Claim OwnershipRuth Bears Witness
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© Carly Absher
Description
“Do not urge me to leave you or turn back from you...your people will be my people” (Ruth 1:16). My name is not Ruth but I love her story. As a multiracial family, many people do not see or experience the world the way we do: racism, managing rare diseases (like PANDAS & cancer) and foster/adoption journeys abound - slamming us into systems of oppression and injustice that I never knew before. But Jesus...I bear witness to what He is teaching me in this “new” world as He heals our broken pieces.
30 Episodes
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Very few people can actually imagine the perspective of the father who seeks Jesus’ healing for his ill son whose ailment is described as “demon possession” in the Bible. It sounds very familiar to families with children suffering from Auto-immune Encephalitis and uncontrolled epilepsy. But we can re-imagine what this father was really asking for if we have lived through the same hell ourselves. In this episode I Re-imagine the father’s back story.
6 months after our daughter’s first round of IVIG, her symptoms began returning. Within a few months, the Emergency Dept’s entrance became a revolving door again. Until she had IVIG in the ED on PANDAS Awareness Day (October 9th)
PANDAS is dangerous both for the child and for the family. Thousands of families suffer with stories eerily similar to ours but without healing in the end. Because the can’t get diagnosed or access treatment. I won’t stand for it.
After 7 years searching, praying, begging for help to heal a very sick daughter, we finally narrowed her diagnosis down to PANDAS and we had to pay every single penny to heal her.
I checked my daughter into an inpatient psychiatric unit for the third and last time. I felt like something was different this time, something HAD to be. And the grief was as much as I can bear.
For the most severe cases of mental illness, there’s no way to live a stable life that a family unit can sustain. I describe 6 things to help parents unburden themselves, relinquish aspects of constant crisis that is out of their control.
As the years go by, our daughter doesn’t heal, rather she continues to deteriorate despite psychiatric interventions. But I can’t stop believing or hoping for God to bring a miracle. And to heal me.
I have never experienced a time in motherhood where my children, any of my children weren’t suffering from neuro-psychiatric disorders. And for years, I fought just to get in the door to get help.
In ongoing suffering that has no end, there often isn’t a tangible reason. Connection with Jesus is ultimately the answer that remains elusive when trying to make meaning out of pain. But if we choose to lean in rather than avoid the hurt, we begin to find Jesus in his humanity looking back at us with love and tenderness. He knows.
You would think “fighting” cancer would take a toll on my person. But maybe not so much….as a person of faith, I see myself as a created being. I’m learning to see how precious life is, how precious I am to God. How precious you are to God because you were created by a God who says that we are loved and WE ARE GOOD.
Less than 2 years after finishing treatment from breast cancer, I find out I have a new aggressive cancer diagnosis - a whole new horizon.
The night before I turned 38, I found myself reflecting on a dizzying roller coaster of a year. I knew we had a lot of work to do to rebuild our lives after so much trauma. Only Jesus could have kept our family and our world intact.
Many years ago, I hiked up Mount Rainier with some girlfriends from my church. I fell in behind a seasoned Rainier Guide and mimicked his every move. All these years later, I recall those lessons learned in the middle of cancer treatment and fighting my daughter’s health with her PANDAS diagnosis.
My 3rd Round of Chemo happened to be scheduled on Good Friday. I couldn’t sleep the night before in anticipation and dread for what awaited me the next morning. But God is still good, even when things are seemingly bad.
Waiting. And some more to find out the next steps of my path through cancer treatment. And with treatment, more lessons learned.
I have turned to Psalm 91 over many seasons of heartache. Breast cancer was no exception - in fact, God made a very strong point of reminding me over and over through the loving gifts and encouragement of family and friends.
Looking for the beautiful things God places in our worlds while walking through difficulty. More mammograms, ultrasounds and Biopsies reveal more cancer.
The hardest week of my life, in the middle of trauma while saying goodbye to my foster son, and checking my daughter with untreated PANDAS into a Psychiatric Residential Treatment Center... I discover I have breast cancer.
Many people like to throw around the word “diversity” as if it is something that just happens. Divine Diversity requires a lot from each of us if we want to really know, enjoy relationship and deeply love believers from all walks of life. My son’s soccer team shows us how it’s done.
I’ve had the privilege of learning from many many BIPOC professors, mentors, friends and family members throughout my life and they have taught me so many valuable lessons that I see most White Folks rarely learn and enjoy the rich intimacy of multi-racial relationships with people from vastly different cultures and experiences outside of their own. And BIPOC experience a broad scale of injustice from hardly ever to every single day. It’s up to White Folks to be aware and sensitive to that spectrum.
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