had to have the shots. Even though every patient prior to me had to have them in order to proceed with the surgeries, I did not. God softened those scars. Somehow, the very healing hand of the Great Physician had stretched down to earth and touched my nose and softened those scars beyond what was humanely possible.

God proved himself to me that day and I also learned something about my own nature. I had always thought before that God delivered me because I deserved it. In this situation, I knew I didn’t deserve his mercy, but he saved me anyway. Sort of the same way he deals with our sin – we don’t deserve his mercy, but he saves us anyway. It’s not about our merit, it is about his faithfulness and his glory.

I had managed to dodge the needles in the face…but only for a time. There was to be another appointment – a visit to the ophthalmologist where I would not be so lucky…

Vicki's Story, Part Six

Click here to read Part One
Click here to read Part Two
Click here to read Part Three
Click here to read Part Four
Click here to read Part Five


Part Six

The most bittersweet day of my entire childhood was the day my mom and I drove downtown to my doctor’s office to get the dreaded buttons removed. I was thrilled to be rid of the big, ugly, tight uncomfortable things, but dreading it also as it would be the first in-office procedure I had ever had done….without anesthesia.

It’s one thing to boast of never crying when they knock you out cold every time they touch you. Now would be the test – could I get these buttons pulled out of my face without losing my cool? I was determined – no matter how painful it was – I was not going to cry!

And so there I was in that wooden-chair infested office, flat on my back, holding my mom’s hand. I didn’t say a word. After all, denying pain when someone has their fist all the way up your nose takes a lot of concentration.

The doctor shoved an extremely cold pair of pliers up my nose – farther than I imagined possible. His teeth clenched, both hands gripped around the handles, he pushed on the wire cutters with all his might. I heard a loud snap from within my nose and the wire cutters slid out. My eyes were closed. The doctor announced that he would now remove the buttons. I braced the pending pain by gripping my mom’s hand hard enough to sever it from her wrist.

The doctor put his hand down on my forehead, bearing down his weight on my head to keep it still. With his other hand he pulled the blood-clotted, mangled wire. He threw his arm back and ripped the wire out with the force of a rip cord out of a lawnmower.

Searing pain – like shots of fire – ran through my nose and down into my jaw. Rebracing his free hand on my forehead he pulled again. Hot streaks of pain shot up into my eyes, filling every ounce of my head with shooting pain. “I won’t cry…I won’t cry…” I thought as I gripped mom’s hand even tighter. I took a deep breath as the doctor ripped the wire over and over again, like a sadistic clown pulling his never-ending train of wire hankys from out of my eye sockets.

At last, he was finished. It was done. My body filled with a warm joy. Certainly this is the way an athlete feels after a game-winning touchdown or a soldier limping up to receive his purple heart in front of cheering peers. I always felt a physical feeling of overwhelming triumph whenever I survived a painful ordeal without tears. I couldn’t control anything happening to me. I had no choices, no options. But I could choose to not cry – I could control one thing at least.

“Do you want to keep your buttons for posterity sake?” The nurse chirped happily.

“Are you crazy? No! Of course I don’t want them!” I spat. I used to get toys and lollipops when I had to endure pain in doctor’s offices and this woman had the nerve to offer me my buttons. I didn’t save them, but now I wish I had. I didn’t realize at the time what trophies those things truly were.

I jumped off the table, smiling. I looked over at mom, she smiled back, rubbing the blood out of the hand I had practically torn off during the ordeal. I walked over to the mirror and examined my new face. My eyes were pretty swollen. Soft pink circles now book-ended my nose the way the buttons used to. I didn’t even care. They buttons had come off just in time. School pictures were two weeks away. The pink circles would be long gone by then.

I was so distracted by the mirror’s new reflection that I had primarily been ignoring my doctor’s chatter. Usual nonsense – make another appointment….fill this prescription…get this special cream….have Vicki rub the cream into the button sores three times a day…

And then my heart sank. “The cream will soften the scar tissue,” the doctor droned on. “We can’t do more surgery until the scars have softened. The cream never works, but we’ll try it for now. Next time she comes in we’ll start the steroid injections.”

“Injections?” I said, spinning on my heels to face the doctor. “You mean shots?”

The doctor nodded with no emotion.

“Shots? On my face?”

“Make the appointment for a month from now…” the doctor said turning away from me.

“Please…I don’t want shots on my face…” I said…almost betraying my “no tears” rule.

In a moment of unorthodox sympathy, the doctor turned to me. “I’ll make you a deal. If your scars are soft enough a month from now, I’ll let you keep using the cream instead of the shots. But I must warn you….the cream never works.”

That night, locked alone in the bathroom with the big silver tube of cream in my hand, I put gobs of ointment on my tender, throbbing scars and rubbed until my fingers went numb. “Please God….please God,” the prayer reverberated in my head and I applied more cream to my nose. “God, please don’t make me get shots in my nose,” I begged.

