Putting Trust in God Making It Right

When people ask me about my story, they first one want to hear about polio. I'm one of the last people to get it before the vaccine was developed, just a few months after I was paralyzed. I was able to get some use back, but I still needed to use one of those long steel and leather braces to be able to stand or walk at all.

It left me with one leg shorter than the other, one foot smaller than the other, and a limp that was very noticeable. And people would watch me walk, and the shame would just burn. Polio crippled my body, but it also crippled my heart with shame. And when people ask about my story, they also ask about Becky. When our first baby was born very prematurely, she only lived for nine days in the NICU.

She was just too premature to make it. And that was horrifically painful to say goodbye to my baby girl. To bury a child. If I thought polio was hard. Losing a baby was so much worse. And then, most recently, I've had this crazy diagnosis of tongue cancer. They had to cut out a third of my tongue to get rid of the cancer.

But it meant I lost my clear speech. I lost my life before the surgery, and after I had the surgery, the grief hit me like a wall several times. But for decades, I have practiced maintaining an eternal perspective. I read and write what Job said, "The Lord gives, the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.” Nothing has touched me without Him having a reason for it.

And despite what was going on with my grief, I was, and I am still filled with gratitude for His goodness and the ways that He has taken care of me. I'm so grateful for how He has shown me His love, and I thought about the reality that a good and loving God was still in control and that He was going to use this pain for my good and for His glory.

And He gave me peace and He restored my joy because he is good like that, I was so grateful that I knew God was good. When I got the diagnosis, that was my first thought, that He is still good even when the news is not. I trust you because you are a good and loving God. You're in control. You've got a purpose in this.

I am so glad to know that Jesus died for me. He rose from the dead. He has a new body, and he's going to give me a new body like his with no polio. I get to talk about him with an in tact tongue for all eternity. And I'm going to get a chance to meet my daughter and find out what she's been doing all this time in heaven while we've been separated.

God is so good, and I am so grateful. Jesus is going to make everything right again. And that's where I'm putting my trust.