My Story
No one anticipates a dreaded disease to cause the end of his or her life’s hopes—especially in youth. Since 1999, Ruth has endured countless trips to cancer centers from Charlotte to Charleston to Houston, TX, tests, doctors’ appointments for more than seven cancer diagnoses, including ongoing, incurable lung cancer. She’s had more than ten disfiguring surgeries, two rounds of radiation treatments for six weeks each, six months of clinical trial chemotherapy, a tumor on the left side of her head treated by Gamma Knife Radiosurgery in September 2010, and more new head tumors on the right and left sides for which there are no further curative treatment options.
The results include strange speech, an appearance that makes everyone stare even if they don’t mean to be rude, partial loss of vision, severe headaches, and since November 2005, an inability to eat normally but only able to consume liquid nutrition through a stomach tube.
In spite of these things, she delights in shining the light of the Gospel of Jesus Christ in dark places with her quirky sense of humor and her confidence in the goodness of God. She often makes friends in cancer center waiting rooms and has a knack for making her doctors smile, if not chuckle.
From her perspective:
“Strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow.”
The circumstances of my life don’t seem to be filled with strength, joy, and hope when one considers that I’ve been physically weakened by so many years of fighting cancer. Humanly speaking, hope is gone for recovering the many things I’ve lost: my face, the ability to eat, my singing voice, normal speech, partial vision, a pain-free, fully-abled life.
But one of the greatest gifts I’ve received in my growing intimacy with God and understanding of the eternal is that I no longer need to dwell in the hopeless bounds of “speaking humanly” but have been called to think of my “treasures above” that holds no comparison with the circumstances of earth. Those are tools of grace to widen my eyes at the wonder of the mercy of God in rescuing me from the hopeless and giving me the hope of an eternal weight of glory that surpasses anything I might imagine.
Join me in determining to rise above the circumstances of our lives in this fallen world, to hold on to the certain hope of the gospel by redemption through Jesus Christ. In Christ we’ll find the immeasurable blessings of walking in intimate relationship with God and experience the unfathomable relief of exchanging our own weakness and upheaval with His all-sufficient strength and peace in His presence.