Unfortunately, I was eleven and my discipline ran out shortly after that first night. Before I knew it, my doctor’s appointment was the very next day, and I hadn’t picked up that tube of cream in weeks.

“Oh God, please help me…” I cried as I sat locked in the bathroom the night before that fatal appointment. “Please soften these scars, Jesus….please….”

The Dreaded Buttons!

I managed to find this old photo. This is probably a few days after the buttons surgery. This picture was taken after I was cleaned up a little, but you can see my eyes are still swollen shut and I think my mouth looks a little funny because of the surgery I had on the roof of my mouth. Here you also can see Papa the banana (was he ever that yellow)?!?!

Vicki's Story - Part Five

Click here to read Part One
Click here to read Part Two
Click here to read Part Three
Click here to read Part Four

Part Five

The first day of sixth grade was hard, but in retrospect, went as smoothly as it would for any “new kid.” For the most part, the kids were still young enough (and curious enough) where they took my sutured-up face in stride and I made friends pretty quickly. Sixth grade was really the end of Innocence for me. Seventh and eight grade proved to be two of the most difficult years of my life. Again, in retrospect, I don’t think I suffered any more than any other junior high kid who had the misfortune of being too tall, too skinny, too chubby, too shy, too smart, or who had too much acne. In other words, no one gets by with anything when they’re 12. And in fairness, I dished it out just as bad (if not worse) than everybody else. Junior High is the closest I ever got to thinking Darwin was a genius. Nowhere else in the world does one see evidence of “Survival of the fittest” than in the confines of a junior high classroom.

By seventh grade, I was a chubby pear-shaped girl, I was pale as a ghost, flat-chested, with a deformed face, completely non-athletic, shy, and I had braces…on the top teeth only. To make matters worse, I knew nothing about pop culture, popular music, movies or anything else any “cool” kid would be talking about. About the only thing I was good at was spelling….which made me even more of a nerd.

I hated gym class more than anything else in the world. Not only was I an uncoordinated weakling but my last name began with an “A” – which means I got to go first. About three or four kids into the activity, the whole class would be bored and disinterested, but that first guinea pig with the “A” names – all eyes were on us – one false move and you got it. You know, nothing reverberates off those high gym ceilings more than the cacophonic laughter of judgmental twelve-year olds.

I was fully convinced that 99% of my problems would go away if they would outlaw junior high gym class. Those horrible uniforms that earned for me daily taunts about my pale, skinny bird legs…my inability to score a goal even when I was a foot from the goal and the goalie was off on the sidelines eating an orange wedge. And what is with those dodge balls? I must have had a homing device in my forehead – every single dodge ball ever launched between the years of 1984-1986 seemed to land square between my eyes (which of course sent my face bleeding like mad because of those blasted buttons wired to my face)!

Then, as if things weren't bad enough, some teacher had the bright idea to start a softball league for the seventh and eight graders. I had no desire or intention to join. But the classes were small and lo and behold, EVERY kid in all of seventh and eight grade signed up. After hearing, “You didn’t sign up for softball?!” a hundred times, I crumbled under the peer pressure and signed up.

The dreaded day came – the first day of practice. The entire seventh and eighth grade was out on the softball field next to the school. The teacher decided to give every single student a chance to bat.

My heart started beating. I was more nervous about trying to bat in front of my classmates than I was before my last surgery. “What if I strike out?” “What if they make fun of me?” “What if someone trips me when I try to run to base?” “What if the whole crowd laughs at me?” Or, “What if the pitcher, just to be mean, whales me in the face with the softball?” Hey….it was known to happen before with the dodge ball, so my concern was not completely paranoid.

Then I had a bright idea! I could stall my turn and if I waited long enough, my mom would be there to pick me up and I could get away! I had found my way out – I started to breathe easy.

I heard a car pull up and turned with anticipation and was shocked to see, not my mom’s car, but my dad’s. My dad NEVER came to pick me and my brother up – never. My heart started to beat. He came out of the car and walked toward the field. Dad was always in a hurry to go. “Let’s go, Dad!” I pleaded. “No, no….I want to see you and your brother bat!”

What?!?

I was so scared. I prayed and prayed that the kids wouldn’t make fun of me in front of my dad. I didn’t want him to know how mean they were to me. I went out of my way to not tell my parents about all of their cruelty. I didn’t need sympathy. It was shameful to me to admit to my parents that I was a freak that nobody liked. I had tried so hard to hide all that from them – and here was my dad, on the sidelines of a baseball diamond, in front of my entire class, about to watch me strike out and get laughed at. The secret would be out.

I panicked. I was so desperate I actually decided to admit defeat (this was long before I learned that telling your dad something meant he would immediately come up with a solution).

“Dad, I can’t bat. I’m going to strike out.”

I was merely forewarning him. It was just a fact, nothing more.

“Go grab that bat!” Dad said.

My heart sank….he was supposed to just accept the fact that his daughter was an athletic moron and take me home. Now, I had just unwittingly gotten myself a batting lesson.

I went and picked up the bat and dad gave me a spontanius batting lesson right there on the sidelines. He showed me how to stand, where to position the bat, where to look, when to swing. I humored him, but knew once I got up there, I’d panic, louse up, get hit in the face, and have to face the humilation of my dad witnessing the whole treacherous experience.

Dad’s coaching session was interrupted by the teacher yelling, “VICKI! You’re up!”

“Go get ‘em!” my dad said patting me on the back. He had such a huge smile on his face. Such expectation. I was about to humiliate myself and my dad in one fell swing in front of every kid I knew and he didn't even know it.

I got to home base. My arch-nemesis was the catcher – sitting there cockily whispering, “You’re gonna choke, Anderson.” I felt like I was stuck in a really bad after school special. This was a nightmare.

I looked up at the pitcher – none other than the eight grade atheletic king, Hein Lee of South Korea. His muscles buldged as he warmed up his swinging arm. My heart was beating so loud it was as if it had jumped out of my flat chest and started running around the bases without me.

“You stink, Anderson….” The catcher antagonized.

I looked at my dad on the sidelines, he was grinning like a Muppet.

“Oh God…..help me” I prayed. I sucked the tears back into my face. I was so scared. “Please don’t let the ball hit my face,” I prayed. “Oh God, please don’t let me strike out.” I positioned my feet just like dad had showed me. “God, please don’t let me strike out, please…” I took a deep breath and lined up the bat with my shoulder.

The ball came flying at me. “Choke, choke….” The catcher chanted.

I heard my dad yell, “Now, Vic!”

I swung that blasted bat with all my might, then I heard something I had never heard before and would never hear ever again --- the crack of wood slamming against a softball. The ball retaliated and catapulted through the air. I was in shock, I stood there just staring at the ball.

“RUN! Run to first!” I heard someone screaming.

My feet took over and I ran to first base…and then to second….and then to third. By the time my foot hit home plate, the outfielders were still in the neighboring yard to the school looking for the ball.

“SAFE!” the ump called. I looked down at the catcher with a smug look of victory on my buttoned-up face. “Pure luck,” he sneered.

I didn’t even care…I walked over to the sidelines with the echo of my dad’s voice screaming, “Go, Vic! Go, Vic!” ringing in my ears. It was the happiest day of that entire school year.

It didn’t earn me any respect or any kindness, but it taught me something about God. Here He is with a universe to run – the Space Shuttle Challenger had just blown up, there were things going on in the world – big things – and here was God, taking the time to bend His ear to a silly seventh-grade girl begging for the strength to hit a stupid softball.

Sometimes the softball incident would come to mind to remind me that God was there, he was listening, he did hear my prayers, he did care about me, he did have a plan for my life. But as I got older, the memories became fuzzy. I forgot all about buttons and baseballs and God's goodness...

Vicki's Story, Part Four

Click here to read Part One.
Click here to read Part Two.
Click here to read Parth Three.

Part Four

My eyes were black. They were so swollen it looked as if they were hiding ping-pong balls instead of eyes behind them. A large tubular-shaped piece of cotton had been sutured to my nose. The cotton crawled up my nose, its whiteness buried in dark brown blood, strapped to my nose with dark black thread. It looked like a leech had crawled up my nose and died there in mid-motion. On both sides of my eyes, placed to the left and right of the bridge of my nose, were the infamous “buttons” that I had heard about for many months but could not, or perhaps would not, imagine. They were bigger than I expected – perhaps the size of quarters. An off-white rubbery button. Inside the buttons was a mass of tangled wire, woven together with bloody cotton balls. The inner knots, crusty with dried blood, protruded out of the center of the buttons. I reached up with my index finger and touched the center of the button as lightly as I could. It was hard as a rock. The mere touch sent a painful burning sensation through my nose. But perhaps the most grotesque thing of all was the pathetic expression upon my face. My mouth was down turned into a frown so deep it was almost like a caricature. “How could I expect anyone to look upon this?” I wondered. Here I was, looking at the reflection, staring in a trance at the grotesqueness of it all. And perhaps that’s why I never faulted the onlookers in the stores and on the streets too much. I myself was transfixed by the horror of it, sitting there alone in my hospital room, starring transfixed at that make-up mirror over and over again as if I were watching some sort of television show. And then, the mood would be broken, when I realized that the image in the mirror was no act of Hollywood, but indeed my very own face.

I didn’t cry. I couldn’t. It would have hurt to have touched the buttons to wipe away the tears.

I wish I could remember now what was going through my head at the time. But my guess is, it was nothing profound. I was eleven years old. It hurt to move and I was scared to tell the nurse I had to go to the bathroom for fear that walking there, or moving to maneuver a bedpan underneath me would hurt too badly. So, I sat there in pain, praying it away. Finally, after about a day of holding it, the nurse announced that if I didn’t go to the bathroom soon, I’d have to have an enema. She left the room and I asked my dad, “Dad, what’s an enema?” I can’t remember his exact metaphorical interpretation, but it was descriptive enough for me to hit the nurse call button immediately after that and tell her I had to go to the bathroom.

Now, around this time, I had a collection of stuffed animals. I had a special love for the stuffed bananas with faces on them – the kinds you could win at dime slides at the fair. I had a couple dozen of them in varying sizes. But being still a child, the thing I wanted more than anything in the world was one of the big three or four foot long ones – you know, the ones that no one could ever win.

A couple of days after my surgery, when my eyes were no longer swollen shut, my family came into my room. I looked at them and they all had huge smiles on their faces. When I asked what was going on, dad told me to turn my head and look to my right. I did so and there laying beside me on my hospital bed was one of the big five foot tall bananas!

For that moment, everything disappeared – even the buttons. My heart filled with a flood of joy and I felt like my heart would explode. It’s one thing to get something you’ve always wanted, but another thing to get something that you thought you would never get. My dad had gone and personally talked to the owner of ValleyFair and told him about me. My dad offered an exorbitant amount of money to buy one of the bananas from him. In the end, the owner gave one to him as a gift.

I remember being alone in hospital at night, turning over and seeing Papa (since he was the dad for all my other littler bananas) looking at me with the biggest smile and bright, laughing eyes. It might seem childish to have felt so loved by such an inatimate object, but for me, it was the only thing in my life that always looked me directly in my face and didn’t turn away, didn’t ask probing personal questions, and always kept smiling.

If only such kindness had been waiting for me on my first day of school…

Vicki's Story, Part Three

Click here to read Part One.
Click here to read Part Two.

Part Three

The date was set. What a way to ruin a summer. My surgery was set for the month of July, right after my 11^th birthday. I was scheduled to have a bone graph taken from one of my hips to sculpt bones for the roof of my mouth to correct the partial cleft palate. In addition, the surgeon wanted to work on reconstructing my face. His first project was to work on narrowing the very wide bridge of my nose. In order for the new nose to hold it’s shape, “buttons” would have to be wired through my nose to hold the narrowed bridge tightly in place. This would not only mean a liquid diet for many months, but starting my very first day of junior high school – at a brand new school – with these buttons wired to my nose.

The day arrived and my parents and I drove down to Children’s Hospital at the crack of dawn. I had my dreaded blood test and was then brought to the waiting room. Hospitals did not cater to childhood fears twenty years ago and so when the time came for me to go into the operating room, I had to say good-bye to my parents. I walked, alone, on my own two feet all the way into the operating room. I looked around at all the busy doctors in stiffly starched lab coats – all of their identities hidden behind blue face masks. I saw silver trays full of various knives and scalpels and needles. I wondered for a moment if this is how Stephen the martyr felt standing around with a bunch of men in a field of stones.

“Hop up here, honey!” The anesthesiologist almost sang, as if he were helping me into the seat of an amusement park ride.

I hopped up on the operating table. “I won’t cry…I won’t cry…I won’t cry…” ran like a broken record through my head as I laid down, squinting into the large overhead light to the symphony of clanking instruments.

A thick rubber mask was put over my face and I was told to breathe in the gas. Sometimes, when I walk into a newly painted house or catch a whiff of a glass of wine, I am thrown back to this moment when my nostrils filled with the stench of sleeping gas. My heart did summersaults as the room began to spin and I listened to myself talking to the doctor, wondering how I was able to answer questions that I never even heard him ask – hearing myself from outside of my head – and then waking up hours later, as if nothing had even happened.

I laid in my bed. I couldn’t move. My hip was burning from the graph incision, I couldn’t even roll over. The roof of my mouth was sore and when I tried to talk, uncut sutures hung down and tickled my tongue. I couldn’t open my eyes because they were swollen shut. I could hear my mom’s voice next to me.

I never detected her voice cracking or any emotion. She was always so kind and loving, but it wouldn’t be until I was much older that I would realize this was all very hard and scary for my mom too – not just me.

“What do I look like?” I moaned.

It was always the first thing I asked. What did I expect her to say? You look great?!

My parents and brother stayed for a while but then visiting hours were over. Jeff had been in the corner of the room most of the time listening to his headphones. His walkman was his prized possession. I wasn’t even allowed to touch it. He was 13 and pretty disinterested in me at that time in life. Mom leaned over my bed and kissed me and said she’d be back. Dad kissed me and said he loved me. Jeff called, “Bye, Vic!” from the door and then all was quiet.

A couple seconds later, I heard footsteps and assumed the nurse had come in to ask if I needed anything.

“Hey Vic.”

It was my brother. He had snuck back into the room.

“I love you” he said and put something into my hand. I didn’t know what it was through the I.V.

“I love you too” I stuttered, overwhelmed with emotion – never having heard my brother ever say this to me.

“Well, bye” he said – the moment passed – and he ran out of the room.

I fumbled with my I.V. tube and put the item into my open hand and felt to see what he had left for me. It was his prized walkman. I tried to hold back the tears because with my eyes swollen shut it hurt even to wipe a Kleenex across them.

Feeling that I was now safely alone, I struggled to sit up in my bed. I had to sway back and forth very slowly to move without inciting my hip to burn in pain. After much effort, I was sitting up. I reached my arms out to the side of the bed, fumbling through the air, looking for the bed table on wheels that should be parked next to the bed. My knuckles hit wood and I rolled the table over my lap. I slid the table top away from me revealing the little storage unit under the table. I flipped up the little makeup mirror and leaned as close to it as I could.

I reached my hands up to my eyelids and using all ten fingers, I pried my swollen eyelids open and looked into the mirror…

Vicki's Story, Part Two

To read part one, click here.

Part Two:

The dentist told my mom I needed braces. As far as I was concerned, this was great news. I was at that age where girls talked about braces and broken legs and crutches and glasses like they were Grammy Awards.

So, I left the office that afternoon with my pink toothbrush, container of floss, and daydreams of showing up for the first day of Sixth Grade, at my new school, with a sparkling metal smile. Life was good.

Soon after that we went to the orthodontist that my dentist had recommended. He took some x-rays and concluded that I did indeed need braces but he discovered a partial cleft palate (no bones in the roof of my mouth) and was concerned to put the braces on until it was decided whether or not I needed surgery in my mouth to correct the palate.

And so, soon after that appointment, we went to a surgeon’s office to have my cleft palate checked out. Mom and I drove downtown to the office buildings across the street from Children’s Hospital in Minneapolis. I had never been downtown before. We walked into the doctor’s office. The waiting room was empty, save a room full of handmade wooden chairs and benches. I sat down on one of the hard chairs and looked around while mom filled out the paperwork on the clipboard.

Eventually, we were called into the office – a small room with a small sink, an examination table, desk, and more of those wooden, slatted chairs. I took the chair next to the desk and awaited the doctor’s arrival.

Mom and I had been guessing for weeks what the doctor would look like. We had made a game of it. We had a complete profile in our head – white lab coat, perfectly coiffed short dark brown hair, big brown eyes, a stethoscope around his neck with the end tucked into his lab coat pocket, a big grin upon his face, and a pocketfull of lollipops.

The door cracked and mom and I looked at each other with wide eyes. Mom dramatically raised an eyebrow, Sherlock Holmes-style. I suppressed a giggle. The door shut and the doctor crossed the room and sat down without a word, not even looking to check whether his patients were even in the room. He immediately set to scribbling notes in my newly- christened medical file.

I looked at mom with a look of horror only to see the same look on her face staring back at me. The doctor was nothing like we imagined him to look like. He was tall and gangly, deathly serious, with Abraham Lincoln-like facial features, and an unruly spray of bangs protruding away from his forehead in dark locks (mind you, this was long before Conan made such a look famous).

Without a word, the doctor turned to me and firmly planted his hand on my forehead. With his other hand he started squishing and pushing at my nose like it was a wad of Play-Doh. From under his grip, my eyes strayed over to where my mom was sitting. My eyes said to her, “What’s going on?” Her expression said, “I haven’t the faintest!”

After a minute or two, my mom interjected.

“We were sent here by her orthodontist.”

“Mmm” he grunted, continuing to pulverize my nose.

“…you know, to check out the roof of her mouth. To see if she needed surgery before
getting braces.”

This seemed to get through. He dropped his hands from my face and faced my mom for the first time since entering the room. I rubbed my nose back into shape. He didn’t say a word.

“She has a partial cleft palate,” my mom continued.

Without a command, he simply took his hand, put it on my jaw and jerked my mouth open. He took a quick peek, grunted and said, “Yeah, she’ll need surgery,” closed my mouth back up and continued to squeeze at my nose.

He then dropped his right hand from my forehead and simultaneously began to squeeze at my nose with his left hand while drawing detailed pencil drawings of my face with his right. I was beginning to wonder if they were going to cement those braces to my nose.

At last he dropped his pencil to the desk. “Mrs. Anderson, I am a reconstructive surgeon. Is Vicki seeing a doctor for her face?”

“No,” my mom replied, “Her surgeons at Children’s Hospital Philadelphia said there was
nothing more they could do.”

“Well, there’s plenty more I can do,” he retorted.

And with that simple phrase, my entire world collapsed.

Perfect Timing

A very strange thing happened last night that I feel compelled to share because I think the story is a lesson in God's sovereignty and His goodness.

I was leaving my parent's house around 8:30 PM. I was anxious to get home because I didn't want to stay up too late. As I was driving down the main street to get to the freeway, I realized I would be driving by Mr. Movies. About five weeks ago, my dad and I were in there renting movies and struck up a conversation with the night manager. He was a young guy who said he had been an athiest for 18 years until he was hospitalized and miraculously saved from this accident. So, he made the leap from athiest to diest, but still struggled finding proof that Jesus is the Son of God. But his search seemed sincere. A couple days later I bought him some C.S. Lewis books.

Those books have been sitting in the back seat of my car for over a month. So, when I realized last night that I would be driving right by the movie place and the books were still in my car, it would be a good time to go and see if he was there. I hesitated briefly, "What if he isn't there?" or "What if he doesn't want the books?" But after a brief mental tug-o-war, I pulled into Mr. Movies.

He was there and he very warmly received the books. We talked for about ten minutes about spiritual things and then I left.

When I got home, I was a bit curious over why there were about half a dozen people standing in my driveway. I pulled into my garage and went out to ask them what was up. Turns out, about ten minutes before I pulled in, a drunk driver had come careening around the bend, swerved off the road, plowed into my driveway, hit my tree, and tore through the neighbor's yard, back onto the road, and went screaming down the street. The tire tread marks from the car were clearly visible in both of our yards.

It didn't dawn on my right away, and perhaps I am just being overly dramatic, but the neighbor said I missed the drunk driver by about ten minutes -- which was about the time I spent in Mr. Movies talking to the night manager. And so, it is hard not to wonder, had I not stopped to give him the books, would I have turned into my neighborhood ten minutes earlier only to be met with a head-on collision? God only knows.

At any rate, it's interesting to think that a couple of books in the back seat of my car -- something meant to save someone else's life - perhaps saved my own.

Kazakhstan Photos

I put up a tiny sampling of our photos. You can view them here.

Unfortunately, you have to put in your e-mail address and a password, but it only takes a second and you are not put on any mailing lists or bound to any obligations.

The photos are mostly of my team: Sonja, Bethann, Liliya, and myself. Nataliya was our main contact. She is a Kazak woman who works with the orphanages in Uralsk. There are pictures of kids. Shine Camp was a one-day "camp" that we held for about a dozen children with disabilities who are not orphans. They are at the camp with their parents.

The other kids in the photos are orphans. The one shot of a building is Cushum -- the disability orphanage about an hour out of Uralsk.

Enjoy! I hope to have more photos posted in the future.

Vicki's Story, Part One

I procrastinated long enough (roughly twenty years or so to be exact), but I think it’s finally time for me to write out my story. I’ve always laid that burden on my mom, thinking it was more her story than my own. Her blog story took you from the day I was born until I was in high school, but I guess the rest of the story is mine to tell. I will do this much the same way I did for my mom's installments -- a small segment for a series of weeks, posted some time on Monday of each week.

Part One

I was seven years old when we moved away from Philadelphia and back to Minnesota where I had been born. We relocated because both of my parents families lived in Minneapolis and dad was able to get his sales territory relocated to the Midwest. At that point, the surgeons at Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia informed my parents that there was nothing more that they could do for me.

About three months after moving back to Minnesota, I turned 8 years old. I would be entering Third Grade the following Spring. I was happy, well-adjusted, and making friends. I loved school – especially reading and spelling. I see now, looking back, that after seven years of rigorous surgeries and doctor’s appointments that the Lord was giving me a much-needed reprieve. I was more than thrilled with the diagnosis that there were to be no more surgeries. Granted, I didn’t understand at eight years old the extent of my deformities, or the extent of cruelty in the world.

For three glorious years, all was as it should be in my perfect little world. That was, all until an ordinary visit to the dentist. It intrigues me how life-changing events turn on the most ordinary of moments. Moses tended sheep for forty years in the wilderness and one day, not unlike any of the others, he spies the burning bush. And so here I was, minding my own business as it were, and a simple trip to get my teeth cleaned ushered in a whole new phase of life – the most difficult phase I would ever encounter.

Psalm 23 talks about “the valley of the shadow of death.” As my mom opened the heavy glass door going into the dentist’s office, how was I ever to know it would usher me onto the path that ran straight through that valley? And how was I to know I would walk on it for the next ten years of my life?

Back in the U.S. of A

I got back from Kazakhstan on Saturday night. What an exhausting trip - both emotionally, physically, and spiritually. But worth every second. After church yesterday, I got home, ate a bowl of cereal, laid down on my couch and didn't wake up until 6:00 AM this morning!

I am having a hard time wrapping my little, jet-lagged brain around everything that happened, but suffice it to say it was awesome. I went with three other women and we brought three wheelchairs, two walkers, a prosthetic leg, and nine suitcases full of supplies for the orphanages in Uralsk.

Uralsk has a high concentration of deformed and disabled children because it is the city where the former Soviet Union did their bomb testing. We went to three different orphanages, one of which housed disabled children exclusively. We also did a day camp for about a dozen disabled kids and their parents.

We had a very close call. In Amsterdam, they told us we didn't have reservations to get on the plane to Uralsk. For about an hour, two of the gals bantered with the ticket agents and made desperate phone calls to our travel agent in the U.S. while I guarded the luggage and took turns praying with the other gals. Not only were they not going to let us on the plane, but they told us the next flight to Uralsk was an entire week away! We prayed and at the eleventh hour, a flight attendant was sent running on board the plane to instruct the pilot to terminate take off. We made it.

We got to Uralsk at 2:00 AM and were there another two or three hours getting through customs and passport control. Two of the three wheelchairs we brought were completely mangled and destroyed by the time we got them. A couple of days later, the team was praying and reading Scripture together and Bethann and I went over to the wheelchairs and starting trying to bend them back into shape and somehow, miraculously, the two of us, with bare hands, somehow put these broken wheelchairs back together and in "good as new" shape. Praise the Lord. It blew us away.

I have so much more to say but I am going to have to blog in spurts as my head still cannot contain all that happened. Thanks to all of you who supported me financially and who prayed for me while I was gone. Your prayers were answered beyond what any of us could have imagined.

On a Mission

I leave first thing tomorrow moring for Detroit. I will hook up with three dear women there and the four of us are off to Central Asia. We will be gone for ten days, working among an orphanage there that is made up, primarily, of disabled children.

Please be in prayer for our safety and travel, but most of all, pray that Christ's name would be glorified in our work there and that the spotlight would be turned off of us and onto the Lord. May they not think it is our citeznship in the United States or our funds that make us happy and willing to serve - but the One who sends us. Let it not be our names, but His Name that is praised.

Please pray for these children and pray for wisdom and discernment as we love and serve them. Help us to rely not on our own strength, but only in the strength that God supplies. His grace is sufficient for us!

I hope to blog more about the trip once we return.

Mom's Story - Final Chapter

A special word of thanks to my mom for laboring over the writing of this story for many weeks. I pray that her work will not be in vain but that people who read her story will be encouraged to put their hope in a faithful, loving, soveriegn Great Physician. To God be the glory!

Click here to read Part One
Click here to read Part Two
Click here to read Part Three
Click here to read Part Four
Click here to read Part Five
Click here to read Part Six
Click here to read Part Seven
Click here to read Part Eight

Final Installment:

As the years have passed, new questions have filled my mind. When Vicki was first born, my questions had been: “Why is this happening to my family?” “Is this a punishment for bad things my husband or I have done?” “Or is this simply an unfortunate accident of nature?” As I searched the Bible, I found answers [see Part 4 of this blog story]. I became convinced that God is sovereign; He is in control of all things.

The belief that God is sovereign is more than understanding that God is in control of all things. It is an understanding that God does more than react to bad situations, turning what was meant for evil into what is good. God does not react; He acts.

It goes against our grain to equate anything bad with God. We feel the need to protect His image and make Him look good. But God doesn’t need us to guard His reputation. What He desires is that we trust Him, even when it looks as though His reputation will suffer. God is God. He doesn’t need our help. He wants our trust.

God knits each one of us in our mother’s womb. When a baby is born with disabilities, do we conclude that God made a mistake? If He does indeed knit us together in our mother’s womb, then we must conclude that He knits us in exactly the way He desires. He makes no mistakes.

But this is not bad news! In fact, it is very good news. God is sovereign. He is in charge of all things. He makes no mistakes. When a baby is born with a disability, it is God’s perfect plan!

This understanding led me to ask more questions. “If this is God’s plan for our family, how does He want us to respond?” I found my answer in James 1:2-4, “Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.”

My next question was, “Could I find peace and contentment in this situation?” The Bible told me, in Philippians 4:11-13, “I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. I can do everything through Him who gives me strength.”

I embraced these verses and found comfort and strength in them. But after awhile, new questions begged to be answered. “Was it possible to go beyond peace and contentment and actually feel joy in our situation?” Life with disabilities is a journey. The difficulties often cannot be remedied, and we must learn to live with them. Can we learn to live with them and actually be joyful in them? 1 Peter 4:12-13 says, “Do not be surprised at the painful trial you are suffering, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice that you participate in the sufferings of Christ, so that you may be overjoyed when His glory is revealed.”

This led me to ask, “Is there joy beyond the pain, or is there actually joy in the pain?” Romans 5:3-5, “We rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out His love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom He has given us.”

I believe that God chose this sorrow for our family. And surprisingly, what I at first felt was a sorrow, I see now as a joy. In all sincerity, if given such a chance, I would not change the journey our family has traveled. We have all learned, we have all grown, and we love the Lord and His sovereign direction in our lives.

When our daughter was born, we gave her the name Vicki Joy. The name was a deliberate choice. We wanted her to one day live out the attributes that her name implies. We wanted her to be “victorious,” and we wanted her to be “joyful.” In every way Vicki Joy lives up to her name.

I will praise the Lord who continually showers us with good things, with blessings everlasting. “The Lord is good to those whose hope is in Him, to the one who seeks Him; His compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness” (Lamentations 3:25, 22-23).

Who Should We Take Pity Upon?

I had a very cool “moment” at Joni Camp. I was being interviewed and the question posed before me was one I have answered many times, “What do you tell people who say that they pity you?” (This is in specific reference to my having a deformed face). I had the pat answer all set up in the chute – “Why feel sorry for me? I have a great life…God has blessed me…I have so many things to be thankful for…I have a better life than a lot of pretty people do….yadda, yadda, yadda…”

And as I opened my mouth to speak, a train whistled and the cameras stopped rolling and the camera man told me to hold off my answer until the train went by. By the time they said, “Roll camera” I had one of those anesthesia moments – you know, you hear yourself talking from inside your head and you’re thinking, “Who is that talking?”

I found myself answering the question in a way I never have before and having now mulled my answer over for a couple of weeks, I am rather alarmed by what I said.

In short, I said something like, “No, I should not be pitied. The apostle Paul said that if we put our hope in Christ and in the end Christ is not the Son of God then our hope was for this life only and, therefore, we hoped in vain. Paul says of these people that they are ‘to be pitied more than all men.’ I have put my hope in Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior and Jesus Christ is the Son of God. My hope is not in vain. Therefore, I am not to be pitied, regardless of what my face might look like.”

The verse I quoted was from the passage of 1 Corinthians 15:19:

But if it is preached that Christ has been raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead. But he did not raise him if in fact the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men.

I am still a little taken aback by that answer because it sobered me. I realized that I have participated in more than my fair share of self-pity in my lifetime – and pitied a lot of other people who I felt deserved it. And yet none of those feelings I had were based on Scriptural standards, but on earthly standards. The world says physical beauty is of utmost importance, so logic dictates that we empathize with those who have been robbed of it.

I want to be more biblically focused. I want to see people through biblical lenses. I don’t want to see as the world sees. Christ reserved his tears for eternal losses – unrepentant Israel (Luke 19:41), the death of loved ones.(John 11:35), and separation from God’s favor (Luke 22:44). In the interest of being Christ-like, I want to weep for the right things.

Joni Camp

I have been home from Joni Camp for four days now and am still struggling to find a way to put the experience into words. It is an experience I would definitely recommend and strongly urge you to check out the Joni and Friends website and start thinking and praying towards volunteering at a camp near you.

It was wonderful, but also a lot of hard work. The days were jam-packed with activity. We were up early and in bed late, and yet, the energy seemed to always be there when I needed it, which I presume to be nothing but the grace of God and the answer to the many prayers people were praying on my behalf.

I spent the week with an adorable six year old girl with OHDO Blepharophimosis Syndrome. I instantly fell in love with this little girl - as well as her mom, dad, grandmother, and brother (who were all at the camp also).

Being put with a six year old carried with it many benefits. First being, that I got to spend time with a wonderful little girl! Secondly, the six year old team had all sorts of fun stuff planned for them. I think I had just as much fun as the kids did. We had puppet shows, games, a moon walk, a carnival, cartoons, train rides, swimming, boat rides, tubing, treats, singing, crafts - you name it. It was a blast! Another blessing to being put with the six year olds is that I had a wonderful team leader who is going to be a life-long friend.

I met many wonderful people there -- fellow volunteers, families of disabled kids, not to mention the kids themselves. It was great being in an atmosphere where everyone was friendly and kind and the rude staring and probing questions were nowhere to be found.

I am only touching on my week. Like I said before, I am still struggling for words to put this whole experience down. I am sure I will blog more as things get processed.

Thank you to everyone who prayed for me while I was gone. God went exceedingly beyond my wildest expectations and I had a wonderful time.

Joni and Friends Family Camp

Tomorrow is the big day. I leave bright and early in the morning for Joni camp. Seven of us are driving there, it will be a ten-hour drive. Lord willing, we will arrive at the camp safe and sound sometime Saturday night. Sunday will involve a church service and an intense day of training for the volunteers (which is what I will be doing at the camp). We also find out on Sunday what family we have been assigned to. The remainder of the week consists of spending time with your family and attending and participating in various activities.

I am eagerly anticipating the trip and am looking forward to meeting the family that I have been paired with. I pray that I can be a blessing to them in some small way and that they in turn will also bless me, as I am sure they will!

Please be in prayer for me as I am away - safe travels, health, freedom from stress (worrying about the work I've left behind!), and that the families that are attending this camp will go home feeling refreshed and renewed.

Pray that the volunteers are given grace and compassion and kindness and eyes to see all the glories of Christ that God specifically designed to only be seen through the lives of those who live with disabilities